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The LaTeX Fetish (2016)

danielallington.net

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Re: The LaTeX Fetish (2016)

#161

Post by moomin »

panglott wrote: post #159
moomin wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Show me the person who can't answer the question "Who was the author of the paper?" by reading the LaTeX version and I'll concede you have a point.

The person first has to realize that it is an actual paper that they are supposed to be reading, instead of some kind of mangled file.

I think you're making it harder for yourself, not easier. Now you're assuming the following:

1) The person has no knowledge of LaTeX 2) They've never seen a markup language before 3) Yet somehow they've received this file, devoid of context, instead of the PDF, and they've opened it up in a text editor. And somehow this is relevant to something they're doing.

Who is this person? What are they doing? How is their experience worse than the guy with no experience of Word, no knowledge of Word who opens up the equivalent Word document in vi?

Re: The LaTeX Fetish (2016)

#162

Post by dingo_bat »

yorwba wrote: post #83
dingo_bat wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are git review tools that are able to diff docx.

How do those work with the rest of the git machinery? Does git add -p work? How are merge conflicts handled? What about git blame ? It seems to me that that everything about git is based on text files that are changed by adding and removing lines, but if there is a way to replace that behavior to handle non-textual file formats, I'd be very interesting in learning about it.

Unfortunately, this particular review tool was an internal utility at my previous employer. The only thing it could do was highlight changes in word documents. You could compare patch sets. That's all. And it was a review tool. Git itself still treated docx files more or less like binaries. The advantage was we could use word documents instead of markdown files, usually people would embed visio diagrams inside design docs etc.

Re: The LaTeX Fetish (2016)

#163

Post by pmoriarty »

fny wrote: post #29

I have only three gripes about LaTex and friends. First, LaTeX was intended for physical publication, so there's no native notion of text reflow or "responsiveness". Worse, everyone distributes their documents as PDFs, which are a PITA to read on a smaller device or ereader. At best, an author could utilize something like pandoc to distribute an HTML version, but alas, publishers never give a damn. Second, I have bee…

You blame LaTeX for all of these shortcomings, but some are a deficiency of your PDF reader.

For instance, if you use zathura and mupdf to read PDFs, with a single keystroke you invert the text for reading at night. I do it all the time, and it works great. Whether that PDF was generated with LaTeX or not has nothing to do with it.

Re: The LaTeX Fetish (2016)

#164

Post by pmoriarty »

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…

Even when using only LaTeX, I still find the edit/compile/view cycle annoying compared to WYSYWIG. How much of a delay to this cycle does using pandoc add?

Re: The LaTeX Fetish (2016)

#165

Post by [deleted] »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #137
peterburkimsher wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> work with multiple people or track the history of a document I often proofread for my friends. I tell them that they must use Track Changes in Word. Is there a better tool that you recommend?

Google Docs supports multiple simultaneous editors and tracks revision histories. It was a lifesaver for group projects in college. And while 'always online' is often a bad thing, it seems to be a lot more reliable than the alternatives of email chains with the attached Word document, appending -R3-edited-complete-final-done.docx to the filename, the manual merges when two people are working on the same thing, or the…

[deleted]

Re: The LaTeX Fetish (2016)

#166

Post by JelteF »

pmoriarty wrote: post #164
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…

Even when using only LaTeX, I still find the edit/compile/view cycle annoying compared to WYSYWIG. How much of a delay to this cycle does using pandoc add?

Pandoc doesn't add much, the compilation from markdown to latex is quite fast. The LaTeX compilation still takes most of the time, especially when having to run it multiple times because of references and cross references.

Re: The LaTeX Fetish (2016)

#167

Post by zephyz »

I'm surprised the author does not mention another reason that've heard in favour of using Latex: scale and predictability.

A LaTeX Document will always behave the same whatever its size and content. Whereas word processors may unexpectedly change formatting without anyone noticing, for example in the case where you share a file with someone and this person update the text and sends it back. The text written might not belong to the same formatting family as the rest of the text but shares the same appearance and this change will go unnoticed until the original owner changes the appearance of the formatting family.

Not to mention versionning. Having your thesis in Latex in a git repo will consistently work. Whereas you will struggle sharing a single .docx file across multiple system or even different word versions. And you lose any possibility to roll back, inspect the history or show diffs.

Re: The LaTeX Fetish (2016)

#168

Post by geezerjay »

panglott wrote: post #140
moomin wrote: post #71

So, to demonstrate how bad LaTeX is, he picks the single most markup heavy thing you do (barring tables) and compares it to plain text? Plain text, I'll point out, that doesn't format the same way. In practice, there _are_ a bunch of extra steps to get this working in Word, they're just not easy to express in a text document. Then he goes on to show the example of trying to find a spelling error. Ignoring that this j…

To demonstrate what a barrier LaTeX is, he illustrates by writing the title of a paper, the author, date, and first line. The result is obviously human-readable in a word processer without special training, but not in LaTeX.

> he illustrates by writing the title of a paper, the author, date, and first line. The result is obviously human-readable in a word processer without special training, but not in LaTeX.

And that shows, at best, that if all you do is write papers with the author, date, and only thefirst line, then perhaps Word is better suited for that particular task.

But then, writing real documents is far more demanding than that.

For instance, let's say you're trying to publish your paper in a document, and your paper has more text than a single first paragraph. You find out that the style guide imposed by a journal demands that all your figures are placed at the end, in annex. In LaTeX, all you need to do is add a single line of text (include a package). How much work does Word forces you to do?

And I won't even get started on the fact that MS Word fails to support any vector graphics format.

Re: The LaTeX Fetish (2016)

#170

Post by dredmorbius »

emmab wrote: post #36
fny wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can compile from LaTeX to HTML with pandoc and then repackage the HTML into an epub using a tool like epubmaker[0]. YMMV though with pandoc, not sure how well it handles more fancy latex macros and packages. The simplest thing to do might be start with a more HTML-based solution (e.g. Markdown with extensions, RST) and then compile that into whatever layout you intend for the physical/pdf form. [0]: https://githu…

HTML doesn't have a notion of multiple pages within the same document though?

That depends on what you're talking about. HTML itself is a text markup language, not a styling language. (Well ... mostly.)

But through CSS with a paper media-type, you can specify page-based conditions and actions.

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