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Begin LaTeX in minutes

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Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#111

Post by apathy »

cyphar wrote: post #107
apathy wrote: post #82

Overleaf.com is really nice too, if you work with others (e.g. on academic papers). The most painless papers I've ever written were with other competent people using LaTeX and overleaf. ShareLatex is good too, I'm not sure if you can autosubmit to journals and preprint servers with it though. That last feature is terrific for academics -- it's how publishing should work, but usually doesn't. I spent the same amount o…

Note that Overleaf.com is proprietary, while ShareLaTeX is completely free software under the AGPL (and self-hostable).

Absolutely true, and although I did pay for Overleaf at first, I stopped paying when I realized I didn't need the for-pay features anyhow. They made a conscious decision to focus on internal development and I'm OK with that -- Google isn't open-source either (certainly not all of it, and when I was there, very little of it), and I'm OK with that too.

https://www.overleaf.com/help/17-is-overleaf-open-source#.WB...

An open-source business that doesn't survive (cough ReplicaDB cough) isn't necessarily better than a closed-but-extensible one that does. LaTeX itself is, and anything you're working on within Overleaf can be exported as text at any time, so I don't worry so much about lock-in.

The underlying toolchain (LaTeX and packages) is fully OSS, and isn't going anywhere; I have supported the LyX project in the past, and indeed that's how I laid out my dissertation, but in the end I find Overleaf more usable.

I still wish they'd support Markdown, though. Sometimes I just want to run off a quick, properly typeset series of equations and lists/tables without all the boilerplate. I suppose you could make the argument "well, if it was OSS, you could just patch it yourself!", and you wouldn't be wrong. But we use the autosubmit feature a lot, so on balance I've decided I can live with this shortcoming.

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#112

Post by jdleesmiller »

paradite wrote: post #105

The author mentioned ShareLaTeX but not the other popular cloud service overleaf. I actually would have done the same given my experience with both. Recently I tried out overleaf in order to allow others to collaborate on a paper. However, what was compiling perfectly fine on my local machine just refused to compile on overleaf, keep throwing me error related to $ symbol even though I did not use $ symbol at all (I u…

(Co-founder of Overleaf here.) Sorry to hear you had a bad experience --- we run a standard install of TeX Live, so that's surprising. If you try Overleaf again, feel free to send your project's link to our support team via www.overleaf.com/contact, and they can help you fix any issues.

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#113

Post by chronic6l »

cyphar wrote: post #108
Cyph0n wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm currently using Overleaf[1]. It has collaboration (no live tracking) in the free tier, support for BibTeX with auto-import from Zotero, auto-complete and syntax highlighting, and works completely in the browser. [1]: https://www.overleaf.com

Note that ShareLaTeX is entirely free software (under AGPL) and self-hostable. Overleaf is not.

Furthermore, Overleaf has a history of occasionally losing people's data. That's bad for college and university folks.

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#114

Post by freyfogle »

patrickdavey wrote: post #98
massysett wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of alternatives. LaTeX is merely a TeX macro package. There are others, such as ConTeXt. Also, if you hate the pick-a-package mentality, there are LaTeX packages that attempt to do it all in one package--Memoir is one. You can elect to opt out of fancy layers on top of TeX and go with Extended Plain TeX or even just writing in plain TeX, which apparently Knuth did. Don't like TeX at all? Try roff (or…

I don't suppose you have your recipe system online anywhere? I've been contemplating making one for a while (I really like the recipe cards on cookingforengineers.com)

There's a cookbook template on Overleaf https://www.overleaf.com/gallery/tagged/cookbook

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#115

Post by dreamcompiler »

1wd wrote: post #42

Just don't try anything that isn't in your typical math paper. There are thousands of LaTeX packages, because they are all broken if you use them in a slightly unexpected way, so (reminiscent of JavaScript) a new package is created to "fix" it. Tables? Here you go. Oh, you wanted nested tables? For that you need to switch to an entirely different package. Oh, and that one doesn't support splitting up tables over mult…

It's definitely not just you. There's no such thing as LaTeX. There are 2^1000 different things called LaTeX, all subtly incompatible with each other. I suppose LaTeX can be made to work as an authoring tool where you're the only author and you're producing PDF from it. But for sharing documentation it's hopeless. I've never been able to compile somebody else's LaTeX source. There's always some weird library dependency I don't have. Whenever I find a github repo whose documentation is only available as LaTeX source, I abandon it and look for another repo that'll get the job done.

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#116

Post by doodoogoo »

massysett wrote: post #100
patrickdavey wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't suppose you have your recipe system online anywhere? I've been contemplating making one for a while (I really like the recipe cards on cookingforengineers.com)

No, it is a nasty mess of shell scripts and Haskell, though mostly Haskell now. (There used to be XML for recipes, what a mess.) It is useless to others without documentation, which would take a long time to write. Maybe one day. It makes grocery lists with items in categories, which saves me so much time that I have been using it every week for years. But if someone made something decent I would happily pay for it.

Would you mind uploading it somewhere nonetheless? Just your design and flow should be a good read (from source).

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#117

Post by Cyph0n »

chronic6l wrote: post #113
cyphar wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that ShareLaTeX is entirely free software (under AGPL) and self-hostable. Overleaf is not.

Furthermore, Overleaf has a history of occasionally losing people's data. That's bad for college and university folks.

Source please?

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#118

Post by Turing_Machine »

laxatives wrote: post #79
pfooti wrote: post #22

The usual plug for sharelatex here. Check out sharelatex.com, it is amazing. Write LaTeX without having to install it, plus collaboration in the cloud. (I'm not affiliated, just a fan). And in general, LaTeX is a super worthwhile language to learn. It may be a bit more complicated than markdown or its cousins, but it can do pretty much everything. I've barely scratched the surface of what it can do, but since I live…

I think one of the best features of sharelatex is that you skip the insanely bloated installation/package maintenance process. Some of those packages use GB of fonts and I remember having a complete installation with over 30GB of fonts. Not really an issue anymore, but 5-10 years ago, that was pretty excessive.

While I've never looked into the guts of LaTeX package management, I've often thought that it could really, really use a tool that looks for dependencies and installs them (and only them) in an automated way, like Bundler for Ruby, npm, and similar systems.

Nope, tlmgr just isn't the same. :-)

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#119

Post by Ar-Curunir »

pjmlp wrote: post #60
renke1 wrote: post #5

I used LaTeX a lot in university, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Even a minimal (and good looking) document requires a lot of (La)TeX knowledge. You can of course use one of many existing templates, but you will quickly feel lost when you have to customize things. These days, just go with Markdown (or the like) and just include assets (say graphs) as SVG and be done with it. For scientific papers (especially…

I used it for the language manual used on our compiler design lectures, thesis monthly reports and final thesis. Nowadays I just use Markdown, Word or Libre Office. In some projects at work we used Docbook and DITA, coupled with text processor like applications. Where Latex really shines is writing papers full of mathematical or scientifical notation, with a huge references section at end. I don't see a place for it…

I don't know, I don't find Word or LibrePffice documents to be very visually appealing. Maybe I spend a lot of time reading nicely typeset documents, but MS Office just doesn't cut it any more.

You can compile from markdown to LaTeX, getting nearly the best of both worlds.

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#120

Post by seanlane »

user5994461 wrote: post #109

Stupid question: Outside of the maths heavy documents, could markdown or restructuredtext be a substitute to Latex nowadays? It is a lot easier to learn and use.

I use Pandoc [1] to write in Markdown and then have it converted into LaTeX. There's been some bumps, but it seems to let me have (most of) the best of both worlds.

This post was the inspiration for using it: http://kesdev.com/you-got-latex-in-my-markdown/

[1] http://pandoc.org/

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