I read some advanced physics czech book from 1991, just after velvet revolution. It was written on type writer, charts and formulas hand drawn. Xeroxed to final count of 500 copies. You work with what you got.
Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
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Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
LaTeX is a bit like democracy. It is horrible, but all the alternatives I have tried a worse.
Gosh yeah. Imagine writing a 150+ pages thesis in Word. Would give me nightmares. EDIT: To complement: I think it's obviously possible, lots of people do it. But I feel I would spend a lot of time on "keeping the structure right" as I edit it. Feels more straightforward with Latex. And then Math is kind of hard to write efficiently, but that's field specific.
I wonder about that. I don't know word well enough at all to accomplish the same things I do in latex. But I know it can do a lot of those things.
I assume it would be similar if I knew as much about word as I do about latex. But there's no way of knowing, as I am not going to learn word without a much better reason than "i wonder if it's actually terrible to write 150 pages when you know how to use it."
Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
#13Knuth did TeX, Lampert did LaTeX. As this is about typesetting most of the credit should got to Knuth. LaTeX is more about structure of the content.
Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
#14I've said it before and I'll say it again: the single most cost effective way to speed up math and physics research by a philanthropist would be taking a few million dollars and hiring a team of developers to bring LaTeX into the 21st century: Take the 100 most popular packages and fold them into the main code base (so I don't need to install conflicting packages just to get three columns!). Create a non-buggy desktop IDE/wordprocessor that works seamlessly using a traditional interface or a LyX-like interface. Merge/buy/replace Overleaf with an online service that syncs reliably with the desktop IDE. And, most importantly and difficultly, create a standard way for generating beautiful web pages (including mobile) from the same LaTeX++ files that can be used to generate beautiful PDFs.
The annual NSF physics budget is roughly a quarter billion dollars. This only needs to make NSF-funded physicists 1% more productive over a decade to justify spending $20M, and the entire world would benefit.
EDIT: Lots of commenters worry that this will end up like various closed-source for-profit tools like Google Docs. But for a closer analogy they should look at some of the excellent free open-source science software being produced with philanthropic funding such as Zotero. Physicists will only adopt it if it makes their lives easier (and maybe not even then...).
EDIT 2: There are some pretty strong parallels between the commenters suggesting this can already be achieved with homegrown tools and the infamous HN Dropbox comment.
Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gosh yeah. Imagine writing a 150+ pages thesis in Word. Would give me nightmares. EDIT: To complement: I think it's obviously possible, lots of people do it. But I feel I would spend a lot of time on "keeping the structure right" as I edit it. Feels more straightforward with Latex. And then Math is kind of hard to write efficiently, but that's field specific.
I wonder about that. I don't know word well enough at all to accomplish the same things I do in latex. But I know it can do a lot of those things. I assume it would be similar if I knew as much about word as I do about latex. But there's no way of knowing, as I am not going to learn word without a much better reason than "i wonder if it's actually terrible to write 150 pages when you know how to use it."
While Word has evolved to do many of the things that were exclusive to LaTeX at one point, the problem is that Word is not extensible. When you hit a wall in Word, that’s it — you have no options. In LaTeX you can pretty much always figure out how to do what you want to do, even if it takes learning a fair bit about the packages, and if you don’t want to spend that kind of time you can almost always find relevant info on stackoverflow.
Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
#16Better title would have been: ‘How was research ever presented in a clean, pleasantly formatted document before LaTeX?’
Indeed, but this this being on threadreaderapp means it started as a write-once Twitter thread, not a well-written blog post.
Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
#17I have such a love-hate relationship with Latex. I use it almost every day. I love how easy it is to write beautiful math, and how easy it is to organize well large documents. It's fast (in general). And, thank god, there are lots of information online. But boy do I hate the whole semi-broken macro-based system. The package management feels so outdated. Errors are hard to decipher. Package documentation is there but…
The main advantage of LaTeX is that the format is more-or-less transparent. I say "more or less" because last time I claimed it is transparent, someone showed me their .tex files and sure I could not understand them, but by now this has been the only time I could not understand a .tex file (this was someone who used macros to decline nouns, among other things; it's not a common use case).
In general, if you see a .tex and cannot compile it, you can look inside and get a good idea of what the file is about in 5 minutes; a bit more time and you can essentially read it by hand. I don't know of any other semi-popular text format except well-written html+css (which is insufficient for science) that supports this. The cleanest systems will go obsolete and become unsupported; if I want my writings to stay around for 200 years, my best bet is to write them in a format that does not strictly require any decoder. And LaTeX, as commonly practiced, is such a format.
Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
#18And speaking of typesetting after LaTeX, I recommend giving RMarkdown Distill, scientific and technical writing, native to the web (https://rstudio.github.io/distill/) a try.
There are references with a mouseover, possible to include an interactive chart D3.js, etc. Right now I use it for an internal report in deep learning.
Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
#19I've said it before and I'll say it again: the single most cost effective way to speed up math and physics research by a philanthropist would be taking a few million dollars and hiring a team of developers to bring LaTeX into the 21st century: Take the 100 most popular packages and fold them into the main code base (so I don't need to install conflicting packages just to get three columns!). Create a non-buggy deskto…
Yes for IDE. Yes for HTML+ output (though what exactly the "+" entails is a tricky thing; HTML+CSS won't suffice). Not sure about merging the 100 most popular packages. Most likely their conflicts cannot be resolved in a backwards-compatible way, and then you have the standard "101 standards" outcome and old tex files start rotting.
Re: Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
#20I've said it before and I'll say it again: the single most cost effective way to speed up math and physics research by a philanthropist would be taking a few million dollars and hiring a team of developers to bring LaTeX into the 21st century: Take the 100 most popular packages and fold them into the main code base (so I don't need to install conflicting packages just to get three columns!). Create a non-buggy deskto…
You can use VSCode as LaTeX IDE and git to sync to overleaf... Which costs slightly less than $20M