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The Art of LaTeX: Common mistakes and advice for typesetting proofs

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Re: The Art of LaTeX: Common mistakes and advice for typesetting proofs

#71

I have a question: if what you have to write in order to create your beautiful and aesthetically pleasing proof, and thereby "establish your ethos and character" (presumably as a righteous and good), is an ugly and fragile instance of a poorly designed, inherently unreadable, archaic language that embodies none of the characteristics you are after, can the result really be "a work of art that combines both the precis…

I find writing LaTex is like painting a beautiful sunset using pig’s blood. The results are beautiful, but don’t look behind the canvas or too deeply into the artist’s mental health following that.

Re: The Art of LaTeX: Common mistakes and advice for typesetting proofs

#73

I really wish there was a way to have shared editing on a doc, similar to google docs, that used LaTex. I often have to share docs for work (in google docs) and the lack of a clear way to format as eloquently as LaTex makes me not even try.

Something like overleaf.com ?

Re: The Art of LaTeX: Common mistakes and advice for typesetting proofs

#74

I really wish there was a way to have shared editing on a doc, similar to google docs, that used LaTex. I often have to share docs for work (in google docs) and the lack of a clear way to format as eloquently as LaTex makes me not even try.

Have you tried overleaf?

Re: The Art of LaTeX: Common mistakes and advice for typesetting proofs

#75

I really wish there was a way to have shared editing on a doc, similar to google docs, that used LaTex. I often have to share docs for work (in google docs) and the lack of a clear way to format as eloquently as LaTex makes me not even try.

Overleaf (https://overleaf.com/) is pretty popular for this, and also tracks things like edit history

Re: The Art of LaTeX: Common mistakes and advice for typesetting proofs

#77
post #76

Anyone know of any good typesetters who I can hire to typeset an ebook?

I've written my books in Latex - the pdf output goes to Amazon for the print copy, and then I run it through pandoc to get a perfectly formatted epub that I upload to amazon and apple and anywhere else.

It takes a bit to get setup, but now I have the template going it makes a perfectly formatted book a breeze.

I wrote about it here: http://theroadchoseme.com/how-i-self-published-a-professiona...

Re: The Art of LaTeX: Common mistakes and advice for typesetting proofs

#78
Is there a reasonable assessment of where LaTeX's capabilities are falling short? One of these may be laying out tables without need for manual intervention/adjustment. Another could be easier ways to customise look and feel of documents.For example the "letter" document class is too bare-bones.

Re: The Art of LaTeX: Common mistakes and advice for typesetting proofs

#79

I have a question: if what you have to write in order to create your beautiful and aesthetically pleasing proof, and thereby "establish your ethos and character" (presumably as a righteous and good), is an ugly and fragile instance of a poorly designed, inherently unreadable, archaic language that embodies none of the characteristics you are after, can the result really be "a work of art that combines both the precis…

I am still looking for a text markup system that gives me good PDFs with DTP-grade text setting and and is plain-text, so I can work with standard version control programs. Right now, only TeX/LaTeX comes close. AsciiDoctor is not doing citations well, Markdown is basically a mess which differs in implementation, also footnotes and citations. Do you have something better?

I think (though I can’t find a reference) that Knuth hoped that some of the algorithms developed for TeX, such as the hyphenation and line breaking algorithms, would catch on and be used by other, non-TeX typesetting software. If that has ever happened, I a unaware of any examples. That’s a pity.
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