121–130 of 175 posts
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.
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.
There is some learning curve, but you can get LaTeX out of rst from docutils, Sphinx, or my tools.
From various tutorials I feel my knowledge of latex is very top down, and not very deep. I just recently realized that {} are not needed for singletons, so I may for instance write \frac12 for 1/2. Can anybody recommend a more bottom up guide? Something more similar to learning a programming language, where you start with the basic syntax and build on features iteratively? Is Knuth's book the best way to go? Or is th…
> I just recently realized that {} are not needed for singletons Trick question: What will you get by TeX-ing this document? $\acute a\acute{a}\acute{{a}}$\'a\'{a}\'{{a}}\end
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I'm not saying that HTML is totally suitable, but a slight modification of it could be, and it would be a lot simpler to use than TeX. And who says that it could not be rendered in the same way in 30 years? By the way, the one thing that disappoints me most about LaTeX is that you often cannot nest one environment in another without running into issues. In HTML the "composability" is much better.
Have you ever looked at "bare" latex? It really isn't any more complicated than html. Especially early html. But you are being somewhat naïve on the render in thirty years point. Html from two years so probably renders differently today. Never mind how different it is on machine that is rendering it. So, could someone have made a simple one? Maybe. Evidence looks unlikely. Plenty have tried.
This is a good beginner doc. I'd never used LaTeX until about a year ago when I needed it to write a paper. The first thing I wondered was how to install it. Surely in 2015 installation would be a snap. It'd be in the App Store. Or Homebrew. Do not install LaTeX. Use it in the cloud. I use www.overleaf.com which is awesome. Similarly, I use www.draw.io to create PDFs for my drawings. \usepackage{microtype} \usepackag…
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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.
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Have you ever looked at "bare" latex? It really isn't any more complicated than html. Especially early html. But you are being somewhat naïve on the render in thirty years point. Html from two years so probably renders differently today. Never mind how different it is on machine that is rendering it. So, could someone have made a simple one? Maybe. Evidence looks unlikely. Plenty have tried.
Well, I'm not so sure if LaTeX renders the same in 30 years, given all the packages and their dependencies, that might also change. In fact, I'm not sure the document will even still compile by then.
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This is also very true in my experience, and seems to be in large part caused by the absence of proper namespacing, scoping, and general rules about how packages should be implemented to minimize bad interactions. I feel like this is a significant shortcoming of Latex, and it really is a mystery to me why no one has seriously tried to write an alternative typesetting system. I know Latex is good enough for lots of ap…
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…
With LaTeX, I suspect that really should also know the underlying TeX, but with some understanding of TeX can do just fine without LaTeX and all its extra considerations.
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Most people don't want to learn about the LaTeX (resp. TeX) internals or typesetting in general, they just want to produce documents. Including a package and using its functionality is the easiest way to get started, but sooner or later you'll hit a wall. Writing LaTeX documents becomes easier once you understand the basics: plain boxes, positioning, macros, lengths, counters. Granted, you need to have a fair share o…
There are cool things happening around compiling markdown to LaTex. Especially funky things happen when you mix in R as well. Taking the strong sides of all three would be lovely.