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I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

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Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#131

Post by kaba0 »

marcosdumay wrote: post #104
wesleywt wrote: post #78

Having written my thesis in LaTex, I can say it is wonderful and a wonderful waste of time.

Having written a report in Word that was about 1/4 of the size of my dissertation, but had some of the same content, and then the dissertation in LaTeX, I can say that as much as LaTeX wastes your time, it's by far the least wasteful option.

Strong agree. My fiance and I wrote our thesis simultaneously, she in Word, while I used LaTeX. The amount of stupid figure- and page- rearrangements she suffered because she removed half a sentence from the middle, while LaTeX generated sane output with basically any text seriously made me much more productive.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#133

Post by ProfXponent »

petschge wrote: post #92
WolfOliver wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For how long do we still need to print a paper?

For as long as I use time sitting on public transport and airplanes to review them. Nothing beats the ergonomics of a printout, a red pen and no internet.

Or a decent paperback novel.

Reading long form content on a screen gives me awful eyestrain.

Plus I love the smell of a good book.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#134

Post by wiz21c »

jIyajbe wrote: post #79
teleforce wrote: post #38

Try TeXmacs, it's neither TeX nor it's Emacs clone. TeXmacs is WYSIWYG scientific editing platform. Documents created can be saved in TeXmacs, Xml, Scheme, PDF or Postscript. Converters exist for TeX/LaTeX and HTML/MathML. It can also be used as a graphical front-end for other computer algebra, numerical analysis, statistics software[1]. [1] https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/welcome.en.html

Another good WYSIWYG front end is LyX: www.lyx.org . I've written a few hundred physics lecture notes with it, as well as a number of Beamer presentations. I find it much easier to use than TeXmacs (mainly because of keyboard shortcuts), and the output is excellent. And yes, it produces true TeX/LaTeX.

I concur. LyX makes things order of magnitude easier for a casual latex user like me.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#135

Post by netizen-936824 »

samatman wrote: post #107
netizen-936824 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps my example is poor, but it shows that hands are not coupled to predation I'm specifically talking about the evolution of hands, humans are not the only organism with hands.

The poster didn't say "hands", they said "your hands". Your human hands, which co-evolved with throwing things, we have abundant paleontological evidence of this and you may read as many papers on the subject as you would care to.

Got links to any of those papers?

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#136

Post by Jenk »

netizen-936824 wrote: post #117
dev_tty01 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you consider a "design" to result from a process where someone sketches out a plan, builds it, and it works first time. I've designed a lot of systems, and it is clearly an iterative process. Balancing tradeoffs, figuring out the essentials, build prototypes, test, etc. If you are patient and diligent a solution emerges. That sounds a lot like evolution, so in my mind everything in nature has been designed by the…

I think that's a reasonable perspective to take, although I would argue that there is no clear goal in evolution besides survival and reproduction

There is no plan in evolution. That's the point. It's a reactionary phenomenon. If it had a plan, it would be a proactive phenomenon. Evolution is happenstance.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#139

Post by plopilop »

kaba0 wrote: post #131
marcosdumay wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having written a report in Word that was about 1/4 of the size of my dissertation, but had some of the same content, and then the dissertation in LaTeX, I can say that as much as LaTeX wastes your time, it's by far the least wasteful option.

Strong agree. My fiance and I wrote our thesis simultaneously, she in Word, while I used LaTeX. The amount of stupid figure- and page- rearrangements she suffered because she removed half a sentence from the middle, while LaTeX generated sane output with basically any text seriously made me much more productive.

Word has had automatic reference numbering for a while now (see for instance [0]). Not denying that it's not very known (nor pleasant to use), and I'm not even talking about bibliography.

I made my partner switch to Latex thanks to the bibliography. Writing tables almost made her switch back to Word.

[0]: https://www.sfu.ca/~ljilja/cnl/info/UseCrossReference/index....

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#140

Post by TheDesolate0 »

kaba0 wrote: post #125
pif wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I always find this a bit sad, because it seems to take away the idea that programming is about assembling composable parts [OT] Concerning "programming is about assembling composable parts": I always find both sad and ridiculous when self-proclaimed software developers bash Unix because they are not able to appreciate its philosophy.

It would help Unix’s case if the glue between the parts wouldn’t be byte streams and some very crude int result code, signals, etc. A monolith can be just as composable if not more, with a much “stronger glue” in the form of language-mandated guarantees. Also, sometimes doing multiple things well is the better direction — IPC is additional complexity and essential complexity can’t be decomposed.

In Unix space we use text, almost exclusively. This byte stream thing is a windows/java bs thing.
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