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Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX

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Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX

#161

Post by chmln »

sevensor wrote: post #158
mbid wrote: post #130

I don't get it. Say I already know that I'll need some formulae in my document. Then the use case here seems to be, essentially, that I can write # Section Name instead of \section{Section Name} and that I can write *important stuff* instead of \emph{important stuff}. I can see that the markdown version is a little nicer on the eyes and keyboard, but only by a small margin. Now, if I write a document in latex I need…

I wrote my dissertation and several papers for publication using mardown + pandoc + latex. On Arch. I have to say, you're far overstating the difficulty of this arrangement, and understating the benefits. As long as you're willing to accept the haskell package madness, which pacman takes care of for you, everything else works in a very straightforward manner. The trick is, you don't have pandoc generate straight thro…

> as long as you're willing to accept the haskell package madness

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/pandoc-bin/

Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX

#162

Post by behindmyscreen »

k_bx wrote: post #113
behindmyscreen wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is, if you do a lot of formula writing in a narrative, most WYSIWYG editors that support LaTeX formula rendering are just not efficient. I want to type my thoughts, start a formula block, write my expression, end the block, and continue going. You can't do that in most WYSIWYG editors.

You can definitely do that in Typora (unless I miss something what exactly you meant).

When I think of WYSIWYG editors, I see presentation and content being mixed.

Unless Typora has figured out how to get remove the need to locate the insertion point of a formula, open an editor, then submit the data to render an image that is placed inline or made into a block. If it has figured that part out then props to them for making it easier to write mathematics in an accessible editor.

Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX

#163

Post by tincholio »

ikurei wrote: post #146
tincholio wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thing is, if you're already looking to use e.g., Emacs, you'll be better off using org-mode instead of markdown. Same lightness of syntax, tens of times the functionality (including much better tables, which you can use directly from a TeX document, as well, via radio tables). Editing ascii tables with no editor support is painful. There's also some org functionality in vim plugins, though I've never used them, so I…

> if you're already looking to use e.g., Emacs, you'll be better off using org-mode I find that you should use org only if you use Emacs. Vim plugins for Org are very limited, and this is even more true for other editors. Judging a technology only for its technical merits is unproductive. Markdown has "won", it's everywhere and everyone can learn to use it. Those are damn powerful advantages. Using Markdown, I gain t…

I don't doubt that using org outside Emacs may be problematic to some degree (in terms of expected functionalities, anyway), but I use Emacs for everything, so it's not really an issue.

If popularity alone were sufficient for technological choices, we wouldn't even be having this discussion (and we'd all be using Windows). I try to choose my tools according to how well they work for me. Markdown, in my opinion, is a poor choice compared to org, but I can use it to collaborate with others, no problem.

As for the transition from light markup to TeX, that's pretty much the point of the OP, isn't it? Maybe the break point is different for everybody. For me, LaTeX imposes no extra cognitive load, but then again, I've been using it extensively for many years. If I'm need for something lighter, it'll be org (but really, org usually wins for me because of how well it does all the other stuff, not just the markup part).

Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX

#164

Post by tincholio »

black_knight wrote: post #157
tincholio wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a library of these substitutions available? Sounds like it could be useful.

I just have this[0], which is a list of the substitutions. You can either make it a sty file, or just stuff it in the preamble, or template. Some of these are suboptimal. But you can just change them, and make your own. [0]: http://lpaste.net/362623

Thanks!

Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX

#165

Post by username223 »

Tarean wrote: post #101
username223 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, and a bit surprising. Back in the Triassic Age, I picked up LaTeX from an undergrad roommate because it was easier than writing up homework by hand, and because you can turn a basic ".txt" file into a ".tex" file with very few changes. I agree that Markdown and friends have their place, but they quickly reach their limits. You write that "Pandoc can take care of the presentation for us," but in my experi…

You can write markdown and pandoc will leave any latex fragments for the backend. This only works for latex based backends like pdf but it works great if you have some formulas. Code formatting and tabels are also vastly easier with pandoc.

Yeah, LaTeX tables are a pain, so I usually generate them with a script and include them via "\input{...}". But I've come to rely on TeX macros to generate repeated things like fancy chapter intros, and on packages to customize page headers, etc. This stuff is not necessary for a homework assignment, but I doubt it's as easy to accomplish in Pandoc.

On an unrelated note, I hadn't checked out Pandoc's output in awhile, and this bit from http://pandoc.org/demo/example13.pdf looks pretty bad: https://i.imgur.com/Kxy4mic.png . Granted, the terrible word-breaking and spacing is TeX's fault, but typesetting usually seems to require dealing with a few special cases by hand. I wouldn't trust Pandoc, or any other program, to "take care of the presentation" without a bit of hand-holding.

Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX

#166

Post by wfo »

skrebbel wrote: post #144
mbid wrote: post #130

I don't get it. Say I already know that I'll need some formulae in my document. Then the use case here seems to be, essentially, that I can write # Section Name instead of \section{Section Name} and that I can write *important stuff* instead of \emph{important stuff}. I can see that the markdown version is a little nicer on the eyes and keyboard, but only by a small margin. Now, if I write a document in latex I need…

> Latex is a beast, but there are no serious alternatives to typeset formulae. People keep repeating this like it's true, but MS Word has had an excellent formula editor for a decade now (the one they shipped before Word 2007 was terribly shitty though). It's wysiwyg (which is fantastic if you're editing a big formula), it supports all math notation I've ever needed, and it has surprisingly decent UX. It even support…

Agreed, there's a great formula editor which is very nice if you want to create math presentations in powerpoint instead of in beamer (and I wouldn't blame you, especially if you're in a hurry).

But could you really imagine writing a serious mathematical document (paper, book, thesis) in Word? No Git, no vim/emacs, no plain text? Abandoning the digital lingua franca of mathematical communication? Abandoning the packages written by the sum total of anyone who has worked on anything close to mathematics in recent years? For what?

Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX

#167

Post by jnxuw »

skrebbel wrote: post #144
mbid wrote: post #130

I don't get it. Say I already know that I'll need some formulae in my document. Then the use case here seems to be, essentially, that I can write # Section Name instead of \section{Section Name} and that I can write *important stuff* instead of \emph{important stuff}. I can see that the markdown version is a little nicer on the eyes and keyboard, but only by a small margin. Now, if I write a document in latex I need…

> Latex is a beast, but there are no serious alternatives to typeset formulae. People keep repeating this like it's true, but MS Word has had an excellent formula editor for a decade now (the one they shipped before Word 2007 was terribly shitty though). It's wysiwyg (which is fantastic if you're editing a big formula), it supports all math notation I've ever needed, and it has surprisingly decent UX. It even support…

LaTeX uses a different strategy where WYSIWYG is no advantage. The markup commands tell the computer about the logical structure of the text. This is not possible in a WYSIWYG system precisely because it displays the final result, and intermixing both is a mess. Word is a glorified typewriter, LaTeX is a diligent professional typesetter.

Apart from that: Microsoft Word /seems/ easy to use but this is not really true, by far. To typeset a minimal LaTeX document as for a homework assignment, very little learning and boilerplate is necessary. This can be done /quicker/ than in Word - an intelligent person will need half an afternoon to write a short presentable text in LaTeX, and the learned knowledge works forever. What you are assuming is that people are already used to write high-quality structured documents in Word, and this is, for most people, simply not true, as Words gets heavily in the way of writing in a structured approach. The ribbons UI has not really helped with that - I curse every time I have to search for a section formatting style in that terrible drop-down menu.

Now when it comes to writing seriously complex larger text documents, like a large software documentation, a piece of literate programming, or a PhD thesis, MS Word is far far behind. It is simply not up to the task.

You also say that Word has been getting better, but having occasionally been forced to work with Microsoft products in the last nine years, I really don't see that. The only thing that changes is the user interface. It is hardly believable that Microsoft will use office programs to try out new paradigms and software metaphors.

And to add, I am also pissed by the appearance that Microsoft - not specifically for this comment, but very much in general - seems to follow the strategy to make their commercial products mentioned as much as possible in the context of free and open source software, in forums and in places such as reddit. There may indeed be a few people which use .NET or c# or the Linux subsystem or which give up the power of UNIX shells for an inferior solution, but I just can't get rid of the strong impression that the huge majority of such comments are just product marketing done by some PR company. It is annoying. And completely hollow. As here, somebody who really has medium knowledge on how to use LaTeX will rarely suggest to use Word instead.

Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX

#168

Post by jnxuw »

quanticle wrote: post #94
davesque wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a bit confused by this. As I see it, LaTeX can do everything that Markdown can before things get complicated. Where LaTeX does get complicated (e.g. when designing figures or drawings), Markdown doesn't offer any advantage or even any functionality. For composing simple documents or outlines and doing typesetting of equations, LaTeX has some boilerplate but it's really not that much.

LaTeX in my experience, is worse than markdown for one crucial use case: formatting code. Formatting large blocks of monospaced text (especially monospaced text that includes character sequences that can be interpreted as LaTeX commands) has always been kind of a chore. In markdown, on the other hand, it's as simple as enclosing the text between two sets of triple-backticks (```).

That's very easy by using the minted package, and even in Debian, it is installed by default:

    \begin{minted}{python}
    def square(x):
        return x * x
    \end{minted}
Does not look difficult to me.

Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX

#169

Post by jnxuw »

skrebbel wrote: post #144
mbid wrote: post #130

I don't get it. Say I already know that I'll need some formulae in my document. Then the use case here seems to be, essentially, that I can write # Section Name instead of \section{Section Name} and that I can write *important stuff* instead of \emph{important stuff}. I can see that the markdown version is a little nicer on the eyes and keyboard, but only by a small margin. Now, if I write a document in latex I need…

> Latex is a beast, but there are no serious alternatives to typeset formulae. People keep repeating this like it's true, but MS Word has had an excellent formula editor for a decade now (the one they shipped before Word 2007 was terribly shitty though). It's wysiwyg (which is fantastic if you're editing a big formula), it supports all math notation I've ever needed, and it has surprisingly decent UX. It even support…

Ah, and to add, if one wants to try re-formatting a Word document in LaTeX: One can import the word format to AbiWord, and export it to LaTeX. It will probably need a bit of clean-up, but it is easier to add things like footnotes, section references, a bibliography, or an index. So, for learning LaTeX, it might be a nice strategy to take a modestly-sized Word homework document and re-format it based on Leslie Lamport's "LaTeX: A document preparation System" (which is in my opinion still one of the best software documentations ever, worth a read alone because of that).

Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX

#170

Post by jnxuw »

da_chicken wrote: post #20
SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #7

Markdown can do quite a lot, but it doesn't have any way to write mathematical formulae. Since that's 90% of why I use LaTeX in most cases it seems silly to recommend Markdown. LaTeX has a superset of features, and is well suited to what it does properly (typesetting). Markdown is quick and easy to use, so it's good for blog posts.

My problem with LaTeX is that a ton of programmers think it's a good idea to use LaTeX instead of, say, Word or Writer or plain text wrapped at 80 characters or a Wiki for things like process or project documentation. Programmers love to use LaTeX, because they get to feel like they're doing something exciting like writing a computer program when what they're actually doing something incredibly boring like writing do…

In addition to the other comments, being able to use version control on software documentation is a critical ability. If you develop software without a distributed version control system, you are just stuck in 17th century and there is no need to discuss further.

If you use version control for your code and do not treat documentation as an integral part of the software which accompanies each version, this makes the impression that documentation is just an afterthought.

To address the 'environment' issue, it is, in most cases, unproductive to not work on Linux where all of this stuff works out of the box.

Also, your idea that it is easier to write a /good/ document using Microsoft Word than using LaTeX hugely underestimates the complexity of MS word for anything moderately complex, and even more hugely overestimates the complexity of using LaTeX for simple things. Somebody who has the job to write code in Python or Go should be easily able to document an API in LaTeX within two hours.

And to add finally, maybe you don't believe the world will continue to move without using MS office. Be assured, there are quite a few large companies which have ditched office (say, Google) and this was not the slightest obstacle to their further success.

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