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I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

commutative.xyz

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Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#31

Post by politician »

netizen-936824 wrote: post #23
enriquto wrote: post #12

Earlier 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"

Proponents of the anthropic principal disagree. Nevertheless, it's irrelevant to this thread.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#32

Post by giraffe_lady »

I only interact with tex and latex through pollen these days. https://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/

It doesn't shield you from much of the pain, initially at least. But you can separate it from the document and treat it as markup, and reuse bits more easily.

Of course pollen itself is a thing to learn. But if you work with text a lot and like lisp it might be worth it. It's been good to me.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#33

Post by red_trumpet »

kalenx wrote: post #19
ProfXponent wrote: post #15

Earlier 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.

How do you typeset your research then?

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#34

Post by gus_massa »

ProfXponent wrote: post #11

What 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.

We use a lot of LaTeX to make the midterms and final exams in the math department of my university. Everyone knows how to write in LaTeX, so if I make a internal helper package or a bunch of macros, then everyone can use it with minimal training.

The problem with wysiwyg word processors is that people get creative and it's very difficult to enforce the same style for all the material.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#35

Post by tomrod »

netizen-936824 wrote: post #23
enriquto wrote: post #12

Earlier 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"

I'd go so far to say that linguistically nature is the antithesis of artificial (made by hands).

Avoiding silly theological tropes, evolution is often mistakenly referred to as a designer when it's just an emergent property of competing, replicating agents. People don't normally bother with precision though, so we are where we are.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#36

Post by platz »

enriquto wrote: post #12
Pinus wrote: post #6

You 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!

> This is one of the hallmarks of human civilization.

This is one of the hallmarks of evolution.

How do you think wings evolved? By repurposing an appendage that was already had a purpose other than flight.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#37

Post by MrVandemar »

Pinus wrote: post #6

You 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…

Yes! Plain python is almost always crystal clear and self explanatory. But "idiomatic python" which people seem to compete to be "more idiomatic than thou" is none of these things. It's actually a barrier to learning the language.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#38

Post by teleforce »

Try TeXmacs, it's neither TeX nor it's Emacs clone.

TeXmacs is WYSIWYG scientific editing platform. Documents created can be saved in TeXmacs, Xml, Scheme, PDF or Postscript. Converters exist for TeX/LaTeX and HTML/MathML. It can also be used as a graphical front-end for other computer algebra, numerical analysis, statistics software[1].

[1]https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/welcome.en.html

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#39

Post by vjerancrnjak »

RugnirViking wrote: post #14
ProfXponent wrote: post #11

What 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.

Academia. At least, its widespread (almost universal) where I am studying. Mainly to manage citations, figures, and tables of contents automatically. Tools like Sharelatex are used for collaboration on papers.

I thought Sharelatex was bought by Overleaf years ago? It is still alive I see.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#40

Post by vjerancrnjak »

red_trumpet wrote: post #33
kalenx wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How do you typeset your research then?

You could do it through Pandoc. Pandoc can process multiple data sources (citations, chapters, yamls etc.) and output a pdf.

You can turn on citation linking (in the text), you can apply a custom latex template.

Once it is all setup, you just write text in Pandoc Markdown.

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