LaTeX? I just use TeX. The documentation for TeX is clear, very precise, and much shorter. LaTeX is just TeX but with a lot of new macros. The intent is different: With TeX, you just say in detail what steps you want the software to do. With LaTeX you say what you want in general terms and f'get about the details.
I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX
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Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX
#92Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX
#93What 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…
Won't asciidoc together with tools like pandoc serve the same usecase.
Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX
#94I 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.
I gave a cursory look at it and it's really too niche, complicated for its own good IMO.
Your comment made me want a modern TeX, written in Racket/Lisp.
#lang latex
(documentclass "article")
(document
(section "Chapter 1")
Welcome to (LaTeX). Here is some (textbf "bold") text.)
Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX
#95Earlier 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?
Yep. A while ago, I used wkhtml2pdf to write a document in Markdown (Pandoc) and convert it to PDF.
It worked fine. There where some minor issues around page breaks. But then again, most people don't use paper for reading anymore, so I'll happily accept these minor issues over the absolute inconsistent hell that is text-selection, searching and hyperlinks in most PDFs.
Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX
#96What 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.
Laying out books. The fact that all of this can be done in a text file, without hidden codes and being tied to this file format or another, is extraordinary. Images are easily handled, fonts simply work (XeTeX & friends work well for me), and — with sufficient warnings — these files can be handed over to an author and edited without messing much, if anything, up. The PDFs generated work well with all the PDF tools I'…
Another poster just finished saying images and tables are hard. Why the disconnect do you think?
Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX
#97In 1999, I was editing a telecom industry standard as an intern and, of course, decided to use LaTeX instead of Word. The seasoned industry veterans on the technical committee were super impressed with my “Word” abilities and wondered if I could share my much-improved template with them.
It suffices to say that I hastily hired a friend in school to work over the weekend converting the beautiful LaTeX into Word.
Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX
#98In the last three decades of having the opportunity to learn and use TeX, i have managed to avoid it. In the same time i've helped a friend with word processing for her dissertation. I'm still not sure how we managed to get it to work with all the horror stories about data loss and Microsoft Word at the time. But it did its job and I'm still in the WYSIWYG camp. Maybe in another life...
I have the exact opposite story to tell. A friend of mine asked me to convert a 300 pages Word document to LaTeX, because Word couldn’t handle it. It was text, mostly, so it worked out quite well.
Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX
#99Earlier 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!
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.
It seems you are actually in agreement with the underlying argument. Humans were able to use their body, originally developed for hunting large prey, to design, build and play violins.
Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nothing in nature was necessarily "designed"
Proponents of the anthropic principal disagree. Nevertheless, it's irrelevant to this thread.
> Proponents of the anthropic principal disagree. Nevertheless, it's irrelevant to this thread.
The anthropic principle does not imply designed, it implies suited for.