31–40 of 204 posts
But I do think that Markdown/Asciidoc is a viable system for very many tasks.
I 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 The package management feels so outdated.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…
Have you tried adding the `-file-line-error` compilation option? The errors are still unreadable, but they become 1000% easier to debug.
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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 inf…
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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.
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Considering what "modernizing" other parts of the tech stack has meant, I would expect a 21st century LaTeX to be hundreds of megabytes, require running a buggy, slow electron app, and phone home to a variety of SaaS providers when you use it. Edit: Someone beat me to it by suggesting VSCode as an IDE.
Hundreds of megabytes would be a considerable improvement for me. I think my last installation of LaTeX and the few packages I depended on was around two gigabytes.
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Considering what "modernizing" other parts of the tech stack has meant, I would expect a 21st century LaTeX to be hundreds of megabytes, require running a buggy, slow electron app, and phone home to a variety of SaaS providers when you use it. Edit: Someone beat me to it by suggesting VSCode as an IDE.
Hundreds of megabytes would be a considerable improvement for me. I think my last installation of LaTeX and the few packages I depended on was around two gigabytes.
Edit: phone autocomplete typo
If anyone has other examples of beautiful typography or graphing/figures throughout history, I'd love to see them! I've been replying to the original thread on twitter with some favorites: https://twitter.com/iraphas13/status/1262489387767480322?s=2...
> Since version 3, TeX has used an idiosyncratic version numbering system, where updates have been indicated by adding an extra digit at the end of the decimal, so that the version number asymptotically approaches π. This is a reflection of the fact that TeX is now very stable, and only minor updates are anticipated.
I 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…
Better title would have been: ‘How was research ever presented in a clean, pleasantly formatted document before LaTeX?’