No it's not. I like being able to use my favorite editor to write markup a lot better than being forced into a particular WYSIWYG editor.
> In short, run `pdflatex` in a VM.
Yeah with a premature prankster you might have to.
Not to speak about collaborating. Oh the fun of sharing a Word doc between 10 people, each one with a slight different version that messes the formats so badly (like that one guy who uses OpenOffice) and constantly making phone calls to ask others to close the document to not overwrite it.
Meanwhile with LaTeX you have plain text source files so you can have nice version control with git or oven github, each person working in their local repo or even branch, with the document having a nice history of commits, blames, merges, etc. Maybe not to the average office worker, but for anyone with experience in coding / version control is a godsend.
You can setup git (or your preferred VCS) hooks to make this relatively manageable.
It is frustrating, because the popular choices all make better demos. But recovery is often so painful that you start living in fear of formatting mistakes.
<rant> We had to constantly clear cookies, restart the computer, delete our local OneDrive copies and do other quirky work-arounds to be able to do anything. Not to mention the constant crashing and general bugs that plagued the process.
As an example: during the final reading of the paper (a three hour session), I had restarted my computer 8 times and created about 15 local copies of the word document "just in case".
I have heard similar horror stories from other students as well.
It is genuinely shocking to me that Microsoft is getting away with this horrendous performance. </rant>
> Yeah with a premature prankster you might have to.
Anything that runs on untrusted input should be run in an isolated environment.
When it's your own stuff do as you please. When it's a thing you got from somewhere and just blindly run it on your machine, might want to think twice. That advise doesn't just go for LaTeX.
Just because you consider it immature doesn't mean it's not genuinely exploitable and someone couldn't use it against you. If anything, taking the approach of "only immature pranksters do this" probably makes it easier for someone to sneak it past you.
Not because of my coworkers posing threats. And this wouldn't have to come from a coworker. Though that's what the author suggests the issue isn't limited to that which unfortunately seems to have taken the upper hand in the discussions around this.
But I do most of my development in isolated environments. Not because I don't trust my coworkers but because people can fuck up, things sneak in and can break my system or leave it vulnerable.
If a colleague sends me something to review, I trust that he doesn't want to hack me. Someone can always use physical access to capture my keystrokes in some way.
> doesn't mean it's not genuinely exploitable
Agreed, so the message should be "don't run random LaTeX files from the internet or classmates or something", not "oh hey look at me annoying colleagues at work".
Now we actually compile source files into documents and get surprised that someone might trick you into running malware.
Of course it won't help if your coworkers don't also sign things they send to you.
It's like Office macro viruses but for nerds.
Yes, it is. That's like saying I prefer bash because it's the same on all platform as opposed to windows proprietary UI.
Is latex powerful? Yes. Is it easy? Not for the average user.
Have you tried writing technical reports in Word? It's a nightmare. Word's numbering and reference functionality, not to mention its citation functions are way worse than what you can achieve with TeX. Cooperating on writing the same document with many people? Yeah, forget about it. One guy has Mac OS with one Word version and then you have three others with different combinations of Windows/Word, and the whole thing implodes in a cascade of formatting glitches.
Also, I'd say that if you can't write your technical report in LaTeX because LaTeX is too hard, let's go shopping (in the Microsoft App Store), then maybe you shouldn't be writing a technical report.
Not to mention that nobody has to write an ounce of LaTeX since the advent of pandoc.
When you make a syntax error (missing closing brace, forgot to escape that underscore, etc), what's the probability that the latex error message will be at all relevant to the source of the error? It's pretty damn low. In my experience, debugging LaTeX is anything but easy.
Word may make it easier to half-ass something. But its error reporting is way worse than LaTeX's — it doesn't have any. If something's fucked up, it's fucked up, and good luck finding out what you did wrong. Writing a consistently styled, readable and good looking document in Word is anything but easy.
So we're back to square one: typesetting a document is hard, and there is no software solution that makes it easy (for simple stuff, pandoc comes close.) You'll have to learn to do it.
Like any complex program there are things to learn and quirks to get used to, but it can be a very powerful platform once you get past that.
The average user of course doesn't even know what the difference between a text editor and MS Word is but I'd argue that it's not much harder to learn using something like LyX than learning Word. Word only wins because of peer pressure. Almost all offices use MS Office, so you're expected to use that, even for documents where simple Markdown would be completely sufficient.
Which is always, because defaults are ugly as hell. Might work for math papers, but not much else.
My only real issue with LaTeX though is its error reporting, which is less readable than C++ template metaprogramming fails, and the fact you have to compile the same file $magic times in a row to get a stable render.
There are shittons of templates.
Oh, that's so true. I've spend far to many hours trying to help debug LaTeX code from friends and coworkers.
I'd give Office users that MS Office is easier to use if you want to write one page of plain text without anything else but above that Office is just a huge pain in the a... But the biggest problem I have with Office isn't whether it's hard to use or not but that the text it produces is simply ugly. Especially so if you have to work between different versions of MS Office and maybe even an OO user within the loop. (That would than probably be me...) The text layout MS Office produces is simply hideous.
The error messages suck though, that's true.
EDIT: nevermind, I didn't know Latexmk is a thing and is popular.
You should look into LatexMk[0].
I now use rubber[0] to avoid this. I especially like that it has a --clean option :)
LaTeX is easy to use, but not easy to learn.
edits: typos.
But the ``problem'' is people who insist on using it for everything. Have a memo? Better set up a repo. Writing a report for a manger? Latex!
With the simpler things where you won't be cross referencing constantly and any figures that you have you want absolute control over placement, Word is the way to go. And pretty much the moment you are done your dissertation, that is the majority of what you'll write. Even in academia you'll likely spend more time writing grants and memos than papers. And, with at least the former, what matters most is having the figure easily seen and fitting the format requirements (specifically page count).
Use the best tool for any given job.
Oftentimes, I can (correctly) correlate "weird" looking documents with MS Word or Open/LibreOffice, eg: when reading papers. It's a surprising subconscious estimate and I don't know what throws my sensibilities off! Maybe I'm used to a higher standard of typesetting, or maybe it's just that I'm used to reading LaTeX output. I have heard the same from multiple academics who have spent some years looking at LaTeX output.
I wouldn't be surprised if people spent more time looking at beautiful documents, compared to uglier counterparts. Just like any other UX. As always, the document creator has to decide whether it's worth the extra effort.
http://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/435x597x...
Had I written it in word I would have tossed the disk into the trash, and watched a movie.
LaTeX, the gift that keeps on giving.
OTOH: for many business cases where text is kept sparse and randomly placed PowerPoint excels. And new versions have somewhat taken Tufte's criticism to heart -- the smart, make-a-diagram-for-text enable a lot of conceptual collaboration across a widely multidisciplinar organization. I mean, sometimes you're writing documentation for your fellow nerds (i.e. the equations behind some code you wrote) and sometimes you're explaining economic concepts to lawyers.
(I think (we) nerds tend to undervalue the work and insights of people like lawyers and accountants; and the importance of clear communication. But I digress on a digression...)
"LaTeX users were slower than Word users, wrote less text, made more typesetting, grammatical, and formatting errors"
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Agh, I keep on making the mistake of doing homework directly to LaTeX. It seems that you're able to think directly from the page but it ultimately slows you down. I know way too much about mathematical typesetting as it is -- before I start making up rules about how Expectation should be \mathsf{E} and writing huge custom command files.
This one exam I started doing all the exercises in the book into LaTeX. As an aspiring mathematician, I need to learn to better appreciate pencil and paper.
I spend hours trying to fix bugs for my master dissertation and gave up with two unfixed problems: (1) missing line breaking in references containing accentuated characters and (2) including some non BMP code-point character.
And some package can mess up with some other packages so coming with a solution can sometime break another thing.
I find the "favourite editor" a moot point, when it is unclear if there even is an editor that works with latex. Setting up a pipeline that can give you a PDF is also difficult beyond reason.
And then we haven't even mentioned the code. Latex is not mark-up, it is code and it is one of the most horrible programming languages I have ever had the displeasure of using.
Writing latex is painful to say the least.
One feels that the pain was worth it when their existing .doc files render differently using another Word version.
I don't know how to write a single line of latex, but I can write a beautiful paper, full with footnotes, links, italics, quotations etc. thanks to emacs.
On the other hand, on some larger papers with heavy footnotes, sometimes tex doesn't compile. Then, I find the error through trial-and-error by editing the tex file.
But that's an advanced use case :-)
There are actually some online services that have web-based latex editors, and they may use this tool to generate PDFs. I just sent one of them an email to make sure they know about it.