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LaTeX Templates

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Re: LaTeX Templates

#21

Post by pseut »

jlgreco wrote: post #19
joshuagross wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still haven't figured out if the general trend is up/down for LaTeX (I have a vested interest, CTO of SpanDeX.io, but I'm not sure). My argument against "give it another 10-20 years" is that LaTeX has already been around forever. I know people even in math, physics, and CS that never use LaTeX (in favor of Word). Which I find silly and strange, but it is what it is. Of course, I'm hoping that new online editors lik…

If someone makes it to graduate school without knowing LaTeX, I would suspect chances are high they don't really have any interest in changing their routine then. They're busy, and hey, word has been working in university for several years already! If I wanted to increase LaTeX adoption, I would get undergrads hooked on it. I bailed to LaTeX my second year of undergrad and never looked back. Even with papers for the…

I've used plain TeX for my christmas letters for years because it looks so much better than word. LaTeX feels like overkill if I don't need to number equations and floats.

Re: LaTeX Templates

#22

Post by saryant »

jlgreco wrote: post #19
joshuagross wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still haven't figured out if the general trend is up/down for LaTeX (I have a vested interest, CTO of SpanDeX.io, but I'm not sure). My argument against "give it another 10-20 years" is that LaTeX has already been around forever. I know people even in math, physics, and CS that never use LaTeX (in favor of Word). Which I find silly and strange, but it is what it is. Of course, I'm hoping that new online editors lik…

If someone makes it to graduate school without knowing LaTeX, I would suspect chances are high they don't really have any interest in changing their routine then. They're busy, and hey, word has been working in university for several years already! If I wanted to increase LaTeX adoption, I would get undergrads hooked on it. I bailed to LaTeX my second year of undergrad and never looked back. Even with papers for the…

My CS department (undergrad) pushed LaTeX heavily. It was required for all senior thesis projects and we had this one Unix guru of a professor who seemed to know every there is to know about LaTeX.

Some of us even became proficient enough to take notes real-time during discrete math and numerical calculus lectures.

> Even with papers for the english department it was great, if only because it just looked that much better than all the Word formatted papers from my peers.

Back in college I used to get compliments on how good my papers looked from humanities professors just because it was typeset in LaTeX. Fun times.

Re: LaTeX Templates

#23

Post by ovis »

alexholehouse wrote: post #5

I use LaTex for a lot of my note taking (for typesetting all equations certainly). When I first started using it, I remember the absolute horror of trying to get it to work with BibTex. The learning curve is relatively steep for non-programmers (I learnt it basically in parallel with learning to code) but it's certainly one of the most valuable tools I've learned and one I continually come back to for a huge range of…

I learned LaTeX the summer after my undergrad, and rely on it now. Nevertheless, I'm not surprised that few others in my department, outside of my group, use it. When work needs to be shared or collaborated on, the simplest, lowest common denominator (Word or LO) wins out.

Re: LaTeX Templates

#25

Post by einhverfr »

joshuagross wrote: post #12
a_bonobo wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Certainly in an academic environment it continues to surprise me that everyone isn't taught LaTex in their first year of a PhD. I work in a academic environment as well, and I give it another 10-20 years until it will be widespread for everything - currently my supervisors want me to write everything in .doc as they don't know LaTeX and don't want to learn (no time, which I can understand). It's not very widespread…

I still haven't figured out if the general trend is up/down for LaTeX (I have a vested interest, CTO of SpanDeX.io, but I'm not sure). My argument against "give it another 10-20 years" is that LaTeX has already been around forever. I know people even in math, physics, and CS that never use LaTeX (in favor of Word). Which I find silly and strange, but it is what it is. Of course, I'm hoping that new online editors lik…

> I still haven't figured out if the general trend is up/down for LaTeX (I have a vested interest, CTO of SpanDeX.io, but I'm not sure).

It seems to go around in cycles. There is a very heavy anti-LaTeX movement that I occasionally run into. There are also a lot of people who use it and would not recommend anything else.

> My argument against "give it another 10-20 years" is that LaTeX has already been around forever. I know people even in math, physics, and CS that never use LaTeX (in favor of Word). Which I find silly and strange, but it is what it is.

This is very true. And what I find more annoying is the argument that we need to move to DocBook because somehow that's more accessible (and yet it isn't either as accessible or as powerful).

There are a few things that hurt LaTeX adoption in some environments though and I want to mention here. These are generally from my experiences participating on various TeXLive-related email lists.

There is an expectation at least in the XeTeX community from what I have seen that everyone will manually upgrade to the latest and greatest quickly. With many of the TeX distribution, there isn't a lot of thought given to long-term support. This makes things like running hosted services for mission critical apps which use LaTeX somewhat problematic.

I ran into the dreaded "we can't start because you are using something 7 years old" message and the only help I could get was "upgrade." Not helpful when trying to package software that people are running on production services. Not helpful at all.

I will follow up with you on email (from my personal account, chris.travers@gmail.com). I think that one of the things that LaTeX really needs to get wider support is a set of community resources for longer-term support, for people who are happy to accept workarounds if it means being able to support earlier versions etc.

I am in the process of trying to get a hosting service up for LedgerSMB and we use LaTeX for a lot of stuff internally (the hosting solution will use XeTeX). I think a rising tide here would help both us and the community out.

> Of course, I'm hoping that new online editors like SpanDeX.io and LaTeXTemplates are the adrenaline shot that LaTeX needs for wider adoption.

I think it may help. It certainly comes along at a good time.

Re: LaTeX Templates

#26

Post by twog »

saryant wrote: post #22
jlgreco wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone makes it to graduate school without knowing LaTeX, I would suspect chances are high they don't really have any interest in changing their routine then. They're busy, and hey, word has been working in university for several years already! If I wanted to increase LaTeX adoption, I would get undergrads hooked on it. I bailed to LaTeX my second year of undergrad and never looked back. Even with papers for the…

My CS department (undergrad) pushed LaTeX heavily. It was required for all senior thesis projects and we had this one Unix guru of a professor who seemed to know every there is to know about LaTeX. Some of us even became proficient enough to take notes real-time during discrete math and numerical calculus lectures. > Even with papers for the english department it was great, if only because it just looked that much be…

If you dont mind me asking, where did you go to school?

Re: LaTeX Templates

#29

Post by anders0 »

twog wrote: post #26
saryant wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My CS department (undergrad) pushed LaTeX heavily. It was required for all senior thesis projects and we had this one Unix guru of a professor who seemed to know every there is to know about LaTeX. Some of us even became proficient enough to take notes real-time during discrete math and numerical calculus lectures. > Even with papers for the english department it was great, if only because it just looked that much be…

If you dont mind me asking, where did you go to school?

I'm not saryant, but the school of CS at St Andrews (UK) briefly teaches us LaTeX in second(?) year, and encourages us to use it to write all our reports, essays, etc.

(OT: I also got complimented in high school for my physics coursework being typeset nicely. :D None of the other teachers seemed to really notice, though.)

Re: LaTeX Templates

#30

Post by churreiro »

joshuagross wrote: post #12
a_bonobo wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Certainly in an academic environment it continues to surprise me that everyone isn't taught LaTex in their first year of a PhD. I work in a academic environment as well, and I give it another 10-20 years until it will be widespread for everything - currently my supervisors want me to write everything in .doc as they don't know LaTeX and don't want to learn (no time, which I can understand). It's not very widespread…

I still haven't figured out if the general trend is up/down for LaTeX (I have a vested interest, CTO of SpanDeX.io, but I'm not sure). My argument against "give it another 10-20 years" is that LaTeX has already been around forever. I know people even in math, physics, and CS that never use LaTeX (in favor of Word). Which I find silly and strange, but it is what it is. Of course, I'm hoping that new online editors lik…

After some time using LaTeX I think is a very useful tool and probably online editors will help to the wide use of it.

As I see it now, the variety of editors for Mac, Windows and Linux may cause problems when migrating from one environment to the other. Hopefully this will be over with tools like SpanDeX.

BTW, congrats for your tool, have been using it for few hours and feels awesome.

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