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Modern LaTeX

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Re: Modern LaTeX

#31

Post by herewulf »

I'm finally updating my CV after years of neglect. I'm keen on switching to the route of Org mode -> LaTeX -> PDF.

It's partly because I love the simplicity/power of Org and I do all my writing in it nowadays, the other part is to separate the content from the presentation so I can have the content in two different languages but still end up with the same formatted document for both.

Anyone have experience with this or have favorite LaTeX templates for CVs?

I'm currently experimenting with this:

https://titan-c.gitlab.io/org-cv/

Re: Modern LaTeX

#32

Post by watusername »

Check out Tectonic which is an all-in-one LaTeX toolchain (single executable w/ engine + build system) that lazily downloads TeX Live (no upfront multi-gig downloads). It's a breath of fresh air in the chaotic LaTeX landscape. Bit of a shame that they opted for XeTeX rather than LuaTeX though.

[0]: https://github.com/tectonic-typesetting/tectonic

Re: Modern LaTeX

#33

Post by josephg »

mr_mitm wrote: post #12
JohnKemeny wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typst sure has a lot of good marketeers. LaTeX never needed that.

I remember tons of latex zealots 20 years ago. The internet must be full of latex vs word flamewars. Also, typst is just really good.

> Also, typst is just really good.

Yeah - typst has a bunch of features that I really want for blog posts and rich documentation, where markdown isn't a powerful enough tool. For example:

- Boxes & named figures

- Footnotes

- Variables, functions (incl populated from nearby files)

- Comments

- Chapter / Section headings (& auto generated table of contents)

- Custom formatting rules (For example, typst lets you define your own "warning box". Stuff like that.)

I don't know of a better tool to write my blog posts today. Markdown doesn't have enough features. And I'm obviously not writing blog posts in latex or a rich text editor. I could use actual javascript / JSX or something - but those tools aren't designed well for long form text content. (I don't want to manually add

tags around my paragraphs like a savage.)

Pity the html output is still a work in progress. I'm eagerly awaiting it being ready for use!

Re: Modern LaTeX

#34

Post by DocTomoe »

mr_mitm wrote: post #12
JohnKemeny wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typst sure has a lot of good marketeers. LaTeX never needed that.

I remember tons of latex zealots 20 years ago. The internet must be full of latex vs word flamewars. Also, typst is just really good.

Word 20 years ago was a very different beast compared to word today. For starters, it still had a closed, binary (read: not friendly to source control) format. It also had more bugs than Klendathu.

When you are losing your semester's 25-page seminal work an hour before deadline because Word had that weird little bug about long documents and random CJK characters (and whether or not the moon was currently in the House of Aquarius supposedly), you develop a ... healthy dislike for it.

LaTeX back in the day didn't need zealots - Word did all the heavy lifting in demolishing itself for anything more involved than 'Secretary writes a letter', 'grandma Jones writes down her secret butterball recipe' or 'suits need a text, and only text, on paper, quickly".

(Yes, that was snarky. I am still bitter about that document being eaten.)

Re: Modern LaTeX

#35

Post by jraph »

fsh wrote: post #20
qiu3344 wrote: post #8

LaTeX is quite underrated these days. Even though alternatives like Typst are popping up, LaTeX is also pretty convenient and powerful if you get past the crude syntax and obscure compilation errors. I sill remember my disbelieve when I found out that I can change my article into a presentation just by changing the document class to "beamer". These days I usually default to pandoc's markdown, mostly because the raw t…

Please nobody actually do this. Good presentation slides have almost zero overlap with the corresponding article since they serve completely different purposes. In my field, seeing beamer slides is a huge red flag for an imminent terrible presentation. Slides are an extremely visual medium, and WYSIWYM is a huge hindrance for designing appealing slides.

> WYSIWYM is a huge hindrance for designing appealing slides.

I don't know, if your slides are just a few keywords in a few bullet points and the occasional picture / diagram, WYSIWYM is great.

I agree that you shouldn't turn an actual article into a presentation though.

Re: Modern LaTeX

#36

Post by mturmon »

cadamsdotcom wrote: post #3

Trivia: the correct capitalization is LaTeX and it's pronounced "lay-tek". Knuth & friends were on a roll naming things - the 80s must've been quite a time. As always wiki knows all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX

This is incorrect. In his book on LaTeX, Leslie Lamport specifically says that he does not care how you pronounce it. (See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX#Pronouncing_and_writing_...)

Knuth, on the other hand, has a whole rationale on why it’s pronounced “tech”. (“Your keyboard should become slightly moist”, iirc).

Re: Modern LaTeX

#37

Post by mturmon »

kashunstva wrote: post #22
cadamsdotcom wrote: post #3

Trivia: the correct capitalization is LaTeX and it's pronounced "lay-tek". Knuth & friends were on a roll naming things - the 80s must've been quite a time. As always wiki knows all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX

> it's pronounced "lay-tek" Or “lah-tek”, the Wikipedia article doesn’t seem to address which, if either is preferred. And I think Leslie Lamport said that he didn’t want to impose any particular pronunciation.

This is accurate.

Re: Modern LaTeX

#38

Post by josephg »

BlackFly wrote: post #19

I always wonder why people compare Latex with word and not with the single most popular document markup (especially here): HTML + css + javascript. The problems are quite similar, "How do I center a div?" vs "How do I keep this float on this page?" Has latex really modernized? I don't hear a lot about new layouts or style mechanisms. Most people are probably reading articles online these days, although there is a lot…

Its the same reason that Markdown became popular. I want my document to primarily contain content. Not a sea of handwritten tags.

I don't want to manually type (or read past) HTML tags littered around the place. I don't want to manually put

tags on my text, or worry about how indentation will affect my rendered output. (For example,

foo

and

foo

render differently).

If I'm writing a blog post, I also don't want my post's text to get mixed up with site specific stuff, like meta tags and layout elements.

Are there any good "literate HTML" type tools which first and foremost let me type text, but still let me break into HTML? That I could get behind.

Re: Modern LaTeX

#40

Post by misnome »

dochtman wrote: post #5

Typst is the modern LaTeX. https://typst.app/

“Pricing”, “Sign Up”

Ah yes, this definitely is the “Modern” approach.

There does seem to be an open source, non-SAAS part, but information about it looks pretty deliberately buried.

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