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LaTeX Makes Me Angry

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Re: LaTeX Makes Me Angry

#41

Post by TacticalCoder »

> avoid rebuilding your rendered document too often. It's slow

How slow can it be today? I did typeset one book using LaTeX and the tricky part was that it had to look like a series of books typeset with QuarkXPress, so it took me lots of time to modify/adapt LaTeX so that the output would match what the editor wanted. Later on I simply used QuarkXPress: not that I didn't like LaTeX but... I got a Mac with QuarkXPress.

But that was in the late nineties. Back when compiling, say, Emacs, took 45 minutes (which now takes 2 minutes or less depending on your system). Certainly LaTeX did benefit greatly too from advances in computing power during a quarter of a century? How can rendering a LaTeX document be still slow today?

Re: LaTeX Makes Me Angry

#42

Post by bee_rider »

rrwo wrote: post #24

> 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 think compile times for LaTeX are an over-stated issues (I mean if nothing else it is really easy to get the document to compile in the background). But we should note that it isn't just a matter of length, there are various packages that require an additional pass over the document.

I went looking for a list of which packages increase pass counts and found

https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/30674/document-requi...

the first infinite loop doesn't even really look to use anything exotic at all.

Re: LaTeX Makes Me Angry

#43

Post by CrazyStat »

bradrn wrote: post #39
rrwo wrote: post #24

> 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…

An additional benefit of this style is that it plays very nicely with version control--diffs are much cleaner than if you have one paragraph per line.

Re: LaTeX Makes Me Angry

#44

Post by BrandoElFollito »

rrwo wrote: post #24

> 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 chose LaTeX for my PhD (~25 years ago in physics, I was working in IT at the same time) for that exact reason: that I could write and not wory about how this will end up.

I was happy with the extreme complexity to change things (for me at least) because it means I will not spend time to modify the defaults which are correct typographically speaking.

I only compiled the text when I wanted to pat myself on the shoulder about how great job I was doing.

This is why LaTeX is well suited for something longer (memoir, thesis, book, larger documentation that will end up printed or in a file) and not that mush for one pages (a CV in LaTeX looks dull and you need to have at least something that will make it stand out). An exception would be exercises in math or similar, where the power of equations is primordial.

Re: LaTeX Makes Me Angry

#45

Post by bee_rider »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #41

> avoid rebuilding your rendered document too often. It's slow How slow can it be today? I did typeset one book using LaTeX and the tricky part was that it had to look like a series of books typeset with QuarkXPress, so it took me lots of time to modify/adapt LaTeX so that the output would match what the editor wanted. Later on I simply used QuarkXPress: not that I didn't like LaTeX but... I got a Mac with QuarkXPres…

Usually? It is not so bad as long as you don't accidentally add a bunch of compiler passes.

In general? LaTeX is a turing complete language so I guess you could write an infinite loop.

https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/30674/document-requi...

Re: LaTeX Makes Me Angry

#46

Post by qwerty456127 »

> LaTeX — the age-old typesetting system — makes me angry. Not because it's bad. To clarify, not because there's something better. But because there should be.

Yeah, exactly this. It's crazy there still is no better typesetting language. TeX/LaTeX is the most extraterrestrial language I ever seen. Take any language people consider weird and it shines as handy and intuitive instantly as you compare it to this.

I don't mean the math formula part. I mean learning the actual language to be able to expressing the design you want in it feels impossible.

Re: LaTeX Makes Me Angry

#47

Post by pclmulqdq »

bee_rider wrote: post #42
rrwo wrote: post #24

> 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 think compile times for LaTeX are an over-stated issues (I mean if nothing else it is really easy to get the document to compile in the background). But we should note that it isn't just a matter of length, there are various packages that require an additional pass over the document. I went looking for a list of which packages increase pass counts and found https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/30674/document-req…

I remember that my undergrad thesis took ~8 compile passes to link up all the references correctly, and this was so common that the latex IDE I used had that as one of the possible "build" presets.

Re: LaTeX Makes Me Angry

#48

Post by whatever1 »

rrwo wrote: post #24

> 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…

Give me your thesis source code, I will just remove one bracket from your complex equations Let’s see how many hours you will spend to fix it.

The compiler will just tell you “out of memory error” with no line number. Good luck finding it.

Latex and its tooling ecosystem are atrocious for productivity. For a type system that promises “just write, forget about formatting” the effort it requires to get document formatting right is insane.

Re: LaTeX Makes Me Angry

#49

Post by newpcnotmyfault »

>Unless you are very good at manoeuvring around long documents, liberally split them up. I think it's fine to have sections in their own source files.

That's cool. I'm a lawyer. Often those section becomes snippets-like text I can re-using in other documents.

Also, making those _snippets_ help me to think more clearly. LaTeX wants me to think as crisp he is.

Re: LaTeX Makes Me Angry

#50

Post by pvaldes »

whatever1 wrote: post #48
rrwo wrote: post #24

> 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…

Give me your thesis source code, I will just remove one bracket from your complex equations Let’s see how many hours you will spend to fix it. The compiler will just tell you “out of memory error” with no line number. Good luck finding it. Latex and its tooling ecosystem are atrocious for productivity. For a type system that promises “just write, forget about formatting” the effort it requires to get document formatt…

> I will just remove one bracket from your complex equations Let’s see how many hours you will spend to fix it.

I would measure the fix time in minutes, even seconds, but not in hours. Emacs would help with that. Moving your \end{document} backwards would find the problem also.

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