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The LaTeX Fetish (2016)

danielallington.net

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Re: The LaTeX Fetish (2016)

#141

Post by danraftis »

baldfat wrote: post #127
Grustaf wrote: post #126

Does this post contain any other argument than "I think it is too hard"? Except for handwriting based solutions like the very cool Nebo app, I really don't think there is a better way to enter formulas, and it can be learnt in a matter of hours. Writing complete documents in LaTeX is perhaps a bit more verbose, but then he can use some of the methods suggested here, like pandoc. Spellchecking he can have if he wants,…

I really think Racket's Scribble has a chance to over take Latex. https://docs.racket-lang.org/scribble/ Scribble is well designed to be a more readable Latex with the ability to be beautifully type set. Example: #lang scribble/base @title{On the Cookie-Eating Habits of Mice} If you give a mouse a cookie, he's going to ask for a glass of milk. Pandoc is a great tool to use if all you need is Math. http://pandoc.org/M…

Wow, thanks for the resource... going to give this a go on a current project of mine. Does anyone know of a solution that solves having fairly complex Excel tables? It seems like all of these Latex solutions just have basic text tables...

Re: The LaTeX Fetish (2016)

#142

Post by hvidgaard »

Mathnerd314 wrote: post #76
hvidgaard wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been quite a while since I wrote any LaTeX, but you could compile a LaTeX document into ePub if you wanted to. In essence, LaTeX is the source code for the document, and the output is whatever target it is compiled to. So, if it is compiled to pdf, that is what you get, but nothing fundamental prevents it from compiling to other formats, given that someone writes the compiler.

I've just been writing HTML/ePubs directly, with http://www.bluegriffon.org/ . What do you use instead of LaTeX?

I mainly used LaTeX when going through university, but after that my use is so casual that Word is more than good enough (think short letters and the like to parents or boardmembers). For documentation and notes Markdown works very well, and certainly much simpler. At work I use a mix of Word because that's what the other non tech people use, and Markdown for documentation.

Re: The LaTeX Fetish (2016)

#143

Post by baldfat »

danraftis wrote: post #141
baldfat wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really think Racket's Scribble has a chance to over take Latex. https://docs.racket-lang.org/scribble/ Scribble is well designed to be a more readable Latex with the ability to be beautifully type set. Example: #lang scribble/base @title{On the Cookie-Eating Habits of Mice} If you give a mouse a cookie, he's going to ask for a glass of milk. Pandoc is a great tool to use if all you need is Math. http://pandoc.org/M…

Wow, thanks for the resource... going to give this a go on a current project of mine. Does anyone know of a solution that solves having fairly complex Excel tables? It seems like all of these Latex solutions just have basic text tables...

> Excel Tables?

Are you meaning just having nice looking tables?

If your going more then just nice looking tables I HIGHLY recommend RMarkdown.

http://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/lesson-7.html

Using RStudio with RMarkdown makes amazing looking tables with the package Stargazer.

http://www.jakeruss.com/cheatsheets/stargazer/

Re: The LaTeX Fetish (2016)

#144

Post by cbcoutinho »

dmitriid wrote: post #103

LaTeX is only good for one thing, and one thing only: create same-looking two-column PDFs for research/scholarly publications. And it's barely good at that. Things may have changed slightly since I last used it (cca 2008), but: combining several languages in one document (Turkish + Russian, anyone?), tables that properly span several pages, inline images, a different layout (that doesn't break languages, or tables, o…

You've got a pretty unique use-case. What's an alternative you would recommend for this kind of work?

Re: The LaTeX Fetish (2016)

#146

Post by sevensor »

JelteF wrote: post #68

I've switched from writing latex to writing pandoc markdown. I then convert it to latex and then to pdf. This gets the same result as latex, but is much easier to type for common stuff like, sections, emphasis and verbatim. It also allows you to type "&" symbols anywhere. When I require "advanced" stuff like tables and figures you can easily fallback to inline latex commands within you're markdown. It really is a sig…

This is how I wrote my dissertation. I recommend it. I recommend it even though it meant I wasn't able to use Word's "Track Changes" with my advisor. Nice guy, but he wasn't going to learn Git to humor me. PDF annotations were a good enough middle ground. In the end I was glad that there was a barrier between his edits and my source -- like most academics, he tossed off his edits in a blazing hurry, and I was able to avoid some distracting changes in voice because I was typing them in myself.

Re: The LaTeX Fetish (2016)

#147

Post by greggyb »

throwaway2016a wrote: post #49
greggyb wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious about clients that ask you to execute these items in their own templates? We run into this fairly often.

Unfortunately we're stuck with whatever format they use in that case. Haven't found a good way around it yet. Fortunately for our documentation system, Git does allow binary files.

Thanks. I was hoping you'd have the magic answer to that, as we face the same.

Re: The LaTeX Fetish (2016)

#148

Post by danraftis »

baldfat wrote: post #143
danraftis wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, thanks for the resource... going to give this a go on a current project of mine. Does anyone know of a solution that solves having fairly complex Excel tables? It seems like all of these Latex solutions just have basic text tables...

> Excel Tables? Are you meaning just having nice looking tables? If your going more then just nice looking tables I HIGHLY recommend RMarkdown. http://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/lesson-7.html Using RStudio with RMarkdown makes amazing looking tables with the package Stargazer. http://www.jakeruss.com/cheatsheets/stargazer/

Thank you! Will check out!

Re: The LaTeX Fetish (2016)

#149

Post by hyperpallium »

Just a data point: LaTeX is used in math-oriented stackexchanges, like https://scicomp.stackexchange.com Albeit for mathematical notation, not typesetting a complete document.

One might claim it's just catering to the dominant delusional cultist hierarchy... but it sure makes the math a hell of a lot more readable.

Re: The LaTeX Fetish (2016)

#150

Post by swiley »

krupan wrote: post #43

I have spent countless hours fiddling with both LaTeX and Word trying to get them to do what I want. The difference between the two is, once I had figured out how to make LaTeX do what I want, the steps were all documented and reproducible. With Word I had no such record of all the menu items, settings, and button clicks that had given me what I wanted.

This right here! This is why I generally prefer tools with a textual config/markup/command language to tools with a GUI.
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