51–60 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.
> 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…
Just yesterday I tried to apply Texinfo patches to support generating Chinese PDFs via XeTeX. The first error I got was an out-of-memory error, which was solved only by adding a missing font file.
The next error I got is "Undefined control sequence." and there's nothing wrong with the sources.
I'm maintaining a modular installation of TeX Live for GNU Guix for years now, and understanding the errors doesn't ever seem to get easier.
My experience with lout (another typesetting system) has been a lot smoother, even though by default it does not support Unicode. (It's possible with some configuration.)
> 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…
The major source of frustration was that there is no partial rebuilding of the document in LaTeX: fixing one word on one page, even if it did not result in any change on the other pages, would require multiple (because of references) compilations of the entire, enormous document, even just to get some sense of what the resulting document would look like. This is a problem that is somewhat unique to LaTeX, I think.
> 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…
real 0m18.159s, user 0m17.747s, sys 0m0.296s
Not instantaneous but considering the job, pretty good. I no longer bother with \includeonly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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…
Having used LaTeX for a few things. including a PhD thesis, I can say with confidence that this approach just doesn't work for me. I view "how something looks" as being an integral part of what it communicates. The text itself is only part of the package, so not being able to see how the finished product looks as I write is frankly a hassle. (It's also a hassle when I want to collaborate with people who don't know LaTeX, but that's another story).
I wish Word didn't slow to a crawl when I had ~30 equations in a document, but I still prefer it to LaTeX.
With other replacements, I've encountered other problems: VScode's Asciidoc plugin didn't support inline formulas last time I checked. Org-mode had a steep learning curve last time I tried.
How's Lyx for people?
20 years ago I did my thesis in Word 2000 with some plugin for equations. It was far better than latex. I had to insert some hard page breaks, instead of learning completely new language!
There is nothing better? Maybe it is just a bias, since you know all the quirks. 20 years ago I did my thesis in Word 2000 with some plugin for equations. It was far better than latex. I had to insert some hard page breaks, instead of learning completely new language!
> 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…
> 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. Having used LaTeX for a few things. including a PhD thesis, I can say with confidence that this approach just doesn't work for me. I view "how something looks" as being an integral part of what it communicates. The text itself is only part of the package, so not being able to see how…
It seems to be a common pattern for many to render their pdf every paragraph or so, check, then tweak as desired. It may be a bad habit to be broken but it’s driven by a real need to make sure the final product is good. However good LaTeX or ones ability with it is, software should have tests … right … surely the visual checks a an essential necessity at some point?