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I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

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Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#71

Post by leephillips »

miguelmurca wrote: post #67
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 a…

I certainly appreciate the pedagogical purpose; what you did there goes beyond any pure TeX programming I’ve ever tried to do.

My suggestion was to use Pandoc to create a LaTeX document. You can easily tell it to use RevTeX or any style required by a journal. The only friction with my approach is when you need to work with coauthors or editors on revisions.

EDIT: I think I caused some confusion due to my sloppiness. I should have written “constrained to only writing in LaTeX”.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#72

Post by cruegge »

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.

If found “TeX by Topic” a great introduction, it's less overwhelming than the TeX book. Also really helpful in wrapping your head around macro expansion is the `texdef` cli tool, which allows you to quickly evaluate a line of macro code. Finally, https://www.tug.org/utilities/plain/cseq.html is nice for reference.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#73

Post by Smithalicious »

mhh__ wrote: post #3

LaTeX needs replacing with something faster and more program-y, and that isn't just a python script. LateX's successor should be opinionated, safe, easy to build in parallel, and also good at integrating with other tooling: Let a CAS generate the next equation for you, for example. Make sure that figure is never out of date (e.g. a build system rather than relying on a web of files and button clicks) Etc. This will l…

Please no. Stop replacing useful tools with "opinionated" ones. Nothing makes me nope out of using a tool faster than hearing it described as "opinionated".

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#74

Post by FabHK »

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.

Master/PhD theses and papers in the sciences, particularly if formulas are involved.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#75

Post by bqmjjx0kac »

aulin wrote: post #49
MrVandemar wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> almost always crystal clear and self explanatory and slow. Most of the time the idiomatic pandas answer takes advantage of its vectorization capabilities while plain python would require nested loops.

This is one of the advantages of languages with optimizing compilers. In Python, there's a tradeoff between clarity and performance. But in C++ for example, your for-loop is just as fast as any library's for-loop.

Edit: My assumption is that many Python libraries are written in C for performance, but maybe that's not the case.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#76

Post by izhak »

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!

I would disagree. You can play the violin firstly because the violin was designed so that it could produce beautiful sounds under _human_hands_. This way, not another.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#77

Post by FabHK »

Pinus wrote: post #56
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…

I agree that TeX sources are often damn near impossible to read. That stuff is... ugly. But at least it's there. You can see it. You can manipulate it. You can understand it (though it sometimes takes more time flipping through the TeXbook than any sane person is willing to spend). In comparison, WYSIWYGgery is like boxing with an invisible opponent. Where do I click, what magic check box three levels deep in dialogs…

Related: TeX sources can be put under source control, with meaningful diffs.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#79

Post by jIyajbe »

teleforce wrote: post #38

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

Another good WYSIWYG front end is LyX: www.lyx.org . I've written a few hundred physics lecture notes with it, as well as a number of Beamer presentations. I find it much easier to use than TeXmacs (mainly because of keyboard shortcuts), and the output is excellent. And yes, it produces true TeX/LaTeX.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#80

Post by [deleted] »

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"

[deleted]
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