61–66 of 66 posts
I looked at the math in the article and I asked myself, what compels people to choose this path for their career? Nothing about it looks appealing. It looks like a bunch of gibberish for 99% of humanity and only 1% of people willingly go to school to learn this stuff. I have a lot of respect for people who have jobs involving this level of math and physics so dummies like me have the ability to type out this comment.
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I have the best reference. I ask Till Tantau when I have any urgent tikz questions. The advantage of working at the university of Lübeck: his office is next to my office.
Any advice you've learned along the way that you'd care to share? Otherwise I'm confused by the comment. Are you just flexing?
If he writes me a snippet, I just copy paste it.
Specifically being able to create a deep link to a passage is a very powerful capability indeed. The friction required to look up a paper and navigate to the specific passage for a given reference can really be so high that we just end up avoiding it altogether I feel. Kudos to you for trying to solve this problem! I personally find LaTeX a little too friction-full (is that a word?) on the input side. The output look…
Modern tools like Overleaf are great, especially for collaboration. But it's still extremely annoying having to google every little thing like "how can I move this element on the slide a bit to the right?" or even things that you'd expect would be easier in a software designed for mathematicians like "how can I format this common type of math problem (eg an optimization problem) nicely?". Plain LaTeX's overall useabi…
And that's excluding Word line-breaking which always looked rather poor to me: some lines were left very empty and others overcrowded. It just didn't look professional to me. Perhaps that was been fixed too.
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Modern tools like Overleaf are great, especially for collaboration. But it's still extremely annoying having to google every little thing like "how can I move this element on the slide a bit to the right?" or even things that you'd expect would be easier in a software designed for mathematicians like "how can I format this common type of math problem (eg an optimization problem) nicely?". Plain LaTeX's overall useabi…
Maybe Word has come of age in terms of equation editing, but has it come to age in terms of usability? I haven't used in about 10 years, but back then it crashed a lot on larger documents, and I suffered a lot from never knowing if I was inside the invisible tags or not, so I never knew when I was typing right after a list if I would start a new list item or not, or when typing next to italic text if the new text wou…
It's a personal preference, but I think it easily beats the typical LaTeX workflow for most people I know, which starts with copying an old project or some template with a ~50 line preamble and then constantly having to turn to Google for literally anything that's a bit out of the ordinary - including a lot of things that really shouldn't be extraordinary for a math software, like typesetting optimization problems, conditional expectation, argmin, table footnotes,... all of which have multiple options and most don't look great. Heck, you even need to define a theorem environment manually in the preamble to get them to look like you're used to.
Since you complain about moving around figures, in LaTeX the workflow for most users is trial-and-error multiple option combinations to get them roughly where you want them. Just check the Google autocomplete options for latex and tell me that people aren't confused by those things.
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Maybe Word has come of age in terms of equation editing, but has it come to age in terms of usability? I haven't used in about 10 years, but back then it crashed a lot on larger documents, and I suffered a lot from never knowing if I was inside the invisible tags or not, so I never knew when I was typing right after a list if I would start a new list item or not, or when typing next to italic text if the new text wou…
I don't know whether to what version you were referring to, but my guess is that you might still consider indentation and text formatting unintuitive. But it is actually easy to pick up the rules that Word uses, and there are keyboard combinations as well. It's a personal preference, but I think it easily beats the typical LaTeX workflow for most people I know, which starts with copying an old project or some templat…
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I don't know whether to what version you were referring to, but my guess is that you might still consider indentation and text formatting unintuitive. But it is actually easy to pick up the rules that Word uses, and there are keyboard combinations as well. It's a personal preference, but I think it easily beats the typical LaTeX workflow for most people I know, which starts with copying an old project or some templat…
I guess that, as most things related to using software, it boils down to familiarity. You say you managed to figure out Word's rules for when text will inherit formatting of the text to the left of it and when it won't. I believe you, I imagine I would have learned them too if I kept using Word. On the other hand when I taught Linear Programming I typeset lots of optimization problems and didn't Google anything, beca…
Anything becomes easy if you practice it enough, but I find both the 'onboarding' as well as the 'steady-state' productivity higher in Word, because you spend next to no time looking for how stuff works and instead focus on your content. Yes, LaTeX formatting generally looks better (eg spacing, LaTeX even lets you adjust the spacing between individual characters), but looks come second to content imho.