21–30 of 103 posts
For short stuff, i've started using org-mode as "markdown for latex" (whereas markdown is markdown for html). Takes a lot of the visual clutter out, dumps to PDF smoothly, and you can tweak the tex if you like in between.
I write LaTeX documents in VSCode because there's a syntax highlight plugin there for it. If I could, I would write in Sublime Text, because it's faster. However, no Sublime Text plugin for LaTeX exists. Unfortunately, the thing I would like most is a complete replacement for LaTeX that offers these features: * Text-based - no binary file formats * A unique DSL for all features * Complete control over layout and form…
All the things you listed are already there. I think if you want an easier DSL (which might be fair), you will have to give up some requirement, such as "complete control over typography and formatting".
P.S. I can also recommend Latex and Friends from Marc van Dongen. It is a really friendly cookbook that shows what modern LaTeX can do.
Title doesn't match, it's ripped from the first paragraph which really doesn't encompass the theme of the article. The article is more tips for writing manuscripts in tex without getting sucked down rabbit holes Recently had to track down and update my resume. When I finally found it I was able to quickly add last few years of updates on the commandline and run xelatex and done. It took much longer to track down the…
Yes, in hindsight it came off more clickbaity than intended. The article did raise a theme of frustration I share though: sometimes you just want the framework/tooling to get out of the way and let you write, something that regularly comes up when I'm working through technical documentation.
How is that difficult? Most text editors support word wrapping and syntax highlighting.
> avoid rebuilding your rendered document too often. It's slow, it takes you out of the activity of writing, and it throws up lots of opportunities to get distracted by some rendering nit that you didn't realise would happen.
I wrote a 300+ page PhD thesis with a lot of mathematical proofs, 12+ years ago on a computer that was a few years old. It wasn't that slow.
But then again, the whole point of using something like LaTeX is that you can focus on the text and not how it looks when writing it.
> If you use syntax highlighting in your editor, take a long, hard look at what it's drawing attention to. It's not your text, that's for sure. Is it worth having it on? Consider turning it off. Or (yak shaving beware!) tweak it to de-emphasise things, instead of emphasising them.
Again, I never found this to be a problem, even with documents that were full of mathematical expressions.
Title doesn't match, it's ripped from the first paragraph which really doesn't encompass the theme of the article. The article is more tips for writing manuscripts in tex without getting sucked down rabbit holes Recently had to track down and update my resume. When I finally found it I was able to quickly add last few years of updates on the commandline and run xelatex and done. It took much longer to track down the…
Title doesn't match, it's ripped from the first paragraph which really doesn't encompass the theme of the article. Yes, in hindsight it came off more clickbaity than intended. The article did raise a theme of frustration I share though: sometimes you just want the framework/tooling to get out of the way and let you write, something that regularly comes up when I'm working through technical documentation.
On more than one occasion I have started writing a paper draft in Sublime + Markdown because the scaffolding of LaTeX felt too distracting. Eventually you need to actually build the real document though.
Export from Emacs org mode to LaTeX. org mode offers plenty of flexibility to tweak the final output and lets you focus on writing. Edit: and creating tables in org mode is _so_ much better than in plain LaTeX. If you find yourself manually working on tables, the Emacs + org mode combo is worth investing time in.
Title doesn't match, it's ripped from the first paragraph which really doesn't encompass the theme of the article. The article is more tips for writing manuscripts in tex without getting sucked down rabbit holes Recently had to track down and update my resume. When I finally found it I was able to quickly add last few years of updates on the commandline and run xelatex and done. It took much longer to track down the…
Title doesn't match, it's ripped from the first paragraph which really doesn't encompass the theme of the article. Yes, in hindsight it came off more clickbaity than intended. The article did raise a theme of frustration I share though: sometimes you just want the framework/tooling to get out of the way and let you write, something that regularly comes up when I'm working through technical documentation.
Why not make a CI/CD pipeline and have the document rebuilt with each git commit?