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LaTeX Templates

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Re: LaTeX Templates

#51

Post by pessimism »

Permit me to be coarse for the sake of simplicity and tell you that the only LaTeX template you should spend your time and energy on is tufte-latex: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1572530.

It even has a snazzy guide for setting it up on Stack Exchange: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/6483/setting-up-a-lat....

It’s pretty much all you need, and configuring LaTeX can turn into a rabbit hole you will never get out of. Try writing your project in tufte-latex, and I am sure you’ll find that it fits the bill perfectly. I do recall something about having to install an additional package to colour the hyperlinks or something to that extent, though.

I have some old templates—even some boilerplate lying around—so you can drop me a tweet or something, if it isn’t working for you, and I’ll throw something up in a gist.

Re: LaTeX Templates

#52

Post by kmfrk »

jahewson wrote: post #40
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…

Some days I feel like my PhD is in LaTeX, with some computer science on the side.

It reminds me of when people were doing PowerPoint in school. People thought spending three hours in PowerPoint meant you actually did something productive, but all that time got you were some decent-looking presentations. You still had to write the actual content itself.

Keynote is great here, because the default settings are pretty great as it is, so you have fewer ways of deluding yourself into thinking you are being productive, when you are actually just procrastinating by rearranging the furniture on the Titanic.

Re: LaTeX Templates

#53

Post by pseut »

lutusp wrote: post #35
anonymouz wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 am a long-term Latex user and have recently tried one of those online editors. I have two basic gripes with all of them: It's not vim and I don't want to put my papers onto someone else's cloud. Except for that, it seemed nice but the editor itself was a bit sluggish compar…

> I am a long-term Latex user and have recently tried one of those online editors. I have two basic gripes with all of them: It's not vim and I don't want to put my papers onto someone else's cloud. Fair enough -- use Lyx. It's free and open source. It doesn't require you to take the security and other risks of a cloud scheme. http://www.lyx.org/ I don't understand why more people don't use Lyx for Latex production.…

When I used LyX (years ago) typing in equations was slow and buggy (slow means anything longer than typing in text). Plus it doesn't/didn't export very clean source code and, for people who have used latex in a text editor even for only 3 or 4 years, the menus and toolbars are completely unnecessary: I know 99.9% of the macros I use and the ones I don't know are esoteric.

    latexmk -pvc
gives continuous compilation from the command line FWIW.

Re: LaTeX Templates

#54

Post by pseut »

ovis wrote: post #23
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.

Check out pandoc (a markdown variant).

Re: LaTeX Templates

#55

Post by _delirium »

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…

In my corner of CS (overlap w/ computer-music, game development, and HCI), the trend seems to be down.

One reason is that Word is actually decent for writing papers these days. I still use LaTeX mainly because I prefer to write in vim rather than in a WYSIWYG editor, but the difference in output quality is much smaller than it was 10 years ago. For example, Word does auto-hyphenation now (though it's off by default), which is necessary to make the common 2-column justified conference-paper format look at all decent. The kerning has also improved, and the reference-management story is much better than it used to be (there's a built-in reference manager that works ok, and Zotero integration is very nice). Figure placement still sucks, but it sucks in LaTeX too (in a different way).

Another reason is that when collaborating with people outside academia, they rarely know LaTeX. So I find myself writing my own papers in LaTeX, but collaborative papers in Word. Many people from industry really like Word's "track changes" mode as well.

Re: LaTeX Templates

#56

Post by krupan »

_delirium wrote: post #55
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…

In my corner of CS (overlap w/ computer-music, game development, and HCI), the trend seems to be down. One reason is that Word is actually decent for writing papers these days. I still use LaTeX mainly because I prefer to write in vim rather than in a WYSIWYG editor, but the difference in output quality is much smaller than it was 10 years ago. For example, Word does auto-hyphenation now (though it's off by default),…

I think where LaTeX still wins over GUI tools such as Word is once you figure out how to make it do what you want, the method you used is now documented right in the LaTeX source. With a GUI tool, it's hard to go back and remember exactly where you clicked and what setting you changed, especially when you pick up a document months later and ask yourself, "how did I make it look like that?"

Re: LaTeX Templates

#57

Post by ht_th »

_delirium wrote: post #55
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…

In my corner of CS (overlap w/ computer-music, game development, and HCI), the trend seems to be down. One reason is that Word is actually decent for writing papers these days. I still use LaTeX mainly because I prefer to write in vim rather than in a WYSIWYG editor, but the difference in output quality is much smaller than it was 10 years ago. For example, Word does auto-hyphenation now (though it's off by default),…

You might be interested in pandoc: it allows you to write your documents in LaTeX or Markdown and then it can automatically convert it to docx, odt, html, LaTeX, Markdown, and more. For straigtforward[0] documents this works great.

[0] documents containing text, headings, notes, figures, tables, code listings, mathematics, hyperlinks, lists, references.

Re: LaTeX Templates

#58

Post by _delirium »

ht_th wrote: post #57
_delirium wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my corner of CS (overlap w/ computer-music, game development, and HCI), the trend seems to be down. One reason is that Word is actually decent for writing papers these days. I still use LaTeX mainly because I prefer to write in vim rather than in a WYSIWYG editor, but the difference in output quality is much smaller than it was 10 years ago. For example, Word does auto-hyphenation now (though it's off by default),…

You might be interested in pandoc: it allows you to write your documents in LaTeX or Markdown and then it can automatically convert it to docx, odt, html, LaTeX, Markdown, and more. For straigtforward[0] documents this works great. [0] documents containing text, headings, notes, figures, tables, code listings, mathematics, hyperlinks, lists, references.

Interesting, thanks for pointing out the updated version of what "straightforward" means. Last time I looked at Markdown you couldn't do a lot of things I needed in it, such as figures, footnotes, and references, so I didn't give it very serious consideration. But it looks like pandoc has extended the original Markdown into some kind of Markdown++, which covers just about everything I usually need.

Re: LaTeX Templates

#59

Post by saryant »

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?

Trinity University, San Antonio.

http://cs.trinity.edu/

(Yes, their website is ancient)

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