> avoid rebuilding Why not make a CI/CD pipeline and have the document rebuilt with each git commit?
That sounds like a troll, and if it is, it’s a good one because it made me laugh.
LaTeX Makes Me Angry
31–40 of 103 posts
Re: LaTeX Makes Me Angry
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's not that big of a deal. I don't think anyone likes LaTeX so its a good way to get the gang together, clickbait or not.
Agreed, I don't know of a single person who *likes* LaTeX either.
Also ... I strongly suspect jmtd is a masochist.
Re: LaTeX Makes Me Angry
#33I 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…
What would be the advantage of the replacement compared to TeX/LaTeX? 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.
> What would be the advantage of the replacement compared to TeX/LaTeX?
In my experience, LaTeX is pretty clunky, unintegrated and poorly documented. To do any kind of useful typesetting I have to depend on at least five or six third-party packages, and that’s assuming that I don’t need anything ‘fancy’ like nicely formatted references, customised lists or tables, diagrams, hyperlinks or — God forbid — code blocks with syntax highlighting. (Though to be fair that last is a bit difficult in any typesetting software.) If no package exists for something I want to do, then I have to make it myself: a forbidding task, given the complexity of LaTeX’s internals and of the TeX language itself. Besides, TeX is getting old now; it was created when computers had less memory and power, and it shows. A fresher, more coherent typesetting system retaining all the listed features would be clearly better than LaTeX — no mean feat, considering how much better LaTeX is than its main competitors.
(Admittedly, other TeX-based systems do solve some of those problems. LuaLaTeX makes some things a bit easier to accomplish, and I hear that ConTeX is somewhat more featureful out-of-the-box, though last I tried it was nearly impossible to get working on Windows and was documented even more poorly than LaTeX. Either way, both of these still inherit the problems inherent in TeX itself.)
Re: LaTeX Makes Me Angry
#34Re: LaTeX Makes Me Angry
#35I 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…
And:
* Support for maths
Which is as far as I can see the single most unique feature of LaTeX… there exist various tools which cover many of your points, but LaTeX is the only one I know of with high-quality mathematical typesetting.
(Actually, even disregarding maths, LaTeX is the only tool I know of which covers most of your points. But I feel that its maths support is an important feature even so.)
Re: LaTeX Makes Me Angry
#36> format the document source for legible reading. Yes, it's the input to the typesetter, and yes, the output of the typesetter needs to be legible. But it's worth making the input easy to read, too. 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…
I didn’t find it an issue either. However, I’m suspecting the author may be using it as a “document first” tool as opposed to a typesetting one. As an example, I had a rough draft of my thesis on paper along with the formulae that I wanted. I iterated over the LaTeX doc after that. It wasn’t slow and the good thing is I had different files for different chapters. I used Texmaker - open source, free and worked on Linux.
Re: LaTeX Makes Me Angry
#37> the styling used for comments (which is normally de-emphasised)
And that’s wrong. Syntax highlighting should be emphasising comments, not making them almost invisible. But some colour schemes do get it foolishly wrong, and the only reason I can think this might happen is because their authors write the wrong sorts of comments, comments that largely shouldn’t be written. But proper comments are at least as important as the code.
As for “normally”, that doesn’t match my observations. I’d say the significant majority are just different without obviously increasing or decreasing notice—though this is often inherently mild emphasis. Very few clearly increase it, and they’re mostly more conservative schemes that are less frivolous about changing colours.
Re: LaTeX Makes Me Angry
#38> format the document source for legible reading. Yes, it's the input to the typesetter, and yes, the output of the typesetter needs to be legible. But it's worth making the input easy to read, too. 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…
It’s funny, my hobby now is printing ‘three sided cards’ that have a photo or art reproduction on one side, a back with a QR code and some discussion of the subject, and an associated web page.
I write the back sizes in YAML and it takes just a second or so to make a PNG of the back side which gets printed. So far I have manually triggered the PNG build but I am doing more work that involves positioning things in the back and I’m considering both making the process more interactive (less work to trigger build and tools to move objects around with the mouse) and have less need to be interactive (specify that object A is stuck on the left side of object B and centered vertically relative to B.)
I’ve also had the pet peeve that conventional approaches to formatting text tend to make things of secondary importance such as annotations more prominent than the main text. I’ve sometimes experimented with making those things less prominent, instead of using bold I would make the annotations a bit lighter than the main text. Although it reverse the usual conventions the few trials I’ve done seem to indicate that people handle this just fine.
Re: LaTeX Makes Me Angry
#39> format the document source for legible reading. Yes, it's the input to the typesetter, and yes, the output of the typesetter needs to be legible. But it's worth making the input easy to read, too. 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…
> How is that difficult? Most text editors support word wrapping and syntax highlighting.
To add to this, I personally prefer using semantic linefeeds — adding a newline after each sentence or clause (as in e.g. [0] [1]). I find this works exceptionally well with LaTeX, since I get the benefit of the newlines as I write and edit, while the typeset version is formatted nicely into paragraphs for me.
(Not that this is unique to LaTeX, of course; Markdown would be no different. The technique works well with all such tools.)
[0] https://vanemden.wordpress.com/2009/01/01/ventilated-prose/
Re: LaTeX Makes Me Angry
#40This is less a complaint about LaTeX and more a complaint about tooling.
I think that LaTeX is an excellent example of messy tooling that adds a too much overhead to the user experience.