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Begin LaTeX in minutes

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Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#141

Post by kevindong »

tagrun wrote: post #135
kevindong wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally use www.sharelatex.com (which is open sourced under the AGPL license). Downloading LaTeX locally on macOS (or rather, Mac OS X as it was called at the time) is not very difficult. As I recall, it's basically just: download this .pkg file, run it, and you're set. That being said, I did _not_ enjoy having LaTeX installed locally. It wasn't harmful, it just wasn't at all beneficial compared to using an onli…

This is a false anecdotal dichotomy: either install latex on your computer at the cost of "clogging up your filesystem" (whatever that means), or give up your freedoms. textlive-most (which is a meta package which includes almost everything an ordinary user need) uses 1.2GBs on Arch Linux, so for sure it's not "couple of GBs". And even if it takes a couple of GBs: I'm using ~60GBs in my root filesystem, and never exp…

> "clogging up your filesystem"

In this context, I mean that in two ways (but mainly #2):

1) macOS has a feature (Spotlight) where I can search all of the files on my entire computer with a simple keyboard shortcut. >99% of the time, the result pops up within a second. I use that feature literally dozens of times each day. With LaTeX installed, I got a lot of results that are not relevant to what I want. In hindsight, I should've just disabled the indexing of the files in my install directory.

2) My computer (at the time) had a 64 GB hard drive. As a result, I was straining against the limits of that pretty hard. Uninstalling MacTeX (I believe that was the distribution I used) freed up at least 2 GB. I'm not sure why there's a discrepancy between your quoted figure of 1.2 GB and my experience.

---

In addition, ShareLatex's UI was far superior to anything available for OS X (at least, at the time).

My primary interest is in making myself as productive as possible. If using non-libre software gives me significant gains in productivity while not being unreasonable with their licensing terms/costs, then I will use it. That's the same reason I am using macOS. By using this proprietary piece of software, I do not have to tinkle with the inevitable strange bugs that pop up with the various libre options and therefore I am allowing myself to be the most productive I can possibly be. Every time I have tried using a libre OS, I have experienced some kind of bug that's simply impossible to diagnose and solve.

In sum: the value proposition of non-libre software is increased productivity. I highly value productivity. So, I am willing to make the tradeoff. I recognize and accept that if everyone does this, the world is worse off. But, I am selfish and therefore am willing to make the tradeoff (to some extent; my willingness to tradeoff is not infinite).

Sidenote: I could (technically) not throw away my freedoms by hosting my own instance of ShareLatex (as it is, now, licensed under the AGPL), but that's highly inconvenient and I have no interest in being a system admin. Again, this goes back to the idea of increased productivity by using "proprietary" services.

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#142

Post by tagrun »

kevindong wrote: post #141
tagrun wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a false anecdotal dichotomy: either install latex on your computer at the cost of "clogging up your filesystem" (whatever that means), or give up your freedoms. textlive-most (which is a meta package which includes almost everything an ordinary user need) uses 1.2GBs on Arch Linux, so for sure it's not "couple of GBs". And even if it takes a couple of GBs: I'm using ~60GBs in my root filesystem, and never exp…

> "clogging up your filesystem" In this context, I mean that in two ways (but mainly #2): 1) macOS has a feature (Spotlight) where I can search all of the files on my entire computer with a simple keyboard shortcut. >99% of the time, the result pops up within a second. I use that feature literally dozens of times each day. With LaTeX installed, I got a lot of results that are not relevant to what I want. In hindsight…

Wow.

So, behind all your marketing buzzwords, you're trying to portray GNU/Linux software as buggy in contrast to superior Mac/Windows, which has, interestingly, long been a FUD and a lie propagated by Microsoft. This suddenly takes me back to halloween documents and "real cost of 'free'" because you're saying exactly the same thing, only in 2016 (on halloween eve!).

Like many others, I've been using GNU/Linux since ~1997, and been totally happy overall, and I can vouch it's nothing like you're trying to portray.

You may, of course, value your freedoms less than the conveniences you find in Apple or SaaSS programs. You prefer trading your privacy and freedoms for bits of conveniences, and that's the way you chose to live. I did hear you the first time. No need to reiterate, as this is not about your personal feelings or the "values" you found here and there (and no offense, but frankly I don't care about your personal feelings or anecdotes).

I'm trying to make a point that goes beyond your "productivity": this line of though shouldn't be advertised as a good thing due to the fact that it eventually hurts us as a society at large (see the references in my previous posts).

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#143

Post by CalChris »

bo1024 wrote: post #133
CalChris wrote: post #59

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…

$ apt-get install texlive-full Not sure how much more of a snap installation of something can get....

  -bash: apt-get: command not found

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#144

Post by tnecniv »

godelski wrote: post #140
akytt wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that bad. I've been using LaTex for everything for the past five years and never really bump into things I can't do any more. I've learnt that when people really want to do stuff, they fix the packages. Thus, when things do not work, most of people do not really need it. If so, do I? That's not to say the learning curve is not similar to the cliffs of Dover. Because it is. And stackoverflow is your friend. Y…

Same. Definitely not trivial to use, but generally I can get anything I want to get done with a quick google. I'm surprised at the hate on this website. I do a lot more googling for coding. I get if you're doing something exotic in LaTex, but for writing a paper, a presentation, or resume, it is fairly straightforward. The key to easily writing LaTex is making a few skeletons and then just reusing them.

The real problem with LaTeX is that it doesn't try to make itself friendly. It gives horrible errors that are big headaches for newcomers, and setting up your environment can be a pain. Early today, someone set me a document and I spent 15 minutes finding and updating the right packages until it built.

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#145

Post by tnecniv »

yellowapple wrote: post #130
akytt wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Got any good examples? I'm looking for pretty much the same thing (not necessarily involving R, but definitely something that'll let me convert Markdown to LaTeX with relative ease).

Typora was posted on here a few weeks ago. It has a LaTeX export option, but I haven't tried it yet since it also just exports directly to PDF/HTML.

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#146

Post by voltagex_ »

nxc18 wrote: post #137
Ar-Curunir wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In 5 minutes you can configure your word document to look just like something LaTeX would output. It is interesting that learning LaTeX is a completely reasonable thing to spend time on but learning the basics of styles (surprisingly similar to how styles work everywhere else) is thoroughly unacceptable.

What do you do in your first five minutes in a new Word document then? Or do you have a go-to template?

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#147

Post by Ace17 »

amelius wrote: post #48

Sometimes I wonder: why can't LaTeX be just as simple as HTML, or perhaps even simpler? Except perhaps for pagination and available default fonts, HTML practically fulfills all my formatting needs. (Note: HTML includes MathML, a mathematical formula markup language). And for automatically numbering tables and figures, one can easily write a script that is completely independent from the underlying formatting language…

Does HTML allow you to define your own abstractions? (CSS doesn't count)

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#148

Post by xtreme »

daemonk wrote: post #30

I personally really like using latex. But the main problem for me is that latex is not really designed for collaborative editing, especially with people who don't know latex. are there any track changes feature plugin/app that's available and relatively simple for people who mainly use MS word.

> latex is not really designed for collaborative editing

My personal experience is quite the opposite. In our research team, we collaborated on papers, proposals, theses and similar documents and we exclusively used Latex. Being a text based format, it lends itself well to version controlled (svn/git) repos. It was very easy to track changes and resolve conflicting edits. I don't think any binary format would have worked as well.

> with people who don't know latex

This is, however, painfully true. Newcomers had to learn Latex; but given the prevalence of it in the academia, I doubt it was a bad investment.

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#149

Post by marvy »

Ace17 wrote: post #147
amelius wrote: post #48

Sometimes I wonder: why can't LaTeX be just as simple as HTML, or perhaps even simpler? Except perhaps for pagination and available default fonts, HTML practically fulfills all my formatting needs. (Note: HTML includes MathML, a mathematical formula markup language). And for automatically numbering tables and figures, one can easily write a script that is completely independent from the underlying formatting language…

Does HTML allow you to define your own abstractions? (CSS doesn't count)

No, not really. My favorite example is: try to implement the equivalent of the LaTeX command \tableofcontents using just HTML and CSS. On the other hand, that's not a fair comparison: TeX is Turing-complete, and HTML+CSS is not. We need one more ingredient: HTML+CSS+JS. (Though using JS just to get a table of contents seems a bit silly, and it probably makes more sense to generate the HTML for the table of contents on the server, like Wikipedia does. (Imagine if every Wikipedia article required running JS just to render the table of contents.))

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#150

Post by phreeza »

yellowapple wrote: post #130
akytt wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Got any good examples? I'm looking for pretty much the same thing (not necessarily involving R, but definitely something that'll let me convert Markdown to LaTeX with relative ease).

I can recommended pandoc
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