Up and Running With LaTeX - by Alex Kahn

akahn.net

13 points·akahn··4 comments

All the points are good, but it always sounds a little weird to me when people say things like "LaTeX is great because it handles hyphenation." The hyphenation support is part of TeX, which is the programming language, not LaTeX, which is a library built on the TeX language. It's kind of like saying that Rails is great because it supports regular expressions.

Not that this distinction really matters when you use it, but it at least gives credit where it's due (in this case, to Donald Knuth rather than Leslie Lamport for the hyphenation algorithm, which is indeed a brilliant algorithm).

Hey,

That's an important point, thank you. I definitely have had the experience of wondering, "Is this something LaTeX provides, or is it from Memoir?" I guess I should also have been asking myself what comes from LaTeX and what is already part of TeX.

Your Rails analogy is apt, I definitely remember being a Rails n00b and not knowing what was part of Ruby's standard library and what was provided by ActiveSupport.

Cheers, Alex

Every time I use LaTeX I remember what my prof. said to me. "I never could understand why you need to program if you just want to type a document." Me: "Uhhh, so we really really have to use OpenOffice?" Prof: "Yes". My team partner (windows guy): "Yay". Me: "Sign."

I guess your professor didn't have a web page, since that would have involved programming HTML?

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