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I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

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Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#161

Post by jonpalmisc »

wollsmoth wrote: post #127
jonpalmisc wrote: post #9

I also have a love & hate relationship with LaTeX. I think it really boils down to the following: LaTeX will work excellently for you, so long as your use case was envisioned by the original authors. I can't say that the original authors of LaTeX didn't envision using it for creating slideshows/presentations, but I can say that making a beamer theme is uniquely complicated. I wish that LaTeX had something as flexible…

If you have a lot of time on your hands, nothing makes your math/cs hw look quite as slick. Was fun to play around with in undergrad for sure. I've forgotten all my LaTeX skills since though.

I used it avidly for years. It’s still fun to see pretty LaTeX documents, but my patience for working with it—despite being rather fluent with it—has grown too slim.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#162

Post by toolsexist »

falcor84 wrote: post #99
izhak wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No post body was provided.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#163

Post by impendia »

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'm a professor and research mathematician, and I use LaTeX for nearly everything I write. In addition to what others wrote --

- The way I conceptualize it, LaTeX is a word processor. So, for example, if I'm writing a rec letter and I choose LaTeX over Word, I'm thinking "I like this word processor better than that one."

- LaTeX/PDF is often criticized for being static, but in my experience, this is a good thing in most cases. If I am discussing the contents of a file with someone else, it is useful if we are both looking at exactly the same thing.

- I don't try to do any significant programming, or extensive customization of how my documents look. I agree that trying to do so would be annoying, but this is not part of my use case. If you look at a random selection of math papers, say here

https://arxiv.org/list/math/new

you'll notice that all of them look more or less identical.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#164

Post by WolfOliver »

petschge wrote: post #92
WolfOliver wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

For as long as I use time sitting on public transport and airplanes to review them. Nothing beats the ergonomics of a printout, a red pen and no internet.

I think the same way but I'm also pretty sure that the generation to come does not appreciate it anymore.

I hope that e-inc displays will mature. Paired with the UX of a modern I Pad this will replace printed stuff.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#165

Post by netizen-936824 »

samatman wrote: post #159
netizen-936824 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Got links to any of those papers?

Are you vegan? Just curious.

No, but I'm not sure what that has to do with the topic at hand

Also unsure how that's an appropriate response to a request for citations?

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#166

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#167

Post by croes »

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…

Design has a goal, evolution has not.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#168

Post by croes »

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!

Nope, we use stones because we can lift and throw it with our hands, not the other way around.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#169

Post by andrepd »

bqmjjx0kac wrote: post #75
aulin wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

>But in C++ for example, your for-loop is just as fast as any library's for-loop.

This is most definitely not true. Even stuff like subtle aliasing guarantees can make code run an order of magnitude faster or slower.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#170

Post by kergonath »

plopilop wrote: post #139
kaba0 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strong agree. My fiance and I wrote our thesis simultaneously, she in Word, while I used LaTeX. The amount of stupid figure- and page- rearrangements she suffered because she removed half a sentence from the middle, while LaTeX generated sane output with basically any text seriously made me much more productive.

Word has had automatic reference numbering for a while now (see for instance [0]). Not denying that it's not very known (nor pleasant to use), and I'm not even talking about bibliography. I made my partner switch to Latex thanks to the bibliography. Writing tables almost made her switch back to Word. [0]: https://www.sfu.ca/~ljilja/cnl/info/UseCrossReference/index....

> Word has had automatic reference numbering for a while now

It also breaks regularly. I know a student in the middle of a thesis writing up marathon, and the time he wastes with this is unbelievable. For example, there are the references that just end up garbled, with Word putting in an error message instead, the references that somehow don't get updated despite having been entered exactly like all the others that do. It adds at least two passes every time he wants to send a chapter to proofread.

Tables in LaTeX are bad. References, notes, and bibliography in Word are horrendous.

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