Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How can I explain the meaning of LaTeX to my grandma?

tex.stackexchange.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–48 of 48 posts

Re: How can I explain the meaning of LaTeX to my grandma?

#41

Post by pbhjpbhj »

gjm11 wrote: post #30
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird, how does "x" not make a "ks" (or "eks") sound, both pronunciations there appear to end in a hard "k" sound; did they misspell LaTeK? Do people here pronounce sex as "sek"? /incomprehension

The "X" is, despite appearance, not an X but a capital Greek letter chi, pronounced like the "ch" in "loch". As Knuth puts it, when you pronounce it correctly your monitor may become slightly moist. Lamport isn't as fussy about such things as Knuth, and the "X" in "LaTeX" is commonly pronounced more like a "k".

But no-one suggested "lay-tech" or whatever.

Interesting that they gave it a nonsense string of characters(mixed alphabets) as a place-holder rather than choosing a word. Wonder if this is what inspired the performer [the artist formerly known as] Prince.

To me it's like Knuth thought - I know what's missing from my type-setting program .. some crappy nonsense marketingese, I'll give it a Greek name because well, to belittle people, then I'll render the characters offset so it's not even Greek, but we won't use an English transliteration because that's not awkward enough.

Bah.

>Lamport isn't as fussy about such things as Knuth, and the "X" in "LaTeX" is commonly pronounced more like a "k". //

See that sentence is entirely wrong, based on Wikipedia (!). It should instead say the \chi symbol in the \latex logo is commonly given an utterance akin to "k". Something like that.

Perhaps we should just optimise, give the system an English name rather than referring to it as \logo. Right it's called Laytext.

I mean clothing manufacturer Kappa don't get everyone fawning over them rendering their name with an actual kappa.

Don't know why but this annoys me intensely, can you tell.

/rant \bye

Re: How can I explain the meaning of LaTeX to my grandma?

#42

Post by gnosis »

moe wrote: post #27
scrumper wrote: post #12

LaTeX produces really beautiful results. The output is so authoritative that it can sometimes transcend the content: I once wrote a product development proposal early in my career. I did it in Word using the company standard document template, and it looked alright. It sat on various bosses desks for a week or so, then got NFA'ed. So I re-did it in LaTeX and submitted it again under a slightly different title. Result…

and you never have to think about presentation at all Sadly your colorful description is not entirely accurate. With LaTeX you're in hell immediately when you need to divert just the tiniest bit from what your \package of choice provides. Want a logo in that letterhead? Address format looks wonky? Need a nice looking table? An image in a table even? PDF output looks strangely different from dvi? Well, any such seemin…

"any such seemingly trivial detail will be good for countless hours of scuba-diving around the ancient shipwreck of a language that is LaTeX"

Or you could just ask how to do it on #latex on freenode. For something really obscure, you might not get an answer immediately. But many times the channel can be quite helpful. Of course, there are forums, newsgroups, and mailing lists too.

That said, my experience has been that if you're doing something non-standard, it can take work to get a document to look just the way you want it. But once you do, typesetting other, similar documents becomes a breeze. And the results are fantastic.

As for "something from this century", I'd like to hear what you have in mind.

Re: How can I explain the meaning of LaTeX to my grandma?

#44

Post by moe »

gnosis wrote: post #42
moe wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and you never have to think about presentation at all Sadly your colorful description is not entirely accurate. With LaTeX you're in hell immediately when you need to divert just the tiniest bit from what your \package of choice provides. Want a logo in that letterhead? Address format looks wonky? Need a nice looking table? An image in a table even? PDF output looks strangely different from dvi? Well, any such seemin…

"any such seemingly trivial detail will be good for countless hours of scuba-diving around the ancient shipwreck of a language that is LaTeX" Or you could just ask how to do it on #latex on freenode. For something really obscure, you might not get an answer immediately. But many times the channel can be quite helpful. Of course, there are forums, newsgroups, and mailing lists too. That said, my experience has been th…

I'd like to hear what you have in mind.

Personally I've always been fond of asciidoc[1].

It even has a LaTeX-backend but I imagine the impedance mismatch must be problematic (I have not tried it).

However, realistically the problem will probably just solve itself in the midterm. Paper is rapidly going out of fashion after all, and so will anachronisms like universities requiring their students to submit content in arcane file formats.

[1] http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/

Re: How can I explain the meaning of LaTeX to my grandma?

#45

Post by shocks »

ntumlin wrote: post #40
shocks wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, LaTeX is a child of TeX. Knuth himself says TeX is pronounced tech, where the "ch" sounds the same as from the the word "Bach" (the composer). He also says "tech" (as in technology) is fine, but "tecks" is utterly wrong. So, LaTeX is pronounced "Lay-tech" with the ch from "Bach". "Lay-teck" is also correct, but "Lay-tecks" is completely wrong.

Is the ch in technology different from the ch in Bach? I thought both were pronounced as a k.

Yes. The 'ch' in Bach is difficult to pronounce. There is no English word that even contains this sound. My suggestion is to look for a YouTube/similar video of someone saying the word! :)

Maybe this could help. https://stanzebla.wordpress.com/2008/09/17/how-to-pronounce-...

>> When you say a “ck” or “k” you lift a part of your tongue up to your palatine and tongue and palatine get contact. Then the tongue goes down fast and clicks. You don’t do that with a “ch” in german. To pronounce a german “ch” the tongue must not get contact with the palatine. Instead, let your tongue lie behind your teeth, drag it a bit to the back and try to narrow the larynx, now exhale. That’s a german “ch”. It sounds like the wheezing of Darth Vader in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (the original trilogy).

Re: How can I explain the meaning of LaTeX to my grandma?

#46

Post by narcissus »

Wilduck wrote: post #37
narcissus wrote: post #33

Speaking of LaTeX, and going a bit off topic... I've always wanted to try it but been frightened by the 'level of effort'. I've seen LyX but never used it beyond 'trying'. Has anyone here tried it and what are your thoughts on it?

LaTeX as a whole is intimidating, but the core that you need to know to get started is actually pretty simple. I could teach it to you in about an hour. That being said, I've never seen a written introduction that I would consider satisfactory. If you have a friend who knows LaTeX ask them to sit down with you and show you how to write a paper that includes headings, subheadings, figures, tables and some math equatio…

Interesting... I might take another go at it then. To be honest, the playing around I did with LyX made me think that it would be fine for what I was looking for, which was essentially "nicely formatted books", where "books" was a definite over-exaggeration of what I can truly expect the outcome to be.

I can appreciate the separation that you are going for, but I also have to wonder how much time you spend in LaTeX? If I were writing something that was worthy of LaTeX, it would probably average to less than an hour a week. I'm not sure if the effort is worth it for me. Again, to be completely honest. Whereas if I was doing a lot of writing that I expect to be read, I could imagine the investment being worth it.

I look at like the way I looked at HTML formatting: I knew how to do the markup, but the WYSIWYG editors got me where I needed a lot faster. Having said that, I now find myself handcoding divs and spans and then using more CSS... so maybe that is the argument I need to read up on it!

Well, lots to think about anyway. Thanks!

Re: How can I explain the meaning of LaTeX to my grandma?

#48

Post by pbhjpbhj »

saraid216 wrote: post #39
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird, how does "x" not make a "ks" (or "eks") sound, both pronunciations there appear to end in a hard "k" sound; did they misspell LaTeK? Do people here pronounce sex as "sek"? /incomprehension

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chi_(letter)

FWIW I'm quite cognisant with the Greek alphabet. However LATEX isn't a word in Greek as it uses L which is roman script.
Post reply on HN