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I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

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Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#201

Post by nautilius »

ohwellhere wrote: post #101
bernulli wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always like to see it the other way around, it eliminates entities that are not a good fit, and the remainder is what drives adaptation. Of course, people could argue that's just like Michelangelo [1], and we're back at 'designed'. [1] “The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.”

> it eliminates entities But evolution doesn't eliminate entities. Low fitness entities are eliminated by hunger, or predators, or lower reproductive rates. The marble on the other hand is eliminated by Michelangelo. There's a linguistic confusion where because evolution is a noun, we think we can treat it as a subject. But in the person/place/thing/idea delineation, it is an idea. Not only does it not design, not on…

Of course 'evolution' is not an actor, it's just the overall pattern we give a name to. And the pattern we observe is that low fitness entities are eliminated. That plus variation yields adaptation.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#202

Post by gibletsingravy »

tunesmith wrote: post #181

I love LaTeX whole-heartedly. I never learned Word in college and wrote all my papers in LaTeX as an undergrad, just using its default styles. I write mathematical papers to myself, despite not being a mathematician. I found a LaTeX package that lays things out in the same style as old TSR D&D modules and I use that to write new dungeons. I wrote a book in markdown and used pandoc to output LaTeX and publish it throu…

Which LaTeX package are you using for old school D&D?

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#203

Post by singhrac »

I too love LaTeX but it's important to remember that the writing experience might be nice and elegant in LaTeX with the right stys and ShareLatex and whatnot, but the editing experience is decidedly not. Everyone who has used it in any serious form with page limits knows the stress of slowly varying their figure sizes and hoping it will squish into the limits.

Very honestly, part of the reason I don't bother with any new "LaTeX reimagined" projects is because either (a) they are written by LaTeX nonbelievers who don't understand the complexity of beautiful typesetting, or (b) I don't want to learn another markup+ language or mental model. The latter is increasingly annoying to me.

Out of curiosity, is LaTeX compilation benchmarked on the M1 processors? Is it better? Has anyone experimented with magic Raph Levien-style SIMD magic (a la stack monoid) compilation for LaTeX? I just want LaTeX but really really fast.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#204

Post by nautilius »

shp0ngle wrote: post #180

Oh I remember my CS years, when all the professors were raving to me about LaTeX, and I never understood why. 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 ar…

An article about how word processors are superior to LaTeX by someone who has never written anything with LaTeX, not even finished a single paper.

It's like writing an article about how walking is much faster than cycling, because 'I tried cycling once and fell over, so clearly all those fetishists are wrong, the suckers'.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#205

Post by [deleted] »

falcor84 wrote: post #99
izhak wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would disagree. You can play the violin firstly because the violin was designed so that it could produce beautiful sounds under _human_hands_. This way, not another.

It seems you are actually in agreement with the underlying argument. Humans were able to use their body, originally developed for hunting large prey, to design, build and play violins.

[deleted]

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#206

Post by dragonwriter »

enriquto wrote: post #12
Pinus wrote: post #6

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!

> Your hands were designed for throwing a stone at the eye of a mammoth.

No, they weren't designed at all.

And utility in fine as well as gross manipulation of the type you describe is clearly part of what they were selected (not designed) for.

> But you can play the violin with them

Violins, unlike human hands, were designed, and specifically for people with human hands to use. They aren't just something existing outside of humans in nature that hands happen to work with.

So, it's not at all surprising that they can be used with human hands.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#207

Post by GiovanniP »

jIyajbe wrote: post #79
teleforce wrote: post #38

Try TeXmacs, it's neither TeX nor it's Emacs clone. TeXmacs is WYSIWYG scientific editing platform. Documents created can be saved in TeXmacs, Xml, Scheme, PDF or Postscript. Converters exist for TeX/LaTeX and HTML/MathML. It can also be used as a graphical front-end for other computer algebra, numerical analysis, statistics software[1]. [1] https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/welcome.en.html

Another good WYSIWYG front end is LyX: www.lyx.org . I've written a few hundred physics lecture notes with it, as well as a number of Beamer presentations. I find it much easier to use than TeXmacs (mainly because of keyboard shortcuts), and the output is excellent. And yes, it produces true TeX/LaTeX.

TeXmacs is not a front-end for LaTeX, but a completely original system, superior to TeX and LaTeX under every point of view: typographic quality, ease of use, control over your document.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#208

Post by wildzzz »

shp0ngle wrote: post #180

Oh I remember my CS years, when all the professors were raving to me about LaTeX, and I never understood why. 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 ar…

I learned about Latex in physics 2 in college and started taking my notes that way in class. I could quickly make quick notes for anything that would take me too long to input and then I'd go back and actually review my notes to fill in what I hadn't formatted yet. I think it helped a lot because I actually reviewed my notes after class. I had a discrete math professor that offered extra points if you did your homework in Latex. I have shitty handwriting so I was already doing my homework on the computer anyway so it was easy credit. I got to be the favorite in my intro to astrophysics class because I turned in my papers in Latex, professor went out of his way to find me after class and complimented me. Haven't touched it in years since college.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#209

Post by tunesmith »

gibletsingravy wrote: post #202
tunesmith wrote: post #181

I love LaTeX whole-heartedly. I never learned Word in college and wrote all my papers in LaTeX as an undergrad, just using its default styles. I write mathematical papers to myself, despite not being a mathematician. I found a LaTeX package that lays things out in the same style as old TSR D&D modules and I use that to write new dungeons. I wrote a book in markdown and used pandoc to output LaTeX and publish it throu…

Which LaTeX package are you using for old school D&D?

https://github.com/slithy/rpg_module - I'm not sure if it's published in CTAN but I've been active in its GitHub issues.

Re: I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX

#210

Post by GiovanniP »

kzrdude wrote: post #58
teleforce wrote: post #38

Try TeXmacs, it's neither TeX nor it's Emacs clone. TeXmacs is WYSIWYG scientific editing platform. Documents created can be saved in TeXmacs, Xml, Scheme, PDF or Postscript. Converters exist for TeX/LaTeX and HTML/MathML. It can also be used as a graphical front-end for other computer algebra, numerical analysis, statistics software[1]. [1] https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/welcome.en.html

Any published papers that use this?

You can check all of the papers of Joris van der Hoeven (https://www.texmacs.org/joris/main/publs.html) and of Massimiliano Gubinelli (https://www.hcm.uni-bonn.de/people/faculty/publications/?tx_...), and as well these lecture notes the link to which was recently posted on the TeXmacs forums https://www.jonmsterling.com/papers/sterling:2022:wg6.pdf (link to the forum post http://forum.texmacs.cn/t/sharing-some-lecture-notes-created...). The papers of vdH you find in his website are converted from the TeXmacs format into pdf (one can find the TeXmacs sources too by each paper) and the papers of Gubinelli as far as I know are written using TeXmacs but since he puts the links to the journals there you get a version converted from the TeXmacs format into LaTeX.
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