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I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

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Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#241

Post by guraltsev »

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.

Before starting to use TeXmacs I tried LyX. It is true that the typesetting is not optimal, as often pointed out by TeXmacs users, but for me that was not a dealbreaker. I found LyX to be extremely un-customizable. TeXmacs has Scheme that allows you to do potentially anything! That made me very happy coming from Emacs land.

An important thing for me was having context-aware keyboard shortcuts (that are barely possible in LyX).

Another cool thing that seems to be possible that I plan on exploring next is integrating math typing in TeXmacs with sympy and or Maxima. This would allow symbolic manipulation using the above packages directly in TeXmacs.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#243

Post by miguelmurca »

zauguin wrote: post #30
miguelmurca wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi! Author here. This is a cool idea for a vector implementation, but you still need to work around the fact that the command definition can come after the \get

Since your code doesn't write the authors to the file it already requires that the authors are given before `\maketitle`, so then it's also reasonable to require affiliations there. Then you get something like https://gist.github.com/zauguin/19bf1bc9128a8abaedfe3081717b... which doesn't need a file.

Hello, I thought about it a little and indeed you are both right! For the sake of completeness I've updated beamleeto to use this mechanism instead :) thank you for your help!

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#244

Post by Tepix »

dev_tty01 wrote: post #121
Tepix wrote: post #89

In the last three decades of having the opportunity to learn and use TeX, i have managed to avoid it. In the same time i've helped a friend with word processing for her dissertation. I'm still not sure how we managed to get it to work with all the horror stories about data loss and Microsoft Word at the time. But it did its job and I'm still in the WYSIWYG camp. Maybe in another life...

I find Word is only tolerable when used like Latex. I.e., extensive use of Styles. Define a Style for every object type in your doc. Also, carefully choose the Next Style option. Define Sections if columns or pagination vary across the document. With that in hand, it is now just a matter of plugging in text and images. If something isn't working quite right, edit the Style instead of macdinking the text on the screen…

Indeed, using styles is the (only) way to manage any significant document in Word.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#245

Post by krinchan »

galangalalgol wrote: post #96
flenserboy wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laying out books. The fact that all of this can be done in a text file, without hidden codes and being tied to this file format or another, is extraordinary. Images are easily handled, fonts simply work (XeTeX & friends work well for me), and — with sufficient warnings — these files can be handed over to an author and edited without messing much, if anything, up. The PDFs generated work well with all the PDF tools I'…

Another poster just finished saying images and tables are hard. Why the disconnect do you think?

Very late but just in case: If you're referring to my post, it was the particular layout I was trying to achieve. The board wanted me to imitate the existing minutes title page layout from their Word "template." The image was inside a table cell, the table had a lot of column/row spans, and things got messy really fast. As with HTML, using tables for layout is just a bad idea all around.

Also, as pointed out deeper in other responses, the basic tabular environment is not terrific when you're not just presenting standard table data.

Breaking apart the image and table and letting LaTeX handle the layout Just Worked (TM) and looked better in my opinion. That said, LaTeX images and tables are pretty easy and look great by default when you're not doing something weird with them.

Edit: A better way to phrase this might actually be that a major principle for LaTeX is that I should be able to just drop in a new chapter in the middle of a large document and LaTeX will automatically reflow and typeset the entire document without any of the very specific fiddling necessary in WYSIWYG word processors.

A major example is for instance, figures/images/tables will move to new pages but will remain correctly placed between paragraph X and Y. Because I've marked it up as such, if paragraph Y is on the page following paragraph X, it will bring the figure along with it to the new page. In WYSIWYG word processors, that figure would likely just sit at the end of the page until I manually moved it myself.

When you try to micromanage the layout of a very specific page, even if it's just the title page, you're going to have a pretty bad time unless you've written your own \documentclass. :-)

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