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LaTeX Makes Me Angry
71–80 of 103 posts
Re: LaTeX Makes Me Angry
#72> format the document source for legible reading. Yes, it's the input to the typesetter, and yes, the output of the typesetter needs to be legible. But it's worth making the input easy to read, too. How is that difficult? Most text editors support word wrapping and syntax highlighting. > avoid rebuilding your rendered document too often. It's slow, it takes you out of the activity of writing, and it throws up lots of…
Give me your thesis source code, I will just remove one bracket from your complex equations Let’s see how many hours you will spend to fix it. The compiler will just tell you “out of memory error” with no line number. Good luck finding it. Latex and its tooling ecosystem are atrocious for productivity. For a type system that promises “just write, forget about formatting” the effort it requires to get document formatt…
I love LaTeX... have written class notes, tried to get work to switch their documentation over to use it (unsuccessful)... but the errors are truly useless. Compilation should be done every time you save (use the preview continuously option in latexmk), and you should save every sentence or so. Then at least you know where the new bugs are.
Re: LaTeX Makes Me Angry
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think compile times for LaTeX are an over-stated issues (I mean if nothing else it is really easy to get the document to compile in the background). But we should note that it isn't just a matter of length, there are various packages that require an additional pass over the document. I went looking for a list of which packages increase pass counts and found https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/30674/document-req…
I remember that my undergrad thesis took ~8 compile passes to link up all the references correctly, and this was so common that the latex IDE I used had that as one of the possible "build" presets.
Yeah I've had some slides with a similar story, Tikz I think is one of the main villains there (memory is a bit hazy though, I've been avoiding that library).
Re: LaTeX Makes Me Angry
#74https://youtu.be/oKlkOVn0IZw Found OP
Re: LaTeX Makes Me Angry
#75> format the document source for legible reading. Yes, it's the input to the typesetter, and yes, the output of the typesetter needs to be legible. But it's worth making the input easy to read, too. How is that difficult? Most text editors support word wrapping and syntax highlighting. > avoid rebuilding your rendered document too often. It's slow, it takes you out of the activity of writing, and it throws up lots of…
Give me your thesis source code, I will just remove one bracket from your complex equations Let’s see how many hours you will spend to fix it. The compiler will just tell you “out of memory error” with no line number. Good luck finding it. Latex and its tooling ecosystem are atrocious for productivity. For a type system that promises “just write, forget about formatting” the effort it requires to get document formatt…
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Re: LaTeX Makes Me Angry
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But then again, the whole point of using something like LaTeX is that you can focus on the text and not how it looks when writing it. Having used LaTeX for a few things. including a PhD thesis, I can say with confidence that this approach just doesn't work for me. I view "how something looks" as being an integral part of what it communicates. The text itself is only part of the package, so not being able to see how…
IMVHO beside plots/formulae/tables etc who are hard to read if just a bit more than deadly simple cases in code, well written pure text AND an outliner (like org-mode or the old CanonCAT etc, now forgotten tools from a more civilized and dead age) are the best way to focus on what you write instead of it's visual aspects. Visual is part of the package for advertisement, not for scientific/important stuff production.…
> Visual is part of the package for advertisement, not for scientific/important stuff production
That's where my experience differs.
Knowledge is fractal in nature; I can add more details to a paper ad infinitum. Seeing how big the rendered paragraph or section will be is, to me, a crucial hint that it might be time to stop.
Seeing how far away two mutually dependent concepts appear in the finished product (when you a know a reader will likely have to jump back and forth between them) may also influence my writing. If they're getting too far apart I might have to introduce A, then B, then more details on each, to keep the introductions close together.
Deciding whether certain details are better communicated in the figure, the figure caption, or the main text also depends on the layout.
Knowing how large the section/subsections headings are may influence my choice to use less of them, and group some items into the same section, because I find excessive division into subsections makes things harder to read.
And I'll admit this is weird, but somehow this all applies even though I know a journal is going to reformat and re-typeset my work anyway.
I fear that, even though I write technical (and not advertising) material, you'd probably not want to receive an email from me, lest I use bold font at some point to highlight a key point or something ;-)
Re: LaTeX Makes Me Angry
#77> the styling used for comments (which is normally de-emphasised) And that’s wrong . Syntax highlighting should be emphasising comments, not making them almost invisible. But some colour schemes do get it foolishly wrong, and the only reason I can think this might happen is because their authors write the wrong sorts of comments, comments that largely shouldn’t be written. But proper comments are at least as importan…
Comments are secondary to code. Not that they're less important, but they're usually read when the code isn't obvious.
I read in the following order:
1. Top-level comments or README.md to get an overview. I don't care about the color.
2. The structure of the code - either looking for specific names, through source-code navigation, access of a specific variable, .... Here, non-greyed comments make scanning the file more difficult.
3. Comments that describe what can't be inferred from the code. Symbol names can be seen as headlines for comments - again, secondary to the headline.
Re: LaTeX Makes Me Angry
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
What would be the advantage of the replacement compared to TeX/LaTeX? All the things you listed are already there. I think if you want an easier DSL (which might be fair), you will have to give up some requirement, such as "complete control over typography and formatting". P.S. I can also recommend Latex and Friends from Marc van Dongen. It is a really friendly cookbook that shows what modern LaTeX can do.
> What would be the advantage of the replacement compared to TeX/LaTeX? In my experience, LaTeX is pretty clunky, unintegrated and poorly documented. To do any kind of useful typesetting I have to depend on at least five or six third-party packages, and that’s assuming that I don’t need anything ‘fancy’ like nicely formatted references, customised lists or tables, diagrams, hyperlinks or — God forbid — code blocks wi…
On docs, texlive-full (or similar naming in Guix/OpenBSD/Nix...) will provide the PDF documentation and an intro to LaTeX.
Re: LaTeX Makes Me Angry
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember that my undergrad thesis took ~8 compile passes to link up all the references correctly, and this was so common that the latex IDE I used had that as one of the possible "build" presets.
Yeah I've had some slides with a similar story, Tikz I think is one of the main villains there (memory is a bit hazy though, I've been avoiding that library).
I think the combination of Tikz and Bibtex is all you need to get to 8 compile passes.
Re: LaTeX Makes Me Angry
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMVHO beside plots/formulae/tables etc who are hard to read if just a bit more than deadly simple cases in code, well written pure text AND an outliner (like org-mode or the old CanonCAT etc, now forgotten tools from a more civilized and dead age) are the best way to focus on what you write instead of it's visual aspects. Visual is part of the package for advertisement, not for scientific/important stuff production.…
> Visual is part of the package for advertisement, not for scientific/important stuff production That's where my experience differs. Knowledge is fractal in nature; I can add more details to a paper ad infinitum. Seeing how big the rendered paragraph or section will be is, to me, a crucial hint that it might be time to stop. Seeing how far away two mutually dependent concepts appear in the finished product (when you…
Hum... I think I understand your point but... That's seems more related to marketing than scientific publishing and probably is a widespread style and the reason why many found modern papers boring and deprived of any sentiment...
I understand there are time and "publish or perish" constraints but IMO, maybe in a romantic vision perhaps unrealistic now, a publication should be something BIG, in the sense "I do not publish a small observed thing who happen to be not that special, just a small advancement in something AS A PAPER", should be published as a talk in some conference, in a news group/ML with some colleagues etc but not more than that, feeds form ArXiv and alike are already too much charged to saturate them even more. A paper should be a kind of gem, something that mark a potentially important advancement, observation etc, something anyone interesting in a field and probably some others would read it very attentively.
Caring the presentation like a mechanical article is more a mass-production of articles I expect from a tabloid...
Oh, about certain journals: those who ask for certain files formats (like .doc/x) or give PURE CRAPPY templates should IMVO get what they deserve: be ignored spreading the voice that those who publish with them will be badly seen by their peer just because of the crappy journal choice. I understand their need to be consistent, but they MUST gives state-of-art LaTeX templates, docbook etc not crap. I'm not a scientist and very rarely have had to write small stuff about certain companies infra design and well... I have had hard time not telling some others humans what I think they should do with their stuff... In that case I feel the pain of those who have to deal with them regularly!