Vim, LaTeX and High School • Hacker News Board

Re: Vim, LaTeX and High School

#11

Post by ibotty » Sun, Oct 07, 2012, 8:31 AM UTC

henrybaxter wrote: post #3

I did the same in high school, and now at uni it is paying off, my work looks great and is at least as easy to write as in a modern word processor except for good spelling and grammar checking. I haven't found a great solution for that yet. Be sure to keep your tables looking good, look for some resources on it, it's amazing how shoddy even the default tables in LaTeX look, never mind the Excel spreadsheet look every…

vim can spellcheck since ver 7 (afair). see :help spell.

Re: Vim, LaTeX and High School

#12

Post by mvanveen » Sun, Oct 07, 2012, 4:42 PM UTC

I also did this in HS, and echo what others are saying about this paying off later in life. Four years from now, when you're a junior in college and are scrambling to parallelize the build for your homework due next class, you'll be thankful for the upfront investment ;-). Also, having a LaTeX formatted resume never hurt either.

The one problem I always had was essays. I'd always write essays as plain text, but didn't have a great MLA template ready for LaTeX, so I'd usually just copy/paste my plain text doc into OpenOffice or GDocs. I still sort of wish that I had figured out a better solution for this workflow.

Re: Vim, LaTeX and High School

#13

Post by doomrobo » Wed, Oct 17, 2012, 2:20 AM UTC

I tried to use LaTeX to take notes in Middle School once, no joke, and I found it quite difficult. LaTeX is meant for explicit typesetting and having fine-grained control over your documents. If you want to write an English or Math paper in it, then it's perfect, but I think it's overkill for notes. I now use reStructuredText to write my notes and rst2pdf when I have to print them out to study. It's very simple and I don't have to worry about typesetting. For math...pen and paper. Your math example was well typeset but I doubt you'd have time to do all that in class short of asking the teacher to stop for 15 minutes.