Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Begin LaTeX in minutes

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 175 posts

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#91

Post by akytt »

1wd wrote: post #42

Just don't try anything that isn't in your typical math paper. There are thousands of LaTeX packages, because they are all broken if you use them in a slightly unexpected way, so (reminiscent of JavaScript) a new package is created to "fix" it. Tables? Here you go. Oh, you wanted nested tables? For that you need to switch to an entirely different package. Oh, and that one doesn't support splitting up tables over mult…

It's not that bad. I've been using LaTex for everything for the past five years and never really bump into things I can't do any more. I've learnt that when people really want to do stuff, they fix the packages. Thus, when things do not work, most of people do not really need it. If so, do I?

That's not to say the learning curve is not similar to the cliffs of Dover. Because it is. And stackoverflow is your friend. Yes, you can't do everything but you can do most of things you are meant to do.

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#92

Post by williamstein »

daemonk wrote: post #50
PleaseHelpMe wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

checkout sharelatex.com

I've used sharelatex and overleaf. I find them great. But what people in my field want are tracked changes features that you see in MS word. So deleted/added text highlighted by who changed it, comment boxes, etc.

I wrote SageMathCloud's collaborative online latex editor. Like ShareLatex, it's collaborative and 100% open source. There's a docker image for very easy personal hosting. SageMathCloud tracks all changes with a "TimeTravel" button for browsing history. You can click a "changes" button and get a range slider to see the exact changes (and who changed them) between any two points in time, with a display similar to github's diff view. It has split pane editing so you can edit two parts of the same latex document at once, along with forward and inverse search. There's also a full terminal (and Jupyter notebooks), in case you want to mix latex with computation/data, or want to use rsync, git, etc.

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#93

Post by auxym »

mtrn wrote: post #3

I've written my first LaTeX documents with LyX [1], a wonderful application, if you're just getting started. [1] https://www.lyx.org/

For me LyX hits a sweetspot: it does 95% of what I need to do in Latex without ever having to type a backslash (or having to lookup whatever amsmath command is used for setting a matrix). But when I do need to drop down to latex to do something unsupported, I don't need to fight lyx.

I wrote my paper and master's thesis with a workflow involving LyX, LaTeX and python (scipy, numpy, mpl, doit for building the whole thing). The doit script ran the analysis pipeline, exported the figures, exported a .tex using the LyX CLI and ran all the latex/bibtex stuff to generate a PDF and and zip with all the necessary stuff for submission.

My colleagues looked at me weirdly (mech. engineering department), but I think it was worth it. Probably not time efficient, but at least for the peace of mind.

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#94

Post by akytt »

zuzun wrote: post #67
1wd wrote: post #42

Just don't try anything that isn't in your typical math paper. There are thousands of LaTeX packages, because they are all broken if you use them in a slightly unexpected way, so (reminiscent of JavaScript) a new package is created to "fix" it. Tables? Here you go. Oh, you wanted nested tables? For that you need to switch to an entirely different package. Oh, and that one doesn't support splitting up tables over mult…

Most people don't want to learn about the LaTeX (resp. TeX) internals or typesetting in general, they just want to produce documents. Including a package and using its functionality is the easiest way to get started, but sooner or later you'll hit a wall. Writing LaTeX documents becomes easier once you understand the basics: plain boxes, positioning, macros, lengths, counters. Granted, you need to have a fair share o…

There are cool things happening around compiling markdown to LaTex. Especially funky things happen when you mix in R as well. Taking the strong sides of all three would be lovely.

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#95

Post by nanna »

daemonk wrote: post #65
JorgeGT wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the fact that it is a plaintext-based format makes it work extremely well with git. So for collaboration you can have a repo (even hosted in github) and your co-authors can propose merges, etc. It is extremely nice to be able to see the log of commits and who changed exactly what at any point in time, something I think it's difficult in complex formats like Word. Or you can use sharelatex.com as others have com…

This all sounds great. I'll definitely look into it for myself. However, coming from academic biology (I am a bioinformatician) where most of my collaborators won't even know what git is, this is just not a realistic solution. If Sharelatex (I actually wrote my phd thesis on sharelatex) or Overleaf (I used for my last publication) have a nice built-in GUI that does all of this auto-magically, I think a lot of people…

I work on a popular academic philosophy magazine which is now transitioning from a centralised inDesign model to a distributed LaTeX model. The idea is that aside from the egrarious costs involved with inDesign (licencing, buying great big computers to run it), the main issue is that it centralises our production around a few people who have both inDesign and typography skills. LaTeX, on the other hand, allows us to abstract away the typography skills with a class file, and have everyone learn some essential syntaxs such as \footnote{}, \includegraphics{}, \begin{quote}, etc. We'll use git or, if people really can't get their heads around a nice git gui, dropbox, to collaborate. I really can't understand why this isn't a more popular approach, especially for academics.

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#96

Post by Steuard »

thomasahle wrote: post #12

From various tutorials I feel my knowledge of latex is very top down, and not very deep. I just recently realized that {} are not needed for singletons, so I may for instance write \frac12 for 1/2. Can anybody recommend a more bottom up guide? Something more similar to learning a programming language, where you start with the basic syntax and build on features iteratively? Is Knuth's book the best way to go? Or is th…

I really enjoyed learning the details from Lamport's own book: LaTeX: A Document Preparation System. It covers most of the essential features, but maybe just as importantly it describes the philosophy behind LaTeX (which is rather different from the philosophy behind an editor like Word, and thus calls for a correspondingly different mindset while writing). Yes, the book is 20 years old, but then, so is most of LaTeX.

https://www.pearsonhighered.com/program/Lamport-La-Te-X-A-Do...

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#97

Post by massysett »

supergarfield wrote: post #70
1wd wrote: post #42

Just don't try anything that isn't in your typical math paper. There are thousands of LaTeX packages, because they are all broken if you use them in a slightly unexpected way, so (reminiscent of JavaScript) a new package is created to "fix" it. Tables? Here you go. Oh, you wanted nested tables? For that you need to switch to an entirely different package. Oh, and that one doesn't support splitting up tables over mult…

This is also very true in my experience, and seems to be in large part caused by the absence of proper namespacing, scoping, and general rules about how packages should be implemented to minimize bad interactions. I feel like this is a significant shortcoming of Latex, and it really is a mystery to me why no one has seriously tried to write an alternative typesetting system. I know Latex is good enough for lots of ap…

There are plenty of alternatives.

LaTeX is merely a TeX macro package. There are others, such as ConTeXt. Also, if you hate the pick-a-package mentality, there are LaTeX packages that attempt to do it all in one package--Memoir is one.

You can elect to opt out of fancy layers on top of TeX and go with Extended Plain TeX or even just writing in plain TeX, which apparently Knuth did.

Don't like TeX at all? Try roff (or, more realistically these days, groff.) There is a package of roff macros called Mom, which now comes with groff.

In my experience roff is a better UNIX citizen than Tex & Co. I can put roff in a pipeline and it will do what I expect. TeX programs generally do not like to be run in this fashion. Perhaps as a consequence, it seems roff is hard to find outside of UNIX (roff is sort of a UNIX artifact) while TeX and friends run on Windows. I have slapped together a few utilities (I call one "latexstream") so that I can use LaTeX from a shell prompt without dealing with a bunch of temporary files scattered everywhere.

My needs are somewhat simple: I have a system that prints recipes and grocery lists. Nothing beats paper for a task like this. (I see some people using iPads in the kitchen. Forget that. I'm not taking greasy fingers to an expensive tablet.) Generally I am not happy using LaTeX for this. I actually do not want to separate content and presentation. I don't like having to muck around with packages to get what I want. And I don't like dealing with huge TeX distributions when I just need a few things.

But every time I look into all the alternatives I outlined above, I wind up sighing and sticking with LaTeX. None of these alternatives have the community that LaTeX has. I can do relatively simple things in LaTeX (like columns done in particular ways) that would require me to write a lot of code in plain TeX or in roff. Yes, TeX distributions are large, but I am now figuring out how to pare them down to just what I need. (Even though TeX Live suggests you install the whole thing. That's gigabytes. I'm on a smallish SSD. No thanks.)

So folks definitely have come up with alternatives to LaTeX. But if most folks are like me, I imagine they look at these alternatives and conclude that LaTeX with a gazillion packages works well enough.

[edit] forgot yet another alternative: Apache FOP, which uses XML. Some Docbook tool chains use it. IMO the output from those never look as good as the tool chains that ultimately use TeX.

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#98

Post by patrickdavey »

massysett wrote: post #97
supergarfield wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also very true in my experience, and seems to be in large part caused by the absence of proper namespacing, scoping, and general rules about how packages should be implemented to minimize bad interactions. I feel like this is a significant shortcoming of Latex, and it really is a mystery to me why no one has seriously tried to write an alternative typesetting system. I know Latex is good enough for lots of ap…

There are plenty of alternatives. LaTeX is merely a TeX macro package. There are others, such as ConTeXt. Also, if you hate the pick-a-package mentality, there are LaTeX packages that attempt to do it all in one package--Memoir is one. You can elect to opt out of fancy layers on top of TeX and go with Extended Plain TeX or even just writing in plain TeX, which apparently Knuth did. Don't like TeX at all? Try roff (or…

I don't suppose you have your recipe system online anywhere? I've been contemplating making one for a while (I really like the recipe cards on cookingforengineers.com)

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#99

Post by amelius »

yannis wrote: post #86
amelius wrote: post #48

Sometimes I wonder: why can't LaTeX be just as simple as HTML, or perhaps even simpler? Except perhaps for pagination and available default fonts, HTML practically fulfills all my formatting needs. (Note: HTML includes MathML, a mathematical formula markup language). And for automatically numbering tables and figures, one can easily write a script that is completely independent from the underlying formatting language…

Try writing a 300 page book in HTML, create citations and bibliographies, table of contents etc. Then convert it to a pdf, say using Pandoc and then you will have a better understanding where TeX/LaTeX fits in. Write also some complicated formulae using MathML. Save the document and render it again in 30 years! TeX was designed to typeset a document always the same way on any machine that could run it. You can typese…

I'm not saying that HTML is totally suitable, but a slight modification of it could be, and it would be a lot simpler to use than TeX. And who says that it could not be rendered in the same way in 30 years?

By the way, the one thing that disappoints me most about LaTeX is that you often cannot nest one environment in another without running into issues. In HTML the "composability" is much better.

Re: Begin LaTeX in minutes

#100

Post by massysett »

patrickdavey wrote: post #98
massysett wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of alternatives. LaTeX is merely a TeX macro package. There are others, such as ConTeXt. Also, if you hate the pick-a-package mentality, there are LaTeX packages that attempt to do it all in one package--Memoir is one. You can elect to opt out of fancy layers on top of TeX and go with Extended Plain TeX or even just writing in plain TeX, which apparently Knuth did. Don't like TeX at all? Try roff (or…

I don't suppose you have your recipe system online anywhere? I've been contemplating making one for a while (I really like the recipe cards on cookingforengineers.com)

No, it is a nasty mess of shell scripts and Haskell, though mostly Haskell now. (There used to be XML for recipes, what a mess.) It is useless to others without documentation, which would take a long time to write. Maybe one day. It makes grocery lists with items in categories, which saves me so much time that I have been using it every week for years. But if someone made something decent I would happily pay for it.
Post reply on HN