Have a look at https://quarto.org/ if LaTeX makes you angry.
LaTeX Makes Me Angry
81–90 of 103 posts
Re: LaTeX Makes Me Angry
#82Can anyone recommend a WYSIWYG LaTeX editor?
Re: LaTeX Makes Me Angry
#83No discussion of ConTeXt?
i've heard only good things, but congrats to that team for making something even harder to google than 'latex'
Re: LaTeX Makes Me Angry
#84On 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.
What's the missing feature that has your going back to latex? I switched to markdown and sublime a while ago. No more sideways tables, true. But even for that there is a workaround. And much less distraction in return.
I've just worked with LaTeX for a long time and know all the tricks to make it do exactly what I want. Equations, figures, tables, cross-references... I can get it all to work on the page. And some of my collaborators still print things out, so using the tricks to get a good-looking PDF is still worth the trouble to me.
When I want to get my rough, fluid thoughts onto a page, it's going to be easiest in Markdown + Sublime. But once the story and structure is basically there, the final product is easiest to achieve in LaTeX.
Re: LaTeX Makes Me Angry
#85There 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!
In which area? It depends a lot on the equation to figure ratio. If you have many equations, LaTeX is better. If you have many graphics, Word is better.
I still use PowerPoint for slides for Math talks. Adding equations is painful, so you are encouraged to add as few as possible. In LaTeX adding graphics in the right position, with the right side, ... is painful, so people prefer to cover the slide with equations. Also, in PowerPoint is easier to add a color arrows here and there, so you can connect a random equation with a random part of the graphic. I used tikz and xypic and other packages in LaTeX but I never was able to get enough fine control of random arrows.
Re: LaTeX Makes Me Angry
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 wi…
On docs, texlive-full (or similar naming in Guix/OpenBSD/Nix...) will provide the PDF documentation and an intro to LaTeX.
As does MiKTeX, which I use. (And it’s all available online in any case.) The problem, as I see it, is more with the documentation of LaTeX and TeX itself: there are a few non-official tutorials and guides, but very little material providing a comprehensive manual of the language and how it works.
Re: LaTeX Makes Me Angry
#87I personally often go to pandoc markdown. Quick translations to latex. Has first class support for latex packages (just include them in your pandoc's header). TeX like syntax for math with `$\delta$` for inline and `$$x=2$$` for newlines. Subscript/Superscript is `CO~2~` and `e=mc^2^`. A very comfy way to work once you get used to it.
This doesn't support citations or macros. [edit] Maybe I'm referring to the VScode Markdown plugin. Are there editors for the above workflow?
pandoc has great citation support, not sure what you mean by macros.
Re: LaTeX Makes Me Angry
#88> 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…
My PhD thesis compiled for about 45mins (300+ pages)
Re: LaTeX Makes Me Angry
#89I 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.)
MS Word also has great support for mathematical typesetting. And if you restrict yourself to unicode-math for your math symbol font files, for a long time LaTeX packages and TeX compilers for that had bugs whereas MS Word just worked. I'm not too sure about the state of Unicode Math font support today.
Re: LaTeX Makes Me Angry
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wi…
I think it comes down to whether the complexity of TeX/LaTeX is essential or accidental. My feeling is, more than half of the complexity is essential (typesetting is, like human grammar, full of obscure rules and exceptions), and therefore, it simply doesn't pay off to anyone to rewrite the system (not to mention, the more essential complexity is in a given problem, the more accidental complexity you're going to accrue).
There has been unsuccessful attempts to remove the accidental complexity, like Lout. It is very hard. If you limited your requirements to "do not have complete control over typesetting", as I suggested, then lot of essential complexity (of complex typesetting rules) could be converted to accidental complexity (simplified typesetting), and then such a system would be easier to create.
Though such a thing probably already exists in systems like LyX, MS Word, LibreOffice. They can do typesetting with vastly simplified rules (especially of equations).