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The LaTeX Fetish (2016)

danielallington.net

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Re: The LaTeX Fetish (2016)

#81

Post by miles »

JelteF wrote: post #68

I've switched from writing latex to writing pandoc markdown. I then convert it to latex and then to pdf. This gets the same result as latex, but is much easier to type for common stuff like, sections, emphasis and verbatim. It also allows you to type "&" symbols anywhere. When I require "advanced" stuff like tables and figures you can easily fallback to inline latex commands within you're markdown. It really is a sig…

Excellent idea!

Here is a blog post which covers the same approach with examples, templates, etc:

Easy LaTeX with Markdown and Pandoc http://tech.lauritz.me/easy-latex-with-markdown-pandoc/

Re: The LaTeX Fetish (2016)

#82

Post by minademian »

Pretty measured essay. I went through my own LaTex fetish phase. The typesetting can get in the way of the writing. I've found it easier to first write in a text editor and then start typesetting once I'm pretty much sure of the content.

Re: The LaTeX Fetish (2016)

#83

Post by yorwba »

dingo_bat wrote: post #60
x0x0 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other huge advantage that you almost touched on is tex files are text, so you can source control them. This is particularly important if different people are working on different chunks of a document. You can kind of hack around this in word, but it's a giant pita.

There are git review tools that are able to diff docx.

How do those work with the rest of the git machinery? Does git add -p work? How are merge conflicts handled? What about git blame?

It seems to me that that everything about git is based on text files that are changed by adding and removing lines, but if there is a way to replace that behavior to handle non-textual file formats, I'd be very interesting in learning about it.

Re: The LaTeX Fetish (2016)

#85

Post by svckr »

cavDXF wrote: post #63

One passage made me a bit mad: "[...], but for now it is enough to observe that people who don’t know how to use a particular tool very well are being told to throw that tool away and learn to use an entirely new one on the grounds that it will enable them to do things that they could have done at least as well with the old one – which is (when you think about it) a little peculiar if the aim is really to help people…

- complains about people being told to use a different tool

- goes on to tell people to use a different tool

Re: The LaTeX Fetish (2016)

#86

Post by pantalaimon »

moomin wrote: post #71

So, to demonstrate how bad LaTeX is, he picks the single most markup heavy thing you do (barring tables) and compares it to plain text? Plain text, I'll point out, that doesn't format the same way. In practice, there _are_ a bunch of extra steps to get this working in Word, they're just not easy to express in a text document. Then he goes on to show the example of trying to find a spelling error. Ignoring that this j…

I must admit that getting text to flow around images has always lead to cascading nightmares for me in LaTeX too.

Re: The LaTeX Fetish (2016)

#87

Post by lmm »

b0rsuk wrote: post #73
b0rsuk wrote: post #66

I feel offended by the omission of my personal favorite, reStructuredText (reST). It's a very robust and readable markup language, and can easily generate documents in HTML, Linux man, latex, pdf, odt and more. If readability of LaTeX bothers you so much, use reST. Best of both worlds, really. I only roll up my sleeves with LaTeX when I need precise control over appearance, like writing a CV or a board game manual.

Some good points for reST instead of markdown: * Markdown has many flavors, reST is standarized * reST is extensible * reST is semantic, Markdown is just text. http://ericholscher.com/blog/2016/mar/15/dont-use-markdown-f... reST is marginally harder than markdowns, so is it really worth sticking with MD ?

That margin is huge. I've worked with rST, and it's just not fun to write in the way that Markdown is; even a little friction makes a huge difference to the writing experience.

Re: The LaTeX Fetish (2016)

#88

Post by kutkloon7 »

cavDXF wrote: post #63

One passage made me a bit mad: "[...], but for now it is enough to observe that people who don’t know how to use a particular tool very well are being told to throw that tool away and learn to use an entirely new one on the grounds that it will enable them to do things that they could have done at least as well with the old one – which is (when you think about it) a little peculiar if the aim is really to help people…

Well, I don't agree with the author of the article in that I do think that Latex does offer an advantage in many of the use cases. In any case, any student in STEM is supposed to write some reports, and LaTeX is the only choice that makes sense, since there are not many other options with the same support for mathematical typesetting.

However, you're twisting his words a bit. He says that it's not good to learn a new tool if you have an old one which can do the job. Not that you should avoid things for which you need new tools.

I'm all for learning new skills and ideas. However, I hate learning new tools. The ideas in web development are not hard at all. However, there is an idiotic amount of trendy tools and programming languages, and that is something I would object to, because it costs a lot of people a lot of effort.

Re: The LaTeX Fetish (2016)

#89

Post by peterburkimsher »

moomin wrote: post #71

So, to demonstrate how bad LaTeX is, he picks the single most markup heavy thing you do (barring tables) and compares it to plain text? Plain text, I'll point out, that doesn't format the same way. In practice, there _are_ a bunch of extra steps to get this working in Word, they're just not easy to express in a text document. Then he goes on to show the example of trying to find a spelling error. Ignoring that this j…

> work with multiple people or track the history of a document

I often proofread for my friends. I tell them that they must use Track Changes in Word. Is there a better tool that you recommend?

Re: The LaTeX Fetish (2016)

#90

Post by peterburkimsher »

coliveira wrote: post #47
throwaway2016a wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked with O'Reilly and Wrox and both have you do one document per chapter. Anything over 30 pages and MS Word starts to choke, especially with a lot of diagrams. Neither gave me the choice to use LaTeX although I'm sure they might have been open to it had I asked.

You touched on the weak spot of MS Word. It works great for small documents, but anything longer and it takes forever and crashes a lot. In other words, MS doesn't scale, and I wouldn't do anything other than writing pure text in MS Word.

I had trouble with MS Word due to auto-saving. I wrote RAMDiskAccelerator to keep the document on a RAM disk and back it up regularly so those auto-saves wouldn't get in the way. It worked much better after.

http://peterburk.github.io/programs/#RAMDiskAccelerator

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