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Same, I just did my resume in LaTeX, it's such an obtuse and painful tool, yet nothing even comes close to the control it gives you. Hey btw, I'm looking for contract work! https://github.com/1player/resume/blob/master/resume.pdf
I always wonder with comments like this what LaTeX allows that Adobe Indesign is incapable of.
* Cross-platform
* Industry standard in the sciences
I'm always amazed how people could bootstrap something as feature rich and versatile as LaTeX from plain TeX. I'd really like to get to know plain TeX a bit better, but I've got no idea where to start.
I also found A Beginner's Book of TeX by Raymond Seroul and Silvio Levy helpful as a quick reference.
Also I have an anti-recommendation for Knuth's TeXBook. I did not find this book helpful at all- too much information buried in exercises (which I don't think is appropriate for a reference), and not enough directly said on how to do useful things. Figure out how to make a table of contents using only the TeXBook..
The solution presented in this anonymous, undated article is relevant if you’re constrained to only using LaTeX. But you’re not, and there are certainly easier ways to go about such things. We have Python and other higher level languages that we can use to pre-process source and extract metadata. This type of problem is made much easier if you write in Markdown, putting authors, affiliations, and other metadata in (s…
This anonymous, undated article was written by me, yesterday. The strong backwards compatibility of LaTeX(2e) [0] make it so that the date is not especially relevant (since I'm using primitives); in any case my point was pedagogical, in the sense of diving into the operational mechanisms of (La)TeX to develop a better mental model of what's going on. And while Pandoc is very nice, if you're in academia none of your a…
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> I always find this a bit sad, because it seems to take away the idea that programming is about assembling composable parts [OT] Concerning "programming is about assembling composable parts": I always find both sad and ridiculous when self-proclaimed software developers bash Unix because they are not able to appreciate its philosophy.
It would help Unix’s case if the glue between the parts wouldn’t be byte streams and some very crude int result code, signals, etc. A monolith can be just as composable if not more, with a much “stronger glue” in the form of language-mandated guarantees. Also, sometimes doing multiple things well is the better direction — IPC is additional complexity and essential complexity can’t be decomposed.
I think to really use something like that, I'd want a well-defined ordering for the fields and the ability to also do something like
variable.1
in addition to
variable.someLongFieldName
This could result in less than obvious scripts, but a shell language also needs to be compact, for interactive usage.
You sometimes see people ask fairly simple Python questions on Stack Overflow, that could be solved by five lines of plain Python, and be answered with some Pandas magic incantation that happens to do what they want with one call. I always find this a bit sad, because it seems to take away the idea that programming is about assembling composable parts, replacing it by a search for the right magic thing from a box of…
> You always feel like you are trying to trick the system into doing something it was not designed for. This is one of the hallmarks of human civilization. Your hands were designed for throwing a stone at the eye of a mammoth. But you can play the violin with them! Yes; it is totally awkward and anti-natural for your hands, obviously not their intended purpose... but so beautiful!
You sometimes see people ask fairly simple Python questions on Stack Overflow, that could be solved by five lines of plain Python, and be answered with some Pandas magic incantation that happens to do what they want with one call. I always find this a bit sad, because it seems to take away the idea that programming is about assembling composable parts, replacing it by a search for the right magic thing from a box of…
Clearly you haven't seen https://github.com/mscroggs/realhats
What is the intended use for LaTex these days? I’m not trying to flame, I just have no idea why anyone would choose to use it over html/css or just a word processor.
I have various custom C++ programs to generate the puzzles. But, getting the results to a formatted PDF was nearly impossible.
I use LaTeX as I can have my C++ program output a text file which, when compiled with LaTeX, creates the pretty puzzle books.
Essentially, I can press a button and “poof” I have a print-ready puzzle book ready to go up on Amazon.
The solution presented in this anonymous, undated article is relevant if you’re constrained to only using LaTeX. But you’re not, and there are certainly easier ways to go about such things. We have Python and other higher level languages that we can use to pre-process source and extract metadata. This type of problem is made much easier if you write in Markdown, putting authors, affiliations, and other metadata in (s…
LaTeX? I just use TeX. The documentation for TeX is clear, very precise, and much shorter. LaTeX is just TeX but with a lot of new macros. The intent is different: With TeX, you just say in detail what steps you want the software to do. With LaTeX you say what you want in general terms and f'get about the details.
Yes :) https://github.com/mikeevmm/nobeamer
Sure, it might be marginally better than just using Word, although - not that much; and it’s horrible to debug, it’s horrible to actually automate, it’s horrible to actually “separate content from style”…
I thought that maybe something is wrong with me and over time it will “click”… it never did.
But, this article made it click. (but that’s after I already got my degree…)
http://www.danielallington.net/2016/09/the-latex-fetish/
LaTeX is not actually good for writing papers.
It’s good for typesetting. And that’s it. It’s good as a type-setting program, that’s what it is meant to be. It’s definitely not good for separating content from style, or some kind of meta-automation or macros.