91–100 of 224 posts
Don't get me wrong, I love LaTeX, having written my PhD thesis in it. But with the current tools, I would use Quarto instead. It's much easier, you can still "inject" LaTeX and it's quicker for less technical collaborators to adapt.
$ sudo apt install quarto E: Unable to locate package quarto yeah, hard pass
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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…
Case in point, by the time I got at CERN in 2003, most researchers were writing their papers in Word or FrameMaker, with LaTeX lookalike templates. In two years I hardly met anyone still doing pure LaTeX publications, unless the publishing body only accepted LaTeX as submission format.
I remember having to learn LaTeX to write my research papers. Probably the worst time I’ve had learning something. As someone who has OCD for making everything consistent, trying to achieve the same in LaTeX made me wanna give up research itself. In fact, now that I think about it, I did give up research due to it.
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…
There are many reasons this comparison is not made. I will just touch on one. The target medium is different. For html, you have monitors of different sizes as well as windows that can be resized. For latex, you choose your target at the start: A4 paper? Screen presentation? A0 poster? With a fixed medium in mind, you can be extremely particular on where on this canvas you want a piece of text/graphic or whatever. Wi…
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Latex is not a company’s product. That’s a substantial difference.
Obviously there are differences, but that wasn't the point of my comment. I replied to the claim that latex never needed "marketers". Or did you mean to reply to a different comment?
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…
I tried to avoid custom commands and environments to keep it simple. Your content in org text should fit nicely with this.
It also has a template where the preamble is stored in different file such that you can try a different look by just un/commenting a different preamble file.
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> I wouldn't say underrated. Literally every single research article in maths and cs, every PhD dissertation and master thesis in these fields too, are written in LaTeX. Usage level is not correlated to "rate". Sometimes people use stuff because they have to, not only because they like it. See the Microsoft Word case. I'd agree that LaTeX has fell a bit in popularity this days against Typst - but not much in its usag…
I've never met anyone who's used Typst, I've only ever heard it on HN. And I meet a lot of researchers, teachers, and students. Perhaps it's a programmer thing.
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Good slides is about good diagrams. LaTeX has all the tooling to write high-quality ones.
I disagree. LaTeX is very good at layouting test, and can also (reluctantly) put figures into the text. Anything else is a huge hack (like TikZ), and one constantly runs into crazy limitations such as the fixed-point math and the lack of a decent visual editor. Slides should never have paragraphs of text on them, so the layouting is not very useful, but the other limitations are very annoying.
I remember having to learn LaTeX to write my research papers. Probably the worst time I’ve had learning something. As someone who has OCD for making everything consistent, trying to achieve the same in LaTeX made me wanna give up research itself. In fact, now that I think about it, I did give up research due to it.
Wow! Consistency is the reason I took up LaTeX, after suffering a disaster with Word. LaTeX feels dated and isn't flawless, but inconsistency is one complaint that I've never heard about it before.
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…
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