Ultimately, I think wrestling with LaTeX is kind of like wrestling with programming. Over time, you just have to develop that sense of radar that tells you when you are over-implementing. In programming, it's the choice of whether to write custom or hunt for a library, or at a higher level, the build-vs-buy question. For LaTeX, it's whether to wrestle with custom commands or just search its stack exchange or hunt for a package. It's still easy to go down the wrong rabbit hole - last time it happened to me it was because I got obsessed with wondering if I could create nomographs in LaTeX, but luckily I discovered pynomo instead.
I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX
181–190 of 245 posts
Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same, I just did my resume in LaTeX, it's such an obtuse and painful tool, yet nothing even comes close to the control it gives you. Hey btw, I'm looking for contract work! https://github.com/1player/resume/blob/master/resume.pdf
Surely plain old html does?
Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to mention that when it fails to compile, at least in Overleaf you get an error log that is hopelessly useless and the only thing you can do is just remove your changes until it works again. LaTeX is a cool idea, but the implementation? Absolutely horrid.
There are two big challenges: One is that TeX, the underlying executable behind LaTeX, is pushed to its limits¹ to run. The macro expansion paradigm behind LaTeX made sense in 1982 but there are a lot of decisions underlying the executable and TeX-the-language that were dictated by the computing technology of the 1970s (forget Unicode, standard ASCII wasn’t universally available when Knuth wrote TeX). The other probl…
Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always like to see it the other way around, it eliminates entities that are not a good fit, and the remainder is what drives adaptation. Of course, people could argue that's just like Michelangelo [1], and we're back at 'designed'. [1] “The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.”
The process of evolution is more than just the elimination of unfit specimens. That suggests that a tiger is just a tiger, and the only kind of evolution that can occur in the tiger is for it to become a better (faster, stronger) tiger. But in fact there was a time when carnivores didn't even exist, and then some random genetic flux produced an animal that was inclined to start eating other animals and a new ecologic…
Entities could be alleles, genes, or gene products
Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX
#186Try 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
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are two big challenges: One is that TeX, the underlying executable behind LaTeX, is pushed to its limits¹ to run. The macro expansion paradigm behind LaTeX made sense in 1982 but there are a lot of decisions underlying the executable and TeX-the-language that were dictated by the computing technology of the 1970s (forget Unicode, standard ASCII wasn’t universally available when Knuth wrote TeX). The other probl…
I haven’t seen any updates to your “finl is not LaTeX” page in a while. I’m glad to hear you’re still working on the project.
Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX
#188I 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…
However, drawing figures in TikZ seems to be the main way of getting figures into a beamer presentation. This is a total nightmare and not really worth the effort, IMO.
Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX
#189Earlier 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 2000 performed wonderfully. I had no problems with references or images shifting around, no strange errors, nothing. Bibliography sucked, but in general it was a pleasure to work with.
Word 365, on the other hand, is something I have to force to do what I want again and again. It is built in such a way that doing things cleanly and error-free is difficult and much less obvious than in Word 2000. Even standard tools like image anchors, which worked nicely in 2k, are not reliable anymore. I got the feeling that this is due to automatisms aimed at casual users.
Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX
#190Earlier 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.
Someone pointed out to me recently as you say, the idiomatic python sometimes seems like more of a barrier. It takes more time to parse and grok, for their human brain, a for loop with a zip having multiple interables vs nested for loops. I've been thinking about this. So take, a list comprehension, supposedly better than a for loop at times. The canted take would be that list comprehensions are said in a way of what…