LaTeX is great. It also sucks. I'm happy to have learned it and I'm happy to never have to use it again.
Modern LaTeX
41–50 of 224 posts
Re: Modern LaTeX
#42Trivia: 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
The special naming convention is mostly used as a form of elitist gatekeeping; it's a tribal shibboleth. You should be able to figure out whether someone is talking about latex (polymer) or latex (markup) from context, so having a special naming convention is rather pretentious and superfluous. If calling it lay-tek was important, they should've called it laytek. Historically, as I understand it, distinctions between…
Eh - the name is a bit of fun. Its fun to form communities with in-jokes and tribal knowledge and silly names. It doesn't hurt anyone. Lets not sacrifice everything joyous at the altar of being friendly to noobs.
Re: Modern LaTeX
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
MDX as a middle ground with most of the text standard markdown and the escape hatch of custom React JSX when needed has worked well for me.
Re: Modern LaTeX
#44Typst 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.
To be fair - there is a big "View on Github" button on the very first page
Re: Modern LaTeX
#45It's easier and good enough to just use LyX, a graphical document editor with a bunch of backends and templates, and if you really need to do something special you can still drop down to LaTeX and do your own templating.
It's published under GPL so relatively protected from corporate nuisances. Takes five minutes to teach someone how to mark headlines, add content listing and change document type, then a little more to teach how to add tables and images.
Re: Modern LaTeX
#46I'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…
My own experiment involved writing my CV in YAML, and using a Pandoc template to generate .tex and .pdf. I think I may have overcooked the thing a little, but it was good fun.
I never got into emacs. Is Org worth it?
Re: Modern LaTeX
#47I'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…
My own experiment involved writing my CV in YAML, and using a Pandoc template to generate .tex and .pdf. I think I may have overcooked the thing a little, but it was good fun. I never got into emacs. Is Org worth it? https://github.com/boerseth/cv
it’s not too shabby.
Re: Modern LaTeX
#48Typst 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.
They are a very small team and this is a known issue - there is a website refresh coming up that will fix it
They developed the main face of the product first - the online webapp which has live collaboration - which sounds like a sane choice for a new company.
Re: Modern LaTeX
#49Trivia: 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
The special naming convention is mostly used as a form of elitist gatekeeping; it's a tribal shibboleth. You should be able to figure out whether someone is talking about latex (polymer) or latex (markup) from context, so having a special naming convention is rather pretentious and superfluous. If calling it lay-tek was important, they should've called it laytek. Historically, as I understand it, distinctions between…
They did call it Latek, the X in the name is the Greek letter χ (Chi) and in my opinion, it's not an elitist shibboleth but a way to showcase the advantages of their typesetting system over existing, at the time, methods that didn't invest a lot in rendering non ASCII character sets.
Re: Modern LaTeX
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
MDX as a middle ground with most of the text standard markdown and the escape hatch of custom React JSX when needed has worked well for me.
MDX advertises itself as "markdown + components", but its not commonmark compatible. I tried using it a few years ago. In the process, I migrated over some regular markdown documents and they render incorrectly using MDX.
I filed a bug (this was a few years ago) and I was told commonmark compatibility was an explicit non goal for the project. Meh.