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I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

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Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#111

Post by leephillips »

behnamoh wrote: post #109
miguelmurca wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How did you do emojis in pandoc? I’ve had a hard time writing them in md files and converting them to pdf using pandoc

Pandoc uses LaTeX to make the PDF, so you have to set up LaTeX somehow to be able to handle the emoji. I use “normal” Unicode in md source all the time, but not emoji, so, sorry, I don’t know what to do.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#112

Post by pif »

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…

> I always find this a bit sad, because it seems to take away the idea that programming is about assembling composable parts

[OT] Concerning "programming is about assembling composable parts": I always find both sad and ridiculous when self-proclaimed software developers bash Unix because they are not able to appreciate its philosophy.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#113

Post by RugnirViking »

vjerancrnjak wrote: post #39
RugnirViking wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

afaik yes it was, perhaps its a force of habit for me as sharelatex redirects to overleaf I just always click through to it.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#114

Post by josefx »

SebastianKra wrote: post #29
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.

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.

> single file HTML with embedded images would be a much better format

Or use epub, which lets you store the images as part of the zip archive without having to store binary files as bloated and text editor killing base64 text.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#115

Post by RugnirViking »

ProfXponent wrote: post #15
RugnirViking wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

expanding on what others mentioned, usually each university has latex templates for their papers and reports which handle most of the complicated parts, the only real latex ive worked on for reports is for eqations and tables, and many people just use gui tools that generate the code for them.

New students do occasionally complain about images/figures not being where they are relative to the text in the code, thats a solvable problem in latex by embedding it in a minipage but honestly people complain about images having a mind of their own in word too ;)

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#116

Post by zuzun »

My rule of thumb is that once I start writing imperative LaTeX with loops and stuff, I'm almost always on the wrong path. Now, I might be missing some important corner cases, but by skimming through the blog post, I feel like the author's solution is too complicated. For example, I don't get why this requires auxiliary files.

I would create a counter for the affiliations, let the \affiliation command define macros that contain the name of the affiliation and the value of the counter and then append the output to two different helper macros, one for authors and one for affiliations, whose contents I dump in \maketitle.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#117

Post by netizen-936824 »

dev_tty01 wrote: post #110
netizen-936824 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing in nature was necessarily "designed"

If you consider a "design" to result from a process where someone sketches out a plan, builds it, and it works first time. I've designed a lot of systems, and it is clearly an iterative process. Balancing tradeoffs, figuring out the essentials, build prototypes, test, etc. If you are patient and diligent a solution emerges. That sounds a lot like evolution, so in my mind everything in nature has been designed by the…

I think that's a reasonable perspective to take, although I would argue that there is no clear goal in evolution besides survival and reproduction

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#118

Post by drstewart »

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

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

Seems to be about the worst name they could have chosen then

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#119

Post by SebastianKra »

josefx wrote: post #114
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.

> single file HTML with embedded images would be a much better format Or use epub, which lets you store the images as part of the zip archive without having to store binary files as bloated and text editor killing base64 text.

Yes, you're right. Another benefit of epub is that existing reader apps already have good support for highlights, bookmarks and comments.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#120

Post by kaba0 »

whimsicalism wrote: post #82
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.

Idiomatic python is slow. Trying to convert everything into the mini-DSL that a C implemented library can understand is oftentimes considerably faster.

In case of most ordinary datasets it simply doesn’t matter in practice. Even comenius logo would be adequately fast.
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