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

Post by vcxy » Sun, Jan 08, 2023, 10:55 PM UTC

generationP wrote: post #92

BrandonS113 wrote: post #85

Earlier 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?)…

Post by layer8 » Sun, Jan 08, 2023, 11:06 PM UTC

enriquto wrote: post #47

generationP wrote: post #36

Most 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…

Both mathbbm and mathbb are wrong for number sets. These fonts look like the blackboard hack that you use to simulate boldface using chalk. On a computer you don't have this problem and you can simply use mathbf (actual boldface).

Post by generationP » Sun, Jan 08, 2023, 11:19 PM UTC

mattkrause wrote: post #119

generationP wrote: post #92

Earlier 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?)…

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…

Post by OJFord » Mon, Jan 09, 2023, 1:56 AM UTC

Post by patrick451 » Mon, Jan 09, 2023, 2:16 AM UTC

Shorel wrote: post #59

walnutclosefarm wrote: post #2

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…

As ugly as it may appear to you, it is so much more readable than MathML Core. TeX is, in fact, still better than all the alternatives to represent mathematical equations in plain text created so far.