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I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

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Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#221

Post by mgubi »

kzrdude wrote: post #58
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

Any published papers that use this?

I write all my papers with it since few years, and my lecture notes, and my talks. The papers are converted to LaTeX when sending to the publisher. Several of my PhD students used it to write their thesis. Also some Master students.

Some pointers here: Papers: - https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.09637 - https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.05562 - https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.12115 Lecture notes: - https://www.iam.uni-bonn.de/abteilung-gubinelli/teaching/sto... Online lectures with TeXmacs: - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL50D2PpswE&t=4990s

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#222

Post by mgubi »

jIyajbe wrote: post #79
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

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.

LyX is good but the quality of the typesetter is not. Early on, when looking for a replacement for my TeX workflow I was taken back by the rendering. It improved lately, but still TeXmacs is a superior tecnology which renders onscreen exactly as on paper, and it is fully scriptable in scheme, including the user interface. I use it to lecture online, via Zoom, for example and I would not be able to do the same with LyX. See e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FL50D2PpswE Also thinking about mathematics in TeXmacs is really pleasant. I wrote here my reflection on mathematical writing in TeXmacs: https://texmacs.github.io/notes/docs/art-of-math-writing.htm...

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#224

Post by wmwmwm »

Although I haven't used LaTeX in decades to write anything substantial like a paper or dissertation, I recently had cause to use it to write up some homework for an online course I'm doing - mainly (pretty simple) maths proofs. After 20 years of not doing maths, my ability to faithfully rearrange handwritten equations from one line to another was even more rubbish that it was in my 20s! All sorts of dropped or flipped signs, terms and stray brackets would trip me up. Although initially sceptical, I found that doing this in LaTeX (with the ability to cut/paste to a new line and then manually 'refactor') was way more reliable. I think it tapped into my ability to do this semi-unconsciously when coding! (And with no dreaded page turns...)

However, it's still an effort to squint at all of LaTeX's curly brackets and long form symbol names, and LaTeX doesn't grok the equation of course.

Has anyone come across any tools out there that offer a similar experience for manually rearranging equations and somehow 'linting' as you go along? i.e. something that knows a bit more about precedence/structure etc? Even a intellij ctrl-W style shortcut (highlights chunks with increasing scope) would make it easier/quicker to do what I'm talking about.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#225

Post by dash2 »

camel-cdr wrote: post #62
dash2 wrote: post #43

Jesus H Carnegie. I JUST WANT TO WRITE AN ACADEMIC ARTICLE. I mean, look at this abhorrence. And look at what you open up in a TeX file, which again is meant to represent English prose . % Options for packages loaded elsewhere \PassOptionsToPackage{unicode}{hyperref} \PassOptionsToPackage{hyphens}{url} % \documentclass[ ]{article} \usepackage{amsmath,amssymb} \usepackage{lmodern} \usepackage{iftex} \ifPDFTeX ... and…

> \sigma _{I}^{2}=a^{2}s^{2}+\left( 1-a\right)^{2}S^{2}+2a\left( 1-a\right)\sigma. I'd write the above expression as the following: \sigma_I^2 = a^2 s^2 + (1-a)^2 S^2 + 2a(1-a) \sigma The only thing you need to know to understand it conceptually is `_ -> move next character down`, `^ -> move next character up`.

Right, sure. This is indeed copy-pasted from LyX, which is a saviour. Manually written, TeX can be better. But as soon as anything gets complicated, you're gonna be stuck again. The problem is not understanding something conceptually. It's intuiting it. I want my brain to be working on the maths. I don't want to use valuable brain cycles understanding the notation!

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#226

Post by dash2 »

funnym0nk3y wrote: post #60
dash2 wrote: post #43

Jesus H Carnegie. I JUST WANT TO WRITE AN ACADEMIC ARTICLE. I mean, look at this abhorrence. And look at what you open up in a TeX file, which again is meant to represent English prose . % Options for packages loaded elsewhere \PassOptionsToPackage{unicode}{hyperref} \PassOptionsToPackage{hyphens}{url} % \documentclass[ ]{article} \usepackage{amsmath,amssymb} \usepackage{lmodern} \usepackage{iftex} \ifPDFTeX ... and…

Honestly, do you have any idea how to improve the math mess? I did use both Word and LaTeX für equations, the latter is much faster for me. So WYSIWYM seems to have its usecase. But I agree, reading that equation is just awful. My idea would be tooling to partially render tha equation, e.g. rendering sections the cursor is not in.

There's this:

http://asciimath.org/

I wish someone would integrate this into pandoc so I could use it in rmarkdown.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#227

Post by dash2 »

jasomill wrote: post #199
iflp wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The equation example is artificial. In practice there will be no curly brackets around these single-token sub/superscripts, nor should the \left / \right present in this example. With properly added whitespaces this equation becomes quite legible. For more complex equations people use line breaks and indentations, and/or macros.

As an example taken at random from my undergrad days, see https://jasomill.at/metric.pdf produced with \begin{align*} f^*(dx& \otimes dx + dy \otimes dy + dz \otimes dz)\\ =&\ f^*(dx \otimes dx) + f^*(dy \otimes dy) + f^*(dz \otimes dz)\\ =&\ d(f^*x) \otimes d(f^*x) + d(f^*y) \otimes d(f^*y) + d(f^*z) \otimes d(f^*z)\\ =&\ d(x \circ f) \otimes d(x \circ f) + d(y \circ f) \otimes d(y \circ f) + d(z \circ f) \otimes d(…

To be clear, the above is meant to be an example in favour of TeX? You look at that and think "well, it's obvious what's going on here"?

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#228

Post by dash2 »

bowsamic wrote: post #48
dash2 wrote: post #43

Jesus H Carnegie. I JUST WANT TO WRITE AN ACADEMIC ARTICLE. I mean, look at this abhorrence. And look at what you open up in a TeX file, which again is meant to represent English prose . % Options for packages loaded elsewhere \PassOptionsToPackage{unicode}{hyperref} \PassOptionsToPackage{hyphens}{url} % \documentclass[ ]{article} \usepackage{amsmath,amssymb} \usepackage{lmodern} \usepackage{iftex} \ifPDFTeX ... and…

As a physics postdoc I have to say that is quite a simple equation

That's my point! The equation is simple. The markup makes it complicated. Now imagine a complex equation.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#229

Post by dash2 »

pacbard wrote: post #148
dash2 wrote: post #43

Jesus H Carnegie. I JUST WANT TO WRITE AN ACADEMIC ARTICLE. I mean, look at this abhorrence. And look at what you open up in a TeX file, which again is meant to represent English prose . % Options for packages loaded elsewhere \PassOptionsToPackage{unicode}{hyperref} \PassOptionsToPackage{hyphens}{url} % \documentclass[ ]{article} \usepackage{amsmath,amssymb} \usepackage{lmodern} \usepackage{iftex} \ifPDFTeX ... and…

I agree that LaTeX has not the best syntax, but that is a better alternative? I mostly write in Word and I can tell you that it is not that much better than LaTeX. Sure, the editor is WYSIWYG so you can see right away the title, abstract, text, etc. The problems I have with Word are mostly solved in LaTeX. For example, references are automatically managed in LaTeX. In Word, that's mostly a manual process (I know ther…

Ah, Beamer.

You know how people make animations in Beamer?

They write the same picture on multiple slides and then flip through the slides really fast. Like drawing flipbook pictures as a kid.

This, with computers thousands of times more powerful than what took us to the moon.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#230

Post by patrickg »

GiovanniP wrote: post #212
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.

In which sense “better output quality”?
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