Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX • Hacker News Board

Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX

#181

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Feb 19, 2018, 3:48 PM UTC

kerkeslager wrote: post #179

mwcampbell wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is LaTeX unambiguously better for print? Is it just the support for math notation, or is there more to it? And since "print" very often means a PDF that's also available online, has there been any progress on tagged PDF support in pdflatex or a similar tool? This is important for accessibility.

> Why is LaTeX unambiguously better for print? Is it just the support for math notation, or is there more to it? LaTeX is techniques and heuristics from hundreds of years of typesetting for print, codified into a program. HTML is at most 29 years old, and has only supported typesetting of any kind for a fraction of that. What typesetting capabilities it supports are designed by committees, and its primary purpose has…

[deleted]

Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX

#182

Post by BrandoElFollito » Mon, Feb 19, 2018, 8:20 PM UTC

mwcampbell wrote: post #73

kerkeslager wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd also add that while Markdown and LaTeX can do some of the same things, they're designed toward very different tasks. I've used both numerous times in my career, and I can't remember a case where it's been ambiguous which tool was more appropriate for the task. If it's going to be printed, you probably want LaTeX. If it's going to be rendered to a screen, you probably want Markdown. If it's going to be rendered to…

Why is LaTeX unambiguously better for print? Is it just the support for math notation, or is there more to it? And since "print" very often means a PDF that's also available online, has there been any progress on tagged PDF support in pdflatex or a similar tool? This is important for accessibility.

Knuth said that doculents should be readable, but artvto be hanged on a wall.

Typesetting my thesis in LaTeX (physics, 2000) was an amazing choice. I could hardly modify anything (it is doable but requires a lot of work and in the meantime you learn that the default is better) so I was left with the content.

I knew that it would just work and took from me all the philosophical sufferingbof choosing such and such fontvsize for the title of adjusting margins, or placing a graph.

Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX

#183

Post by anon20180219 » Mon, Feb 19, 2018, 9:45 PM UTC

skrebbel wrote: post #173

wfo wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 packa…

> But could you really imagine writing a serious mathematical document (paper, book, thesis) in Word? Yes I could, and I did. My Master's thesis is written in Word and it was pretty heavy on the theory and the formulas. If you're interested it's online on http://e.teeselink.nl/thesis_et.pdf . It's not a particularly stunning thesis in terms of content, but in my humble opinion it's a pretty document, definitely no wo…

Frankly, this PDF shows that it has been produced with Word. For example: (a) Full justification without hyphenation; (b) Chapter 6 ends at page 69, and the next 32 pages have wrong left header; and (c) Section headers with fake small caps. Using LaTeX would have resulted in a more beautifully typeset paper.

Your point that you might have spent more time preparing it is subjectively true, obviously, and it seems that in your case Word proved good enough.

Re: Reach for Markdown, not LaTeX

#184

Post by nanolith » Mon, Feb 19, 2018, 10:08 PM UTC

kvm000 wrote: post #97

nanolith wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can second this. Markdown and Pandoc work quite well together. I write documents professionally using this setup. I do fall back to LaTeX for certain formatting, but it's actually quite easy to build pass-through filters so that raw LaTeX can be inserted when specialized formatting that can't be easily simulated in Markdown is required.

I'd be very interested in any details of your approach that you could share. I added another comment to this thread with the details of what I've been working on for professional spec documents with markdown and rendering to PDF (testing with CSS now).

It's relatively low-tech, but it does work. First, I have some scripts to preprocess the Markdown and extract custom markup that I have built to do things that Pandoc's Markdown can't, but that I can still easily inline in the document. For instance, I replaced the source code markup with a custom one that generates LaTeX formatted the way I want it formatted. I use Pandoc to output LaTeX. I then have a series of shell scripts to postprocess this LaTeX to insert pre-rendered figures, re-introduce the custom markup as rendered LaTeX, or to massage the output so that the document is laid out the way I expect.

I'm planning to use this to write a book in the near future.