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I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

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Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#211

Post by GiovanniP »

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 Make sure that figure is never out of date (e.g. a build system rather than relying on a web of files and button clicks) Etc.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…

> we could have a much better document format and publishing system around it.

TeXmacs (http://www.texmacs.org/ and http://forum.texmacs.cn/), and it happens right now!

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#212

Post by GiovanniP »

patrickg wrote: post #5

I have a related feeling about TeX. It has superb output quality but the programming is awful. When LuaTeX finally arrived a few years ago, it was possible to do almost everything you have done before in the TeX language (starting with \backslashes) in Lua. See http://wiki.luatex.org/index.php/TeX_without_TeX for an introduction. I have (shameless plug) created a database publishing software using this technique ( ht…

> It has superb output quality but the programming is awful

TeXmacs (http://www.texmacs.org/) has better output quality and nicer programming (it is Scheme :-) ) and it is easier to use.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#213

Post by GiovanniP »

singhrac wrote: post #203

I too love LaTeX but it's important to remember that the writing experience might be nice and elegant in LaTeX with the right stys and ShareLatex and whatnot, but the editing experience is decidedly not. Everyone who has used it in any serious form with page limits knows the stress of slowly varying their figure sizes and hoping it will squish into the limits. Very honestly, part of the reason I don't bother with any…

> Very honestly, part of the reason I don't bother with any new "LaTeX reimagined" projects is because either (a) they are written by LaTeX nonbelievers who don't understand the complexity of beautiful typesetting, or (b) I don't want to learn another markup+ language or mental model. The latter is increasingly annoying to me.

Then you have to try TeXmacs http://www.texmacs.org/. It is completely independent from LaTeX and TeX and has - beautiful typesetting (better than LaTeX) - it is fully WYSYWYG, so you don't have to learn a new markup language - yet it affords better document control than LaTeX

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#214

Post by greazy »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #196
shp0ngle wrote: post #180

Oh I remember my CS years, when all the professors were raving to me about LaTeX, and I never understood why. Sure, it might be marginally better than just using Word, although - not that much; and it’s horrible to debug, it’s horrible to actually automate, it’s horrible to actually “separate content from style”… I thought that maybe something is wrong with me and over time it will “click”… it never did. But, this ar…

It's great for writing papers. I can crack open vim rattle off an essay throw in some \par s and some \cite{sho0ngle} s, and then let all the typesetting, citation management, and whatnot get handled by the compiler. For STEM classes, the LaTeX defaults are perfect, and I can insert tables and images and such that can be in flux over the course of writing the report, importing then from external scripts that part of…

> LaTeX only gets hairy when you start trying to fight it. If you want some that looks exactly as you imagine it, you're going to be fighting an uphill battle trying to specify exactly what you want, and constantly re-compiling.

'fighting' as you describe it is the reason why people use latex. They want more fine grained control over the doc.

I work in STEM, every publisher has their own formatting style. My pubs would get rejected if I submitted a default style.

What you're describing is, in essence, using MS Word with defaults. Might as well use Word.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#215

Post by bernulli »

nautilius wrote: post #201
ohwellhere wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it eliminates entities But evolution doesn't eliminate entities. Low fitness entities are eliminated by hunger, or predators, or lower reproductive rates. The marble on the other hand is eliminated by Michelangelo. There's a linguistic confusion where because evolution is a noun, we think we can treat it as a subject. But in the person/place/thing/idea delineation, it is an idea. Not only does it not design, not on…

Of course 'evolution' is not an actor, it's just the overall pattern we give a name to. And the pattern we observe is that low fitness entities are eliminated. That plus variation yields adaptation.

Well, yeah.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#216

Post by rsfern »

greazy wrote: post #214
OkayPhysicist wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's great for writing papers. I can crack open vim rattle off an essay throw in some \par s and some \cite{sho0ngle} s, and then let all the typesetting, citation management, and whatnot get handled by the compiler. For STEM classes, the LaTeX defaults are perfect, and I can insert tables and images and such that can be in flux over the course of writing the report, importing then from external scripts that part of…

> LaTeX only gets hairy when you start trying to fight it. If you want some that looks exactly as you imagine it, you're going to be fighting an uphill battle trying to specify exactly what you want, and constantly re-compiling. 'fighting' as you describe it is the reason why people use latex. They want more fine grained control over the doc. I work in STEM, every publisher has their own formatting style. My pubs wou…

I work in (non-CS) STEM, and not fighting Word is a big reason that I use LaTeX. I find it really distracting how word automatically reflows text while writing, references are always a pain, and it’s a hassle to update figures after re-running analysis scripts. With TeX none of those things are painful

Collaborative writing is often a bit difficult, especially with bigger groups not comfortable with overleaf. But Word is not great in that setting either, it usually ends in a zillion emailed versions. (365 doesn’t seem to have feature parity, and usually doesn’t cut it. Track changes doesn’t work the same way, it’s a mess)

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#217

Post by stjohnswarts »

tunesmith wrote: post #181

I love LaTeX whole-heartedly. I never learned Word in college and wrote all my papers in LaTeX as an undergrad, just using its default styles. I write mathematical papers to myself, despite not being a mathematician. I found a LaTeX package that lays things out in the same style as old TSR D&D modules and I use that to write new dungeons. I wrote a book in markdown and used pandoc to output LaTeX and publish it throu…

I have never met someone who use Latex who wasn't a mathematician, CS, or older (elderly?) engineer

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#218

Post by techdragon »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #149
sph wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.) How does this not exist yet??

Yeah it is kind of surprising. Scribble supports latex output but I don't know the details and it's probably similar to pollen, since pollen is built on it. It doesn't seem that hard (famous last words tho) especially since turning arbitrary DSLs into xexprs is one of the things racket truly excels at.

Just having proper semantic closing syntax would be a huge improvement for any member of the TeX family. It drives me nuts wrestling with shit falling into or out of some macro expanded function based on argument parsing logic. If it had defined closing syntax the damn tools would just tell me there was a mistake or get it correct not mysteriously screw up my document because I added or removed one row from my document. Or my favourite because I added a second table and that macro could only handle one table of that kind per document because it was designed for a table based bibliography that would only exist once at the end of a document…

I put TeX and Perl in my “decent tool with extremely shitty syntax” mental categorisation of languages. I basically never look at anything TeX related directly anymore unless I have to. It’s either the input material I converted to something better like plain text or vector graphics (fuck Tkiz based graphics are so miserable to use) or it’s the output from putting something more sensible into pandoc.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#219

Post by dreamcompiler »

I despise LaTeX for two reasons: It's offensively inelegant, and there's no such thing as "LaTeX".

The offensively inelegant point is purely a matter of taste so I won't belabor it. The second point means that every author writes their document with their own particular suite of LaTeX add-ons, and if you don't have all of them you have no hope of compiling the document. There's Joe's LaTeX and Sally's LaTeX and Jennifer's LaTeX but nobody uses "vanilla LaTeX." So even after I download "LaTeX" (which is itself multiple gigabytes in size), I still have very little hope of compiling documentation that comes in LaTeX form. I hate LaTeX with the heat of a thousand suns and I'm embarrassed for my profession when I find it still in use.

The one thing LaTeX does well is math; if I had to write math papers I'd probably force myself to learn it, but fortunately I don't.

I tend to use org-mode for everything now. I don't use markdown because it has the same problem as LaTeX: There's really no such thing as "markdown" and the vanilla Daring Fireball version isn't facile enough for real work.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#220

Post by mgubi »

drstewart wrote: post #118
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

We seldom choose our names, ourselves. The name was chosen early on to pay due respect to the two main sources of inspiration: the TeX system and the Emacs editor. TeXmacs takes the good features of both, but just because I have the same name as your parents it does not mean I'm the same kind of person. A family is not a clone hierarchy. One can argue that Javascript also has the wrong name, there are reason for this, but usually this does not stop people to appreciate the good sides.
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