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I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

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Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#61

Post by WolfOliver »

porker wrote: post #21
WolfOliver wrote: post #2

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?

There is a Windows build available already.

LyX is a LaTeX frontend, you still need to understand some notions of LaTeX. MonsterWriter is a WYSIWYM Word Processor, LaTeX is just used as internal tool to create PDF files. There are other exports available (e.g. HTML, Markdown, you also can publish to Ghost directly)

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#62

Post by camel-cdr »

dash2 wrote: post #43

Jesus H Carnegie. I JUST WANT TO WRITE AN ACADEMIC ARTICLE. I mean, look at this abhorrence. And look at what you open up in a TeX file, which again is meant to represent English prose . % Options for packages loaded elsewhere \PassOptionsToPackage{unicode}{hyperref} \PassOptionsToPackage{hyphens}{url} % \documentclass[ ]{article} \usepackage{amsmath,amssymb} \usepackage{lmodern} \usepackage{iftex} \ifPDFTeX ... and…

> \sigma _{I}^{2}=a^{2}s^{2}+\left( 1-a\right)^{2}S^{2}+2a\left( 1-a\right)\sigma.

I'd write the above expression as the following:

\sigma_I^2 = a^2 s^2 + (1-a)^2 S^2 + 2a(1-a) \sigma

The only thing you need to know to understand it conceptually is `_ -> move next character down`, `^ -> move next character up`.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#63

Post by kzrdude »

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.

Word processor does not work with git and group collaboration and versioning properly.

HTML is not an authoring tool. Maybe pandoc or sphinx or other system would compete.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#64

Post by benoliver999 »

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.

I use it for stuff more than a couple of pages long, because:

- I can use my text editor of choice

- I don't have to worry about messing with the formatting by accident

- It goes through git easily

Anything shorter and I just use a word processor, it's not worth the time messing with the boilerplate.

I do use it for writing letters - I have a template I just fill out and it spits out a nicely formatted letter with an envelope.

It's also handy for when I need documents in multiple languages - you can make one change to the formatting and it changes them all.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#66

Post by [deleted] »

dash2 wrote: post #43

Jesus H Carnegie. I JUST WANT TO WRITE AN ACADEMIC ARTICLE. I mean, look at this abhorrence. And look at what you open up in a TeX file, which again is meant to represent English prose . % Options for packages loaded elsewhere \PassOptionsToPackage{unicode}{hyperref} \PassOptionsToPackage{hyphens}{url} % \documentclass[ ]{article} \usepackage{amsmath,amssymb} \usepackage{lmodern} \usepackage{iftex} \ifPDFTeX ... and…

[deleted]

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#67

Post by miguelmurca »

leephillips wrote: post #28

The 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 (s…

This anonymous, undated article was written by me, yesterday. The strong backwards compatibility of LaTeX(2e) [0] make it so that the date is not especially relevant (since I'm using primitives); in any case my point was pedagogical, in the sense of diving into the operational mechanisms of (La)TeX to develop a better mental model of what's going on. And while Pandoc is very nice, if you're in academia none of your alternatives are viable, since LaTeX is a de facto standard for most journals.

Fun fact: the article was written in Markdown, with some front matter for metadata!

[0] https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/247524/do-i-risk-bre...

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#68

Post by WolfOliver »

aulin wrote: post #45
SebastianKra wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

have you ever printed a webpage?

For how long do we still need to print a paper?

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#69

Post by miguelmurca »

camel-cdr wrote: post #42

I'm always amazed how people could bootstrap something as feature rich and versatile as LaTeX from plain TeX. I'd really like to get to know plain TeX a bit better, but I've got no idea where to start.

I can only hope to curse you with a TeX nerd-snipe :) I can recommend reading the first few chapters of The TeX Book (it's a genuinely fun read) followed by the links in the article's footnotes for more operational information.
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