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

The LaTeX cargo cult

joshparsons.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 134 posts

Re: The LaTeX cargo cult

#111

Post by sjtrny »

Yetanfou wrote: post #97

LaTeX has one large advantage over lesser text processors which this article does not touch upon: Quidquid LaTeX dictum sit, altum videtur Put two documents in front of someone used to quickly scanning scientific articles. One of them is formatted using LaTeX, the other using whatever document template Word happened to be launched with. In my experience the LaTeX-formatted article will be seen as a more reliable sour…

In my experience this is something that I do subconsciously but it's often justified. People who write in word do so because they are unaware of LaTeX or because they don't know how. The first means they are usually not familiar enough with the field to understand that LaTeX is the default. This lack of understanding is then also present in the content. The second reason is usually indicitive of someone who is lazy or is writing junk. If they can't write LaTeX then it is unlikely that they can write other code.

Re: The LaTeX cargo cult

#112

Post by neltnerb »

Agathos wrote: post #71
pavanred wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this, my thesis committee wanted my thesis as a research paper (irrespective of whether my work was going to be published or not) but in the final stages the graduate college declined to approve it in spite of my committee's approval because they require a predefined format of the thesis. The change of format took me a few minutes, thanks to latex. I can't begin to imagine how much work and anxiety it wo…

My school publishes a LaTeX template for theses. After I downloaded that, I spent very little time thinking about formatting. Unfortunately my advisor doesn't do LaTeX so it kind of sucked for collaboration.

The latter point is the reason I stopped using LaTeX even though I was proficient enough years past to type up lecture notes in realtime during class with little thought (lots of math). Collaboration with it requires everyone involved to know it.

With my adviser and collaborators, I ended up compiling PDFs, printing them, and then they would mark them up by hand because that was fastest. It was not ideal by any stretch.

Word has it's faults (cough figure placement and cross-references), but track changes and adding comments to the manuscript is just spot on and easy. Getting comments and revisions done in Word is just an order of magnitude easier, and just leaves me at the end to make sure all the figures are positioned properly with captions. And now that Word finally seems to have gotten Styles and sections working properly (so many horrible disasters with this in previous iterations) it's pretty workable for technical documents.

Even the equation editor now very nearly straight up accepts latex markup for the math to the point where it's good enough for all but heavy theory papers.

But with LaTeX, asking your busy adviser to look at the compiled output, and then mark up a separate file they have to parse in their head to comment on is just too much effort.

Re: The LaTeX cargo cult

#113

Post by nishonia »

habitue wrote: post #89
ealloc wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think he understands what the word "proprietary" means. It means that the file format is secret or there are legal constraints on its use. Until recently Word documents clearly counted as prorietary, but now that microsoft has been forced to document its format to some degree .doc is listed as "controversially" proprietary on wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_format Even today you will need…

The point is, are there any other applications that will render a LaTeX document correctly that aren't LaTeX itself? It's open source, but in practice the code is so complicated and large no one has ever duplicated it. It's not proprietary in the traditional sense, but if you want your LaTeX file to not be mangled, you must use LaTeX itself.

TeX, pdfTeX, XeTeX, LuaTeX... there are a lot of engines that can properly render a *.tex file.

Re: The LaTeX cargo cult

#114

Post by Sharlin »

impendia wrote: post #58

Philosophy journals won't accept manuscripts typeset in LaTeX?! Journal publishers charge thousands of dollars for subscriptions to individual journals. It seems reasonable to occasionally expect publishers to, you know, do the work for which they are being paid . (And to do it competently.)

As the author mentions, it's a seller's market: the publishers are in a position of both charging thousands of dollars for subscriptions and making their life as convenient as possible at the expense of others'.

Anyway, surely it's no wonder many philosophy journals don't accept LaTeX documents? As far as I know, LaTeX isn't really a thing outside hard sciences.

Re: The LaTeX cargo cult

#115

Post by Sharlin »

sjtrny wrote: post #111
Yetanfou wrote: post #97

LaTeX has one large advantage over lesser text processors which this article does not touch upon: Quidquid LaTeX dictum sit, altum videtur Put two documents in front of someone used to quickly scanning scientific articles. One of them is formatted using LaTeX, the other using whatever document template Word happened to be launched with. In my experience the LaTeX-formatted article will be seen as a more reliable sour…

In my experience this is something that I do subconsciously but it's often justified. People who write in word do so because they are unaware of LaTeX or because they don't know how. The first means they are usually not familiar enough with the field to understand that LaTeX is the default. This lack of understanding is then also present in the content. The second reason is usually indicitive of someone who is lazy o…

This, of course, only applies in the fields where LaTeX is in fact a de facto standard.

Re: The LaTeX cargo cult

#116

Post by ygra »

new299 wrote: post #35

There are a few nice things about Latex for scientific publications: 1. It's style driven. I'm not sure how well you can do this is Word now. But in Latex it's pretty easy to reformat your document to match a journal or thesis style. 2. It's scriptable. I don't mean that it's Turing complete. But you can drive it with a Makefile. This is great for scientific publications I've found. You can script it such that Make w…

1. has been possible in Word for ages (according to an article recently on the front page, it's been the main difference between Word and WordPerfect), and it's pretty much how you write documents of any size without going insane. I'm actually astonished how many people think that using Word means using direct formatting and eschewing styles.

Re: The LaTeX cargo cult

#117

Post by ealloc »

habitue wrote: post #89
ealloc wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think he understands what the word "proprietary" means. It means that the file format is secret or there are legal constraints on its use. Until recently Word documents clearly counted as prorietary, but now that microsoft has been forced to document its format to some degree .doc is listed as "controversially" proprietary on wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_format Even today you will need…

The point is, are there any other applications that will render a LaTeX document correctly that aren't LaTeX itself? It's open source, but in practice the code is so complicated and large no one has ever duplicated it. It's not proprietary in the traditional sense, but if you want your LaTeX file to not be mangled, you must use LaTeX itself.

There are many programs that implement subsets of LaTeX/TeX. For example, for math layout I believe Mathjax and matplotlib have both essentially copied Knuth's program, based on his "TeXBook" and "TeX: The Program" books, which document the TeX code extremely thoroughly using his "literate programming" technique. TeX is one of the best documented programs in existence.

Google "Latex implementation" and you will see a lot of hits. I see a Java implementation, Windows implementations, LaTeX3 and LuaTeX are referred to as reimplemetations 'nearly from scratch', etc.

Re: The LaTeX cargo cult

#118

Post by JulianMorrison »

mhandley wrote: post #21

The biggest advantage of latex is that by (mostly) separating content from presentation, you can use revision control systems like git or svn to collaborate on papers. You can be in that final hour before the paper submission deadline, on a skype call with four authors scattered around the world, all simultaneously editing the paper (each using whatever tools they prefer), and be reasonably confident it won't all end…

You want to separate content from presentation? Use pandoc flavored Markdown. LaTeX is a render target. So, for that matter, is Word.

Re: The LaTeX cargo cult

#119

Post by gcv »

mangecoeur wrote: post #26

LaTeX is a good idea with a terrible implementation. The popularity of markdown (+variants) is a testament to the usefulness of plain text writing. However, LaTeX syntax is a clunky and the ecosystem is a scrapheap-challenge amalgamation of packages with assorted cross-incompatibilities. Latex to PDF converters are also shockingly slow for this day and age, a simple document can take several seconds to compile compar…

> HTML+browsers have been carefully designed and optimized by people who know the intricacies of document rendering.

You're joking, right? HTML+CSS requires heaps of workarounds to achieve the most trivial layouts. The people behind these standards have no understanding of documents and no taste in software: they deem the absence of variables in CSS a feature, and the result is Less, scss, and similar preprocessors.

Had the CSS committee at least the sense to copy the boxes-and-glue model from TeX, things might not be so grim. As is, we seem to be stuck with their clumsiness for a long time.

Re: The LaTeX cargo cult

#120

Post by sktrdie »

hdevalence wrote: post #94
sktrdie wrote: post #76

I understand some of the negative things about LaTeX but it generates outstanding documents that no other processing system can match so far. Specifically the typography: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/1319/showcase-of-beau... http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/85904/showcase-of-bea... Also the graphs are outstanding: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/158668/nice-scientifi...

I don't see anything on that page that couldn't be done with, say, InDesign.

Probably but I don't think most people can afford InDesign.
Post reply on HN