Check out https://www.monsterwriter.app/ , It is something like LyX but even easier to use.
Interesting, I hadn't seen this before. How does it differ from LyX?
Is a Windows build planned?
I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX
21–30 of 245 posts
Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX
#22Take a look at https://sile-typesetter.org/. IIRC it literally reuses some core C libraries from TeX/LaTeX, and glues them together in a different way using Lua, keeping Lua as the only language available. Notably, SILE recently achieved the long overdue milestone of math/equations support (https://sile-typesetter.org/2021/09/sile-0-12-0-is-released). Obviously, open-source.
edit: for some attempt at an explicit discussion of pros & cons & history vs. TeX, see: https://sile-typesetter.org/what-is/#sile-versus-tex
Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX
#23You sometimes see people ask fairly simple Python questions on Stack Overflow, that could be solved by five lines of plain Python, and be answered with some Pandas magic incantation that happens to do what they want with one call. I always find this a bit sad, because it seems to take away the idea that programming is about assembling composable parts, replacing it by a search for the right magic thing from a box of…
> You always feel like you are trying to trick the system into doing something it was not designed for. This is one of the hallmarks of human civilization. Your hands were designed for throwing a stone at the eye of a mammoth. But you can play the violin with them! Yes; it is totally awkward and anti-natural for your hands, obviously not their intended purpose... but so beautiful!
Nothing in nature was necessarily "designed"
Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You always feel like you are trying to trick the system into doing something it was not designed for. This is one of the hallmarks of human civilization. Your hands were designed for throwing a stone at the eye of a mammoth. But you can play the violin with them! Yes; it is totally awkward and anti-natural for your hands, obviously not their intended purpose... but so beautiful!
Nothing in nature was necessarily "designed"
Sculpted like a riverbed.
Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX
#25In my opinion LaTeX fails to deliver when doing anything other than text based work.
Tables, images, etc are always a hassle. It gets even worse when changing one page to landscape mode. Debugging is a pain and there aren't any tools to help with that.
Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s interesting. Is it really a problem that requires manually writing the code? Seems like there should be more elegant solutions by this point.
For most usages, you don't need to write the code. Sometimes buff out rough edges for your specific application, but in my 12 years in academia, I think I've only really _written_ Latex twice.
Ok that makes a bit more sense, thanks for taking the time to educate me :)
Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX
#27I'm not sure if it's necessary to use auxiliary files. I made something implementing fake vectors using \csname . I think that a similar approach can be used for this problem, but I prefer to never see my old code again. IWIMM \newcommand{\defwithindex}[3]{% \expandafter\def\csname #1@#2\endcsname{#3}% } \newcommand{\getwithindex}[2]{% \csname #1@#2\endcsname% } (You probably need the two dimensional version.)
Hi! Author here. This is a cool idea for a vector implementation, but you still need to work around the fact that the command definition can come after the \get
Perhaps you can use the main aux file, as other packages do. I think I never did that, so I'm not sure about how difficult it is. Or perhaps I used the aux file and I forgot about that. [ I should write an article titled "I hate LaTeX. I hate MSWord." :) . ]
Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX
#28The solution presented in this anonymous, undated article is relevant if you’re constrained to only using LaTeX. But you’re not, and there are certainly easier ways to go about such things. We have Python and other higher level languages that we can use to pre-process source and extract metadata. This type of problem is made much easier if you write in Markdown, putting authors, affiliations, and other metadata in (say) YAML blocks, and use Pandoc to convert to LaTeX (or anything else). You can write a filter in Python, Lua, or Haskell to rearrange the metadata the way the author wants. This would be a far more pleasant experience, and easier to extend and generalize.
Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX
#29What is the intended use for LaTex these days? I’m not trying to flame, I just have no idea why anyone would choose to use it over html/css or just a word processor.
PDF is unfortunately still the preferred format for sharing research papers.
And you're right, single file HTML with embedded images would be a much better format, but I assume publishers are preventing this.
Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX
#30I'm not sure if it's necessary to use auxiliary files. I made something implementing fake vectors using \csname . I think that a similar approach can be used for this problem, but I prefer to never see my old code again. IWIMM \newcommand{\defwithindex}[3]{% \expandafter\def\csname #1@#2\endcsname{#3}% } \newcommand{\getwithindex}[2]{% \csname #1@#2\endcsname% } (You probably need the two dimensional version.)
Hi! Author here. This is a cool idea for a vector implementation, but you still need to work around the fact that the command definition can come after the \get
Since your code doesn't write the authors to the file it already requires that the authors are given before `\maketitle`, so then it's also reasonable to require affiliations there. Then you get something like https://gist.github.com/zauguin/19bf1bc9128a8abaedfe3081717b... which doesn't need a file.