The Art of LaTeX: Common mistakes and advice for typesetting proofs
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Re: The Art of LaTeX: Common mistakes and advice for typesetting proofs
#2I have a question: if what you have to write in order to create your beautiful and aesthetically pleasing proof, and thereby "establish your ethos and character" (presumably as a righteous and good), is an ugly and fragile instance of a poorly designed, inherently unreadable, archaic language that embodies none of the characteristics you are after, can the result really be "a work of art that combines both the precision and creativity of your logical thinking, as well as the elegance of a beautifully typeset writing?"
Re: The Art of LaTeX: Common mistakes and advice for typesetting proofs
#3I have a question: if what you have to write in order to create your beautiful and aesthetically pleasing proof, and thereby "establish your ethos and character" (presumably as a righteous and good), is an ugly and fragile instance of a poorly designed, inherently unreadable, archaic language that embodies none of the characteristics you are after, can the result really be "a work of art that combines both the precis…
Well no, but LaTeX should be backwards compatible with TeX so there's always that option.
Re: The Art of LaTeX: Common mistakes and advice for typesetting proofs
#4I have a question: if what you have to write in order to create your beautiful and aesthetically pleasing proof, and thereby "establish your ethos and character" (presumably as a righteous and good), is an ugly and fragile instance of a poorly designed, inherently unreadable, archaic language that embodies none of the characteristics you are after, can the result really be "a work of art that combines both the precis…
Great question! Is there a specific domain/example that you have in mind? I don't think people intentionally use archaic language if their goal is to educate and enlighten, but in papers it is quite common for unnecessary jargon to be peppered in, which while probably obvious to the author, makes it hard for people new to the field to break in.
Re: The Art of LaTeX: Common mistakes and advice for typesetting proofs
#5I have a question: if what you have to write in order to create your beautiful and aesthetically pleasing proof, and thereby "establish your ethos and character" (presumably as a righteous and good), is an ugly and fragile instance of a poorly designed, inherently unreadable, archaic language that embodies none of the characteristics you are after, can the result really be "a work of art that combines both the precis…
Great question! Is there a specific domain/example that you have in mind? I don't think people intentionally use archaic language if their goal is to educate and enlighten, but in papers it is quite common for unnecessary jargon to be peppered in, which while probably obvious to the author, makes it hard for people new to the field to break in.
Realized I misunderstood your question. IMO the main design problem with LaTeX from a usage-standpoint is that there are too many ways of achieving the same thing, and oftentimes none of them is a clear winner. It's still the best option for a usable, programmable typesetting language that we have (i.e writing for-loops to draw structured graphs in TikZ...)
Re: The Art of LaTeX: Common mistakes and advice for typesetting proofs
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great question! Is there a specific domain/example that you have in mind? I don't think people intentionally use archaic language if their goal is to educate and enlighten, but in papers it is quite common for unnecessary jargon to be peppered in, which while probably obvious to the author, makes it hard for people new to the field to break in.
Realized I misunderstood your question. IMO the main design problem with LaTeX from a usage-standpoint is that there are too many ways of achieving the same thing, and oftentimes none of them is a clear winner. It's still the best option for a usable, programmable typesetting language that we have (i.e writing for-loops to draw structured graphs in TikZ...)
My personal beef with LaTeX, other than the utterly atrocious syntax, is that it a.) endlessly barfs on your terminal during its normal operation and b.) does not respond to normal terminal interaction upon an error (wth is it expecting? I interactively edit and correct mistakes!?). So it's scroll blindness and flailing all the way, a kludgy, rickety mess. Not to mention its utter mess of a package management system.
Re: The Art of LaTeX: Common mistakes and advice for typesetting proofs
#7I have a question: if what you have to write in order to create your beautiful and aesthetically pleasing proof, and thereby "establish your ethos and character" (presumably as a righteous and good), is an ugly and fragile instance of a poorly designed, inherently unreadable, archaic language that embodies none of the characteristics you are after, can the result really be "a work of art that combines both the precis…
In this case, of course. The final product (the document), once produced, is much more independent of the underlying code than "normal" software. Once the document has been produced, it doesn't really matter whether you used Word or LaTeX or ConTeXt or whatever.
Re: The Art of LaTeX: Common mistakes and advice for typesetting proofs
#8I have a question: if what you have to write in order to create your beautiful and aesthetically pleasing proof, and thereby "establish your ethos and character" (presumably as a righteous and good), is an ugly and fragile instance of a poorly designed, inherently unreadable, archaic language that embodies none of the characteristics you are after, can the result really be "a work of art that combines both the precis…
In this case, of course. The final product (the document), once produced, is much more independent of the underlying code than "normal" software. Once the document has been produced, it doesn't really matter whether you used Word or LaTeX or ConTeXt or whatever.
Until you have to change, quote, or re-use parts of it, in another document.
Re: The Art of LaTeX: Common mistakes and advice for typesetting proofs
#9TeXmacs allows you to typeset beautiful proofs via a WYSIWYG editor without the pain of TeX/LaTeX.
Note that its name is doubly misleading since it is not based on TeX nor Emacs. It is however inspired by both.
TeXmacs produces documents of similar quality to TeX/LaTeX.
Re: The Art of LaTeX: Common mistakes and advice for typesetting proofs
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
In this case, of course. The final product (the document), once produced, is much more independent of the underlying code than "normal" software. Once the document has been produced, it doesn't really matter whether you used Word or LaTeX or ConTeXt or whatever.
Until you have to change, quote, or re-use parts of it, in another document.
There are tools (i.e https://mathpix.com/) that actually does a pretty great job at LaTeX OCR, although you'll need to re-create labels and the like. I was pleasantly surprised that it replicated alignments & chose the right font faces while using it.