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Begin LaTeX in minutes

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Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#151

Post by Davidbrcz »

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).

Have a look at pandoc. pandoc is a swiss-army knife for converting a markup format to another. It does for sure MD -> latex

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#153

Post by pvaldes »

zzleeper wrote: post #63
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…

Not just you. Tables are a huge mess, and for every package I add to my .tex file to fix a problem, two new problems pop up.. (oh you added package a at the end? It will fail, because package b loaded package C which defined the same macro names, and of course every macro is global...

In 15 years using latex I thing that I had problems with the order of packages in one or two cases (and they were documented, so it was my fault in fact). The situation that you claim is not common at all.

All that you need basically for tables is booktabs and, in very specific cases, longtable.

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#154

Post by paradite »

jdleesmiller wrote: post #112
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.

Good to hear that. I've sent it via www.overleaf.com/contact and I hope this would help your team figure out why.

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#155

Post by jdleesmiller »

apathy wrote: post #111
cyphar wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

(Overleaf co-founder here.) Re markdown, we don't officially support it, but it is possible to write markdown in LaTeX: https://www.overleaf.com/latex/examples/using-markdown-in-la...

Pretty neat!

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#156

Post by jdleesmiller »

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.

(Overleaf co-founder here.) As far as I know, we've never lost any user data. We take that very seriously. If you believe you have lost data on Overleaf, please contact our support team via www.overleaf.com/contact and we'll investigate.

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#157

Post by cyphar »

apathy wrote: post #111
cyphar wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Focusing on internal development is not a justification for making software proprietary. A software license has nothing to do with development style -- you could do code dumps like Oracle while also licensing the code under a free software license.

> An open-source business that doesn't survive (cough ReplicaDB cough) isn't necessarily better than a closed-but-extensible one that does.

I disagree. All businesses will die eventually (or at least, almost all of them will). The difference between a proprietary business and a free software business is that only one of them actually makes a lasting contribution to society in terms of software (hint: it's not the proprietary one).

> The underlying toolchain (LaTeX and packages) is fully OSS, and isn't going anywhere;

True, and even more of a reason to prefer free software solutions (a proprietary version of LaTeX and packages wouldn't have survived for as long as LaTeX has).

But, each to their own.

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#159

Post by baldfat »

massysett wrote: post #97
supergarfield wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Pandoc working with Markdown is a pretty good alternative especially if your needs are not complex.

Pandoc is a document converter. I can make a Markdown file and output to LaTex or just PDF. http://pandoc.org/

I have learned that I get things done faster and works 90% of the time for my needs.

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#160

Post by eriknstr »

baldfat wrote: post #159
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…

Pandoc working with Markdown is a pretty good alternative especially if your needs are not complex. Pandoc is a document converter. I can make a Markdown file and output to LaTex or just PDF. http://pandoc.org/ I have learned that I get things done faster and works 90% of the time for my needs.

I've been using Pandoc for documents where I have mostly text and images. It's also worth to note that LaTeX commands can be written in the Markdown document and most of the time it'll work correctly. Additionally, for custom preamble additions you can create a separate file and pass it to pandoc with -H.

Here is a document I created recently using pandoc, python, inkscape and bmake, where I put a bit of LaTeX in the markdown document:

* PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-2M0DmQ8rj2SmJnMUFpcEZacFE...

* Markdown: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B-2M0DmQ8rj2NV9SWktQTWdKQ3...

* Preamble additions: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B-2M0DmQ8rj2bmNjQ2RweFRfY0...

* BSDmakefile: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B-2M0DmQ8rj2UDhaVk4zMVlOcD...

You might notice some untransformed LaTeX commands in the figures. That's no fault of pandoc mind you, since the figures are just graphic files to be included from the POV of pandoc, that's just because I haven't bothered yet to get that part right due to there being no real gain for me at the moment from getting that part right so I just type LaTeX in the figure text also even though I do not transform those.

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