LaTeX is great, but God forbid you want to move a figure up a centimeter on the page. That'll cost you an hour of reading through StackExchange threads, and you'll probably come up empty.
It is not exactly a picnic in Word either though....
The Art of LaTeX: Common mistakes and advice for typesetting proofs
111–120 of 149 posts
Re: The Art of LaTeX: Common mistakes and advice for typesetting proofs
#112I 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 don’t have an opinion about whether they’re better or worse, but have you tried groff or heirloom troff?
Re: The Art of LaTeX: Common mistakes and advice for typesetting proofs
#113Most of this is good advice, but I don't see the \mathbbm vs. \mathbb distinction as anything other than subjective taste. Also, I use things like \newcommand{\abs}[1]{\left| #1 \right|} in the preamble. This way, I can use \abs{...} without any asterisks, and it automatically adjusts its size. In the 1% situations where I don't want it to adjust the size, I write the delimiters manually. Making maths look good in La…
Use `DeclarePairedDelimiter` from `mathtools`. The rule of TeX is that anything that is written in TeX is instantly old. Because people don't read what Knuth had in mind. TeX was the prototype not the production grade product. Still people refuse to get the message.
Well, Knuth still writes all his stuff using "plain" TeX. For example, the source of the TeXbook and the METAFONTbook are both TeX, not LaTeX or whatnot. Granted, he did create TeX, so he's probably more comfortable with it.
Re: The Art of LaTeX: Common mistakes and advice for typesetting proofs
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
It tells me that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, i.e. what one may perceive as ugliness, countless others will view as beauty or, at least functionality. I personally think that the ugliest design in existence is Python but I admit my opinion is not common. Moreover, I use Python myself, since syntax is not the only important thing in a language (the ecosystem is Python's undisputable strength). It is also unc…
"here are WYSIWYG editors for TeX as well." not there are not. Apart from TeXmacs I know of no editor which give you on the screen the same result you get on the paper. LyX has not such a feature. If an approximation is ok, then fine, but I do not think you can call it WYSIWYG. Is something else. And it requires a lot of work to do it correctly. You should at least appreciate the technical merits, even if you prefer…
As a fellow mathematician you may then appreciate the fact that local and global maxima may differ dramatically which pretty much precludes true WYSIWYG (not just in TeX) in that you have to settle for one of the two: visual output with suboptimal aesthetics (TeXmacs, and, to some extent, LyX) or perfect results that you have to compile with some delay. It has nothing to do with the computational power available but rather with the occasional highly unstable line breaking. Even in MS Word it is annoying sometimes to see it resize a current line even though it uses a rather lame line breaking routine. TeX does have facilities for almost real time WYSIWYG (SyncTeX was added specifically for that purpose) although they take some effort to set up. As far as concentrating on the work at hand I have written whole papers without compiling the document once before everything was complete. I admit it takes some getting used to but I prefer something I can grep through to a mere pretty picture. I admit if my work was heavy on large commutative diagrams I might have had a different view. One thing I totally agree with you on is that TeXmacs is an outstanding piece of software. I would just prefer to keep my documents in TeX (which TeXmacs can export, kinda).
Re: The Art of LaTeX: Common mistakes and advice for typesetting proofs
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have seen very few fully correct bibliographies written with bibtex in the wild. Not everything wrong with bibtex is a bug; the big problem is that bibtex is not adapted to its modern usage. A non-comprehensive list of problems: 1. Does anyone run bibtex directly from the command line? No, it's an extra step and the syntax is hard to memorize (should it run on the tex or the bib, and with or without the extension?)…
If they make it into the wild, who cares if they are fully correct? The rules for a “fully correct” bibliography are too strict anyway. DOI or URL? Who cares? The reader is just going to search for the title anyway. As long as it doesn’t bounce off the publisher it is fine (which, it must not be bouncing off the publishers if it makes it into the wild).
Googling the title works for reasonably new papers. Not so good for textbooks, old papers (titles used to be a lot less expressive 50 years ago), conference proceedings (often not indexed by article anywhere, and the name of the volume can be ambiguous), grey literature like lecture notes (a URL would allow you to use the Wayback Machine).
Also, don't count on authors to get the title right.
Re: The Art of LaTeX: Common mistakes and advice for typesetting proofs
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
How is Quarto? It uses Pandoc Markdown.
There was a discussion about that last year [1]
Re: The Art of LaTeX: Common mistakes and advice for typesetting proofs
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why not use it? Better question: why use it, when you can use the real thing? Mathematicians concerned by typography universally use real boldface. For example: Terrence Tao's blog, Donald Knuth, Paul Halmos (author of "how to write mathematics"), and the famous journal "Publications Mathématiques de l'IHÉS" which is the undisputed gold standard in mathematical typography. They use real boldface for the number sets…
Who is Terrence Tao? Do you mean Terence Tao? (if we are nitpicking about typography...)
Heh.
Sorry about that. A common typo. The keys are like right next to each other.
Re: The Art of LaTeX: Common mistakes and advice for typesetting proofs
#118Slightly off-topic question: any suggestions for modern presentation LaTeX themes (besides Metropolis, https://github.com/matze/mtheme)?
Re: The Art of LaTeX: Common mistakes and advice for typesetting proofs
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the first time I have seen such a complaint against bibtex. Yes bib files are finicky to write correctly, and bibtex can be a pain to use. But bibliographies are never "imprecise, missing important info or plain wrong." I've written 100s of pieces with latex+bibtex, papers, websites, reports, books. bibtex always makes citations and bib entries look like what I or the publisher need. If something is missing,…
I have seen very few fully correct bibliographies written with bibtex in the wild. Not everything wrong with bibtex is a bug; the big problem is that bibtex is not adapted to its modern usage. A non-comprehensive list of problems: 1. Does anyone run bibtex directly from the command line? No, it's an extra step and the syntax is hard to memorize (should it run on the tex or the bib, and with or without the extension?)…
By these standards, are any citation managers adapted to modern use?
I’m definitely open to the idea that we should change how we refer to other findings, but EndNote, Zotero, and the like also can’t save you from new editions, overly-strict rules about reference formatting, and bad publisher-provided information.
If you can deviate slightly from a particular reference format, it’s fairly easy to emit either a DOI or a URL (but not both): https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/154864/biblatex-use-... One of the linked answers even suppresses DOI-like URLs.
Re: The Art of LaTeX: Common mistakes and advice for typesetting proofs
#120The final point, involving labels and references, could be improved by mentioning cleveref: https://ctan.org/pkg/cleveref?lang=en