Word processors are ditching equation editors in favour of LaTeX
go.nature.com
go.nature.com
For blind users, LaTeX Tables come out as an unreadable mess. The large-scale use of Latex to generate PDFs makes academia extremely unfriendly to anyone who needs accessible documents.
-Java: https://tabula.technology
-Python: https://github.com/chezou/tabula-py
What can authors do to make their documents more accessible? Distribute the source? Stick to some formatting guidelines?
In fact, concretely, upload your paper to arxiv which will demand the latex source of your paper.
\usepackage[spanish]{babel}
LaTeX produces great looking documents, but I find it a giant pain to use.
In a word processor, an image size can be changed by inadvertently clicking on something, the style of a text selection can be changed by moving the mouse scroll wheel on the font drop-down menu, page numbering may not refresh when working on a large document, inserting a figure may screw up table or image numbering, etc. You have to be constantly checking your multi page document to make sure everything is still ok.
As a teacher, my heuristic is simple: if I'm authoring a document that is less than 3 pages, I use Word. Otherwise, I use LaTeX.
For example, I write exams and syllabi in LaTeX. Quizzes, assignments and handouts in Word. It has worked well for me for a decade.
Or type a letter, or open the document on a different computer, or set margins, paragraph size, printer, whatever.
But yes, just clicking an image won't change it.
I'm not sure what you find difficult about margins. You define them in document class. It is literally top, bottom, left, right, or height, width. Or you use the template that a publication is giving you. Are you doing something more complicated? If so, I can't imagine this is common.
Headers and footers? I never use headers. But I use footnotes (\footnote{this is all you need}).
Honestly I'm curious what issues you face. I'd gladly lend a hand (LaTeX is far from trivial) and I'd like to learn from others. But I'm honestly confused at the complaints. There's plenty of things to complain about LaTeX, but these aren't the challenges I face.
As for margins, I’ve had issues where changing the margins makes the page numbering “fall off” the page, and as for headers and footers, asserting that you “don’t need” them is not a valid option for many people producing documents.
Also to be clear, I’m not saying LaTeX is impossible or even hard to use, I’m complaining that certain tasks in it should be so much easier than they are.
Disclaimer: I'm mostly a nix user and so doing anything Word generally ends up as a pain for me, but I understand it isn't for most others.
One thing that I find useful is to have semantic line breaks in the source. That is, instead of using automatic or static word wrap, introduce line breaks at the end of sentences or clauses. This makes it somewhat more convenient to look at diffs.
The conclusion doesn't follow from the premise.
Who said "editing plain text" is more accessible (in the accessibility for people with impairments sense) than a dedicated editor that can help them with assistive technologies?
>with the emphasis being on "see" -- you must be able to see to be aware of the markup
Not anymore than you must be able to see to edit a text document. The markup can be read back to the user (and is , e.g. "bold emphasized words end bold".
http://latex-access.sourceforge.net/
The software is designed to work with the LaTeX source, rather than with the ensuing PDFs. From what I can tell, it's not very complete -- but it certainly suggests to me that LaTeX provides a platform which can be built upon.
However, none of these systems work well, and I think it'd an unsolvable problem due to the fundamental foundation of TeX, which is actually a text rewriting system, so when using packages there never is a nice semantic description of the page. The only thing to do is to rewrite every package in another language, which describes semantically how to latex should be interpreted.
What would an ideal solution look like? Say I have a complicated equation. How could I present it (in any format) so that a blind person could read it, and understand it as easily as possible?
This isn’t the 1980’s. We have better technology.
Given source code there’s no reason the document couldn’t be made available in a variety of formats, including more accessible formats than PDF.
But we stick to avatistic document representations because that’s what everyone has always done.
Academic papers should have rich media. High resolution images and video.
Bah hum bug!
I find myself scrolling down then up, down then up. I also have to manually control the zoom so text fills my screen width. Then I had to scroll left and right. And when I want to scroll vertically I have to be careful to not screw up my horizontal position. It’s super frustrating.
I don’t think a single blog in the world uses a two column view. If it were an actually useful format for sharing information digitally then it would be more prevalent.
At least in iOS...
Well, yeah, you don't typically print blogs. Remember that academic publications are still printed, and columnar presentation can be very useful for annotation.
And some e-readers do support two column layouts, although it only makes sense if you have a wide screen.
I hate having to pan and scan a PDF file on my phone, and the fixed pagination only makes sense when printed. Even on most desktop screens a letter/a4 page is too long.
Genuine question but can you think of a website that uses reactive HTML properly and mind sharing it? I find that most websites seem to just put a maximum width on a page and call it a day.
In many cases we are talking about documents written using brand-new notation never used in print, but only on chalkboards or scribbled on scratch paper (by the author).
It just happens that LaTeX is a more expressive and precise tool for expressing arbitrary semi-structured 2-dimmensional symbolic formulas than available alternatives.
And we still print them out. People still prefer to read on paper. This doesn't change no matter how much the digital revolution wages on.
It's useful because it's a standardized language everyone knows and can be applied across the web, e.g. on many StackExchange sites (at least the TeX subset via MathJax), but it's too limited to be held up as a standard to move toward.
For a discussion of some of its limitations and things that can be improved: [The LATEX3 Project][1] (1999).
Personally, though, my main criticism of LaTeX is that its logic is static and based in plaintext. The future is in interactive documents (e.g., in the direction of [Wolfram's][2]), not statically compiling plaintext to image-like documents.
Of course, credit to where credit is due: LaTeX was a hugely powerful tool that's done a lot of good in the world. It also continues to be useful for many purposes, especially due to its widescale adoption from this bright history. It's a great page for the history books -- but, it's not the future.
[1]: https://www.latex-project.org/help/documentation/ltx3info.pd...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computable_Document_Format
For example, are you implying that the modern web is somehow too complex? Or/and are you implying that we should've stuck to some simpler alternative than the modern web? And if so, what might that alternative have been?
I don't mean to put words in your mouth, just trying to figure out what you meant.
But, I'm sorry, I have nothing to propose on how to simplify the web. And it would also be offtopic here in this thread... :-) I just believe that adding complexity is most of the time a bad idea.
You're right, the broader issue of ingrained standards creating cultural inertia is a big topic that's probably too much to address here.
As with any long-term speculation, many years from now people may very well get rid of the TeX ecosystem altogether. During our lifetimes, though, I'm skeptical of seeing major changes in (pure) mathematics publishing. As unixhero pointed out, jupyter notebooks and the like will gain further adoption, and the applied math crowd, scientists and engineers will occasionally rant about having to choose between notebooks and LaTeX... c'est la vie!
Sure, there is a space for interactive documents, but LaTeX doesn't even try to compete there.
And honestly, I love plaintext way more that any WYSIWYG format. If proprietary Wolfram stuff is the future, then I don't like the future.
I still hear about people who prefer slide rules (over calculators), or derivative tables (over symbolic calculators), or steam tables (over CAD), or cameras with film (over digital), or dumb phones (over smart phones), etc.. These people just love the tools that they've known; it's part of their workflow, and they wouldn't be happy with a change even if there were some utilitarian motivation for it.
And I'm sure we can find people who'll say that the slide rule will never go away. And maybe, to some extent, they're right?
Which is to say, I don't think everyone's going to give up the old stuff. I suspect that many people will allow the world pass them by. And I don't know if they're necessarily wrong, to live the way that they want. Just how I suspect this'll play out.
This is a pretty patronising way to talk about people who use feature phones and LaTeX. Newer, more powerful tools are not necessarily better. Just look at the web technology that HN runs on!
Honestly, I'd prefer a version of HN that had some more modern features. It's the community that makes this place worthwhile.
I sometimes wonder if the folks behind HN keep the retro style to make that point about growing a community. This is, perhaps they're trying to say that a business's value isn't just in the technology, but also in the human capital? Or not to over-engineer a product when the current solution works?
The assignments given to high school students requiring high-precision calculations that cannot be done efficiently without a handheld electronic calculator are almost universally a pedagogically worthless waste of time. Most problems would benefit from being conceptually more interesting / more involved, but using simpler numbers.
Slide rules are much better tools than handheld calculators for giving students an intuitive understanding of the relevant mathematical functions, as well as learning about place value, numerical precision, .... The students who use slide rules are getting a better education, and wasting less of their time.
For high school work, the 2–3 digits of precision provided by a slide rule are entirely adequate, and with just a bit of practice they are very fast and effective practical tools, not appreciably slower than handheld calculators for basic use.
Any computation too demanding for a slide rule (e.g. physical simulations, statistical analysis, plotting complicated mathematical functions, ...) should be typed on a full-sized keyboard in a proper programming environment.
I also think younger students (3rd–8th grade) should be working with freeform counting boards, like the ones used in Ancient Greece/Rome and medieval Europe. IMO these are better preparation for algorithmic thinking than doing arithmetic using pen and paper. (Students should continue using pen and paper; just not exclusively.)
* * *
Smart phones are definitely a double-edged sword. They offer many wonderful conveniences, but they are also extremely addictive and are in practice also doing incredible damage to people’s a ability to concentrate, do creative work, maintain healthy face-to-face social relationships, get enough sleep, etc.
LaTeX vs. WYSIWYG is more like a plain text programming language vs. a graphical one.
The more general the more complex a problem, the more likely plain text solutions win over solutions that might be more convenient in specialized cases.
The future isn't LaTeX. It's the much better, native unicode, normal font using, flavours of TeX, like XeLaTeX or LuaTex.
It is the stacking of macro's on top of macro's and the fact that there is no 'looking back'. Any kind of 'look back' functionality requires a second pass and the .aux file.
I think something like HTML / CSS would make a lot more sense. Essentially, we already have this atm (you have a document file, and a document type).
An alternative would be some extension of markdown with a separate file for display logic. I fear it would be hard to get that extensible enough though.
I thought that it was common to compile LaTeX into postscript.
Literally the best feature. Universal, easy to manage with text editors, text processing tools, version control, etc. The future should be going back to this, imo.
>The future is in interactive documents (e.g., in the direction of [Wolfram's][2]), not statically compiling plaintext to image-like documents.
Jesus I hope not. Text is and forever will be the superlative format for information - images and videos can be brilliant for aiding the understanding of new ideas, but they are awful as a reference. You can search text, you can't search for images or within a video. And those are not problems to be solved - things should just simply be in text.
With LaTeX your references get updated when you add new figures or tables without having to think about it. The same holds for the references. The formatting of sections and titles is kept (the only way to change the format is that you really want to).
In the Word-templates for papers of conferences there are always so many rules about the formatting. Most of the people never satisfies all those rules, even if they started with the template. I blame word for that, because there is no way to enforce a template (take care of the references, captions, etc.). The last year I just stopped sending word documents to the conferences I go, and instead created an equivalent latex template for them (one of them got even officially accepted). I prefer to invest a few days in making a good LaTeX template than loosing much more days fighting against the Word-nonsense.
It is true that LaTeX requires some time to learn, but it definitely compensates for the time you can loose using word.
Yes but with LaTeX (or anything else that requires signifcant time to learn) you have to make a noticeable investment of your time upfront. If you already use and know Word you may be aware of its shortcomings but it can still be difficult to justify spending the time required to learning something else.
Especially because while you know that your current system (in this case Word) is annoying, you also know that it works. In the sense that you are able to produce whatever it is that you are using it for. Even though you might also recognize that the result could be better.
With switching to anything new, you don't know
- How much time it will take for you to learn it and become effective in using it.
- If it will solve the problems that what you are currently using has.
- That it won't have other problems instead.
And I think to a lot of people the perceived risk outweighs the potential gain. Especially for people who are working a full time job, have a family etc.
Furthermore, a Word document can be edited by "anyone". If you collaborate with someone else on something, switching to LaTeX means that either they have to learn it too, or they will have to tell you what changes to make and then you must do the editing.
Also, not every document is worth typing out in LaTeX.
I used LaTeX for a couple of years. It has some benefits but I rarely use it myself any longer. Most of my documents I write in Google Docs or in Markdown. Sometimes I use Markdown with a sprinkle of LaTeX and run it through pandoc to produce a pretty PDF with some formulas without having to use almost any LaTeX at all except for in a few select places in the document. For some documents I use Adobe InDesign.
Even one of my best friends who used to be a hardcore proponent of using LaTeX for everything I don't think he's using it that much any longer. Not to the extent he used to back when we were in the university.
In summary, the time cost is a hard sell and it's not given that the time spent learning it will actually be worth it.
Word documents can be edited by people who have access to an appropriate version of Word (I do not, admittedly by choice) but the documents themselves are binary (ok, xml) mess, whereas LaTeX ones are greppable, searcheable, etc. They also 'age' much better. I can still LaTeX most documents from 20 years ago (sometimes with minor changes).
As a disclaimer, I am one of those people who uses (La)TeX for everything. I know TeX intimately to the point that I messed with the source code several times and wrote tens of thousands of TeX macros (this is not an exaggeration). I may be biased but I still feel that learning LaTeX is well worth the modest effort it takes to start writing LaTeX documents. And the typesetting TeX is capable of is still unsurpassed.
I never regretted it, nowadays I avoid Word when possible and go for org-mode documents mixed with LaTeX. That gives me all the features and control but with less typing.
I really value the fact that LaTeX is free software, but as a matter of practical reality, are old LaTeX documents really more accessible than Word documents? There is plenty of free software with (imperfect) support for Word these days. I recently opened a bunch of Word documents that were more than 20 years old, and I'm sure I didn't get a pixel-perfect reproduction of the original document, but as someone without a strong grasp of the LaTeX package ecosystem, I imagine compiling old LaTeX documents would have been more difficult than just installing LibreOffice or uploading the document to Google Docs.
I find that much easier to do in Word. Instead of wrangling with conflicting packages, documented for programmers not users, having to compile multiple times to get the references to actually render correctly, etc in Word I can simply define my references in a structured way and they work perfectly without surprises.
My comment was targeted mostly at the academic writing, where things like references, placing of figures and tables, and formatting are relevant. I really think that formatting documents is kind of a solved problem, and it slightly annoys me when I hear people complaining about the headaches they have when formatting their papers in word.
At the end the problem is that _word_-like porgrams is all that is taught at school and so, LaTeX looks super complex and frightening to a lot of people, even when it actually is very simple in its essence. Maybe the most complicated thing in LaTeX is to start a document, because you basically have to configure how it will look and what packages you will use. Then it is all about \section, \ref and \cite. At the beginning this is certainly a bit confusing, but solutions like Overleaf, which offers different templates at a click distance, are good ways to overcome this problem. I personally don't use it, and prefer the vimtex plugin plus a lot of snippets (certainly not for the beginners).
But just to clarify again, it is clear to me that not everyone have the time to learn it, nor is it always the best tool for a given task.
All of the people that I have met that could correctly insert an image in a word document were able to learn VBA at some point. I am yet to meet somebody that can maintain a document with multi-paragraph lists, I certainly can't.
OTOH, if all you want is a simple table, doing that in LaTeX is horrible, and I'll take Word over it any day. One of the many reasons I fell in love with Org Mode is because of the ease with which you can manipulate tables. Since then, I do all my editing in Org and export to LaTeX.
Another neat trick is a latex package called Catchfilebetweentags. This let’s you have a text file with named data fields that you can insert into your document, like when you want to state a parameter that was used in a paragraph. Generating that text file as an artifact of the rest of the data processing means, e.g., that parameters my paper says I used are the ones that I actually used.
In other words, you don't do it by hand. I too rely on a tool to create my tables, which was my point. Doing it by hand is painful.
But I use LaTeX mainly because the resulting documents simply look better, and I imagine that’s a major selling point for many.
For normal text you can use some other markup that converts to LatTex when needed. Then you can add LaTeX packages or your own styles using LaTeX. LaTeX can be treated as intermediate representation. There are many tools for, graph, table, image editing and drawing that can emit LaTeX/TeX.
I should note that the reason it looks great is that pandoc translates to LaTeX on the way there; and you can embed LaTeX in the markdown where needed.
EDIT: I see that many others below have already said it. But it was worth repeating.
I'd rather use Word for simple documents so I can enjoy drag and drop and graphical image positioning and scaling and easy tables and leave LaTeX for complex documents. Markdown is the worst of both worlds.
However, I could see myself using the much superior Asciidoc (vs Markdown) instead of LaTeX, but unfortunately, the worse-is-better philosophy is still alive and has made Markdown the defacto simple markup language, and tool support for Asciidoc is as poor as LaTeX, so I just go directly to LaTeX instead.
On the flip, the latex syntax for super simple documents isn’t really onerous (especially if your editor fortifies the different elements). So I just end up using latex for everything.
The project: https://github.com/corollari/caoutchouc
Documentation & Rationale: https://caoutchouc.io/
I have tried to see the use case for Markdown for a long time but have been unable to do so. And yes, pandoc understands RTF.
I've encountered a real rabbit hole here, and I'm not sure what to do about it. The naive view is that LaTeX does typesetting the best way. If you want better typesetting, use LaTeX, and if you're using LaTeX, you're done.
This turns out not to be true, which is upsetting to those of us ingrained in the LaTeX ecosystem and used to thinking of it as the best way. The first thing you're likely to learn is that you need the microtype package. Without this package, kerning is not as good as it could be. (Which raises the question - if LaTeX is the final form of a typesetting language, why not do it right by default?)
But the problems don't end there. Modern OTF / TTF fonts have a lot of typesetting information that isn't fully retained if you convert the fonts to use with LaTeX. So if you want modern font support, you can't use LaTeX at all, you switch to XeTeX!
At this point you realize that the microtype package you previously learned was crucial isn't compatible with XeTeX, so you can't use it.
So it's a Catch-22. LaTeX is for people who are obsessed with perfect typesetting. But perfect typesetting can't be achieved (currently, to the best of my knowledge) in any TeX family language.
IMO the underlying issue is that TeX can’t really be parsed by anything other than Tex because it’s too full of macros that change the language. I think a better language would generate a well-defined AST, and different tools could compete to render it well.
What is/are the alternatives? Word? Apple Pages? LibreOffice? Markdown-via-pandoc? DocBook? FrameMaker (Windows only)? Other?
Out of the box, what gives better PDF/paper output better than something that is TeX-based?
I've always seen ID as a graphical design tool and not as a manuscript authoring/publishing tool.
Sure, you can plop a bunch of text in there, but it seems to be that it is very structure-free when it comes to layout, whereas the stuff I mentioned is more line-oriented, and therefore more focused on text. Does it have things like footnote/reference tracking? Spell- and grammar-checking?
- "how much do WYSIWYG editors frustrate you, and do you already know how to use version control systems",
- "do you want tools to interface with your document without pulling out all of your hair and then some", and
- "do you want to use your own editor"
would also be fitting criteria. I don't meet any of the criteria you cited, but I like being able to spend 5 minutes on modifying a tool's output to be LaTeX so that I can just paste it into my document. (I'm in the infosec business, a common example is entering nmap results). And I like using Vim, so needing to use another editor would be a downside that I don't have with LaTeX. And it works great with version control if you have multiple authors working simultaneously on different sections. It wouldn't be the first time I submit a patch to someone's public repo containing a LaTeX document (in that case, I found a typo in their CV), you can't do that with something like Google Docs (for a typo, a comment works fine, but if you want to propose more than a single line, I guess you're out of luck). For me, there are quite a lot of reasons to use LaTeX.
Most of my LaTeX usage (and I suck at it, but still stubbornly stuck with it for the last 5 years) is with Beamer, for technical conference presentations. Besides the inimitable typesetting and the quality of text, nothing comes close to how harmoniously you can meld diagrams (using "TikZ"; which, I admit, has a learning curve) with text when you're using LaTeX. The sheer quality is peerless.
(Not to mention all the additional advantages mentioned by others in this thread. I accept the trade-offs, including the time sink.)
It's the typesetting tool in CS, and you can get some really beautiful results from it. There's great tooling for IDEs like IntelliJ (https://github.com/Ruben-Sten/TeXiFy-IDEA), it makes managing references (using BibTeX) much less of a chore, there are tons of high-quality packages that do pretty much anything you could think of and there's an excellent community on e.g. TeX.SE to provide support. It's free software, the results are better than Word and it's much less painful to use than an unpredictable WYSIWYG editor.
I've used it in industry to write security audit reports and more recently as part of my dissertation. My only regret is not discovering LaTeX earlier and using it more.
Sadly, I still use it because there's no alternative.
So bug prone, so many fragile packages, so many weird incantations that must be done if you ever want any flexibility... it absolutely sucks, but then I use it again and again.
From the SIGBOVIK 2018 presentation, "WordTeX - a WYSIPCTWOTCG Typesetting Tool" : https://youtu.be/jlX_pThh7z8
Having used LaTeX a lot since I started studying, I nowadays also prefer Markdown because LaTeX often feels like an overkill. There are many great Markdown Editors out there for quick note taking. And when things get more academic, I like to use VSCode with PandocCiter (https://github.com/notZaki/PandocCiter) to manage the sources. Also, it's easy to convert the Markdown docs to LaTeX or Word if needed.
CoNText, for those unfamiliar, is a bit more modern...built to really take advantage of PDF features like full color and hyperlinks that LaTeX isn't as good at. Also much better control over figure placement, and is capable of things like sidebars that are somewhere between very fiddly to impossible in LaTeX.
\placeformula[eqn:famous-emc]
\startformula
E = mc^2
\stopformula
/[
E = mc^2
/]
\begin{equation}\ref{eqn:famoues-emc}
E = mc^2
\end{equation}
Like him, I cry myself to sleep at night for not being awesome enough to use TeX, but instead using the layman TeX, Latex.
This is just tongue in cheek, of course.
I wrote my thesis in 1993, and in that time period, my anecdotal observation was that the students who used LaTeX generally took longer to finish.
Today, I use MathJax inside of markdown, and don't even use word processing very much. Industry has gotten less formal. Most text is edited in an e-mail editor with screen shots pasted in. The main use of word processing is documents that nobody will ever read, such as functional procedures and HR proclamations.
Even before this trend, there was a lot of documentation that was never intended to be read. Huge piles of what I call "ornamental" documentation, e.g., in fulfillment of ISO-9000 or other regulatory obligations.
How much of that is down to the choice of tool, and how much is down to people choosing LaTeX being more likely to be more exacting about their work overall? I think it's difficult to a say.
(FWIW, I started my thesis in LaTeX, then gave up and used Word because it was faster - but only because I didn't know LaTeX prior)
Most of the other students had whatever old MS-DOS boxes they could afford, commercial quality typesetting was impossible, so nobody demanded it. My advisor didn't even send typeset copy to journals, because he figured they would just retype it anyway. Acceptance of manuscripts in computer readable format was just on the horizon.
There was a strong tendency to get emotionally attached to the physical document -- it was the pinnacle of your career after all -- and to get wrapped up in the aesthetics. I avoided that, partially because the clock was ticking. My boss had accepted a job at another university, and I had to clear out by a certain date. Nothing sharpens your mind like a semi truck coming to haul your experiment away.
I'd pay good money for a "modern idiomatic latex"-type of tutorial.
It has often been repeated that we should all aim toward separation of content and presentation and LaTeX has been highly touted in this area, yet I find it very difficult to achieve in practice. Far too often, I find some package-provided environment lacking and I need to manually add some extra space or what have you. Now my document has become tainted due to the introduction of explicit styling in the content file. It's now baked in at that location and is very difficult to update later.
How do I avoid doing this? It's not enough to say "go back and redefine that command/environment to make it work the way you want." LaTeX is a leaky abstraction.
Yes. In 1994, you would `latex document` and then `dvips document` to get your document.ps. Then in the 00s almost everyone would use `pdflatex document`. And these days, pdflatex is going out of fashion, but I am unsure what the current to go tool is.
(This just runs latex and bibtex in the right order and the right number of times..)
Unless the authors managed to solve the halting problem, I guarantee that latexmk doesn't always run them the right number of times. ;-)
You can disable the maximum number of runs, in which case it really does run the right number of times.
My usual operandi is: poke around or Google for a solution, until I figure out one of the fifty ways that achieves my desired outcome. I then declare my problem solved. If my solution is deprecated (by whom?), then whoever deprecated it may tsk-tsk to their heart's content.
Most mathematicians I know are not all that fussy with how they write their LaTeX documents, the same way programmers can be extremely fussy with their code. If there are "best practices" out there, then they aren't widely known or followed.
That said, here's something that may interest you. On the arXiv (arxiv.org), at least in math and probably in other disciplines as well, the LaTeX code is available for nearly any paper you want. Pick your favorite paper, and then click "Download other formats" on the right.
If nothing else, you can see what professional researchers are using in practice.
Well in the simplest case how about something like \bf versus \bfseries versus \textbf?
Google that and you'll find thousands of blog posts, each telling you which is the One True Way™ but not expanding on the why.
Finding actual answers is really hard for latex.
Use any of them.
> thousands of blog posts, each telling you which is the One True Way™
When I don't know how to do something in LaTeX, here is my flowchart for figuring out how:
1. Google
2. Look at any of the thousands of blog posts
3. Try the proposed solution, while ignoring any "One True Way" crap
4. Are the results what I wanted? If yes then done; if no go to Step 1.
Now LaTeX technically is a programming language, it's Turing complete. But in practice for most users it's not.
Sure, there might be subtle inconsistencies. There might be some bit of mathematical notation that looks slightly different in one part of your document than another. I guess some people would be bothered by this, I'm not one of them.
It is true that it's possible to become a LaTeX power user, and write all sorts of sophisticated macros. In that case, yeah, you want to get the foundations right. But if you're just doing something simple (e.g. writing up a math paper), then mysterious breakages aren't an issue; there's not really anything to break.
When I worked as a programmer in industry, I was quite anal retentive about how I coded, and getting a feel for the languages I used. They were the tools with which I did my work. But LaTeX, for me anyway, is merely the tool with which I typeset my work. An outstanding tool, perfect for the job -- but not one I choose to invest time in mastering.
When writing my thesis I used LyX but found myself creating more and more ERT (what LyX calls raw LaTeX code). I eventually just started using a text editor. However, I still do tables in LyX and copy them over -- such a pain to insert a column otherwise...
At that point why not just use .docx?
Complex formatting, such as figure captions and figure placement, in Word documents suddenly break for no apparent reason. Troubleshooting a “broken” Word doc is akin to fixing a typewriter while one is blindfolded.
First, over a period of decades, LaTeX's syntax became the lingua franca of nontrivial mathematics in plain text. I regularly emailed quite sophisticated equations to people as part of discussions because you could assume that anyone who could understand the equation understand its LaTeX representation. Given that cultural fact, providing LaTeX as an input syntax for equations is totally normal.
Second, most LaTeX users are not trained in any other typesetting system. This quote from the article is typical:
> “For me, LaTeX is the tool when I want to get the typesetting just so,” says Casey Greene, a bioinformatician at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
I spent a lot of hours typesetting in the family business using Quark Xpress back in the 1990's. I turned in most of my graduate level math homework in LaTeX generated PDFs, because rewriting three page long proofs by hand because you realized you had an error on page one is a pain. Of my two books, I typeset one in LaTeX and one in Adobe InDesign. If I want the typesetting just so, I would use InDesign over LaTeX every time. It's simply a better tool for the job.
The book I did in LaTeX I did because I happened to know that it would fit extraordinarily smoothly in that. It was a long flow of text with a few inline figures and equations and a really disgusting number of references. If I had a comparable reference tracking system in InDesign, I would have absolutely used it instead.
Finally, a lot of writing I'm doing these days is meant to be read on a screen, with all the vagaries of reflowing and unknown screen size that implies. In that situation your best bet is to wrap yourself in a straitjacket. Markdown and pandoc with blocks of raw HTML as needed is where I've landed, not because I love it, but because it's a well supported straitjacket with an easy escape hatch.
[1] http://blog.jessriedel.com/2015/04/16/beyond-papers-gitwikxi...
[7] https://medium.com/@samim/gitxiv-collaborative-open-computer...
Word’s equation editor is hands-down the best WYSIWYG equation editor I ever used. The results are beautiful and if you want a tilde you just type a f*ing tilde instead of spending an hour figuring out which combination of packages and fonts will cause LaTeX to grace you with this standard unicode character.
I guess maybe MS discontinued the old plugin equation editor (which was terrible, agreed), but the built-in one is still there.
Pandoc allows me to pick and choose what parts of LaTeX I want to use and I can otherwise write in plain text/markdown.
There are two good parts to the TeX ecosystem in my opinion.
- Typesetting math formulae. Even Word agrees that it's superior to point-and click for this use case (unlike our Blackboard online learning environment ... *sigh*)
- Plain-text based. You can use your favourite editor, you can put it in version control, diff it, etc.
- Getting figures, page breaks etc. where I want them.
- Underlining things is suprisingly hard (and not intuituve).
- A marco preprocessor that has many of the disadvantages of that in C.
- Confusing error messages, stuff randomly doesn't build.
- Package X doesn't work with package Y (unless you include package W with option Z first) type problems.
For things less than 50 pages or so, I've actually moved back to word, which if you buy the proper version rather than the 365 one is surprisingly good. I've found that in practice, for things where I care a lot how they look (which is pretty much everything), unless it's very mathematics-heavy I get the job done in just over half the time in Word usually.
https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/05/22/typesetting-markdow...
Erm. Doesn’t a word processor or a specialized publishing software like Adobe InDesign offer more control over document layout? I thought LaTeX sort of takes over the control (which, some would argue, is a good thing, because you can focus on writing instead of formatting your text).
I've done desktop publishing, I've done my MSc thesis in LaTeX, I'm a software engineer by profession - but if I would want any control by myself to any aspect of the document I would probably choose some other layout system than LaTeX.
Is LaTeX itself that much more difficult than plain TeX?
If so then why not just use TeX, the TeXBook is really easy to follow and gives clear examples.
The equations are formatted exactly the same way in both.¹
1: Unless you choose to use some package like amsmath, but why ?)
So yeah, don't use LaTeX then use TeX, where you can change things easily because it's not as complicated.
There are a bunch of sites which take arbitrary input and convert it to PDF - they're often easily exploited, to allow arbitrary files to be read from the server, and commands executed:
\begin{document}
\setlength{\parindent}{0cm}{\Huge \Hello}
\bigskip
\section*{Execute Commands}
\immediate\write18{uptime> scriptoutput.tex}
\immediate\write18{id >> scriptoutput.tex}
\immediate\write18{ps -ef >> scriptoutput.tex}
\begin{alltt}
\input{scriptoutput.tex}
\end{alltt}
\bigskip
\section*{Read Files}
\begin{alltt}
\input{/etc/passwd}
\end{alltt}You can still order their licensed software which functions like a plug in and is more rich than the default equation editor that was a feature trimmed release of the broader MathType software I believe. http://www.dessci.com/en/products/mathtype/
Latex can't produce HTML, it can't produce EPUBs or any other reflowable document type. It can't produce any document which is accessible to blind people (other than giving them the raw LaTeX file).
Note: You will find various libraries that claim to produce HTML output. I can tell you from experience none of them work, given a random LaTeX paper you download from, say, Arxiv.
Error at "input" (line 265, column 1): unexpected '\n'
Using templates, with quite a level of flexibility.
AsciiMath is much better and actually works as you would expect it to.
I also don't like how parentheses in asciimath sometimes don't get rendered.
I rarely produce text for the purpose of printing these days but I used to do this a lot when still working as an academic. These days, I read a lot of books in ebook form and I read a lot of articles, blogs, and news in HTML form. Likewise my output seems to be online documentation, social media comments, the occasional blog article, etc.
Pdfs (and their printed output) are a second class citizen in that kind of world. They are harder to machine read, which results in issues with SEO, accessibility, or even simply re-flowing to deal with different screens or output formats. Pdfs are actually only appropriate for sending to a printer. On screen PDF reading is tedious and the UX for that tends to be not great. The whole page metaphor is simply not appropriate because it means setting the size of the output window to some fixed dimensions and hard-coding assumptions about the medium on which it is going to be consumed. It only makes sense if your medium is paper.
My printer is rarely used these days. I've had it for 12 years and I'm only on the second toner cartridge. The awesome thing with laser printers is that they don't dry out. Most of the output is exclusively limited to bureaucratic stuff. Thankfully that's very limited these days. I used to print stuff like boarding passes but these days you just wave the QR code around with your phone.
Engineers have tried to fix latex to produce things other than .ps and later .pdf documents. The results were never that popular. You can do e.g. presentations in latex and people have probably produced websites from latex as well. But lets just say that it's not a great fit for that kind of thing and also not that commonly used that way.
Additionally, the results are typically kind of bland and boring because the people most eager to produce stuff this way tend to have very little interest in e.g. design quality or making things visually interesting. It sort of self selects to people who have neither the skills nor the patience for that kind of thing. I.e. engineers. The same is actually true for the paper output. Yes you can do nice typography with it and some people do, but most people just stick with the bland defaults, which results in a kind of yawn inducing and bland look that instantly jumps out from a page.
What I've learned over the years is that engineers are obsessed with their tools and that mostly the tools don't actually matter. This article makes the simple observation that for mathematical formulas, Latex provides a pretty awesome DSL and that when it comes to doing math in systems other than latex, that DSL is increasingly what people fall back to rather than whichever formula editor comes with word, open office, etc. or alternatives like mathml, matlab, or hand scribbled things in bitmap form, etc. I think it makes sense. I'd probably use it all the time if writing math formulas was a thing in my life. This happens to be not the case for me, so I have had zero exposure to Latex in most of this century. I do a lot of my writing in relatively dumb editors or even an HTML Text area. I seem to use markdown a lot as it is good enough and doesn't lock me in to taking any decisions for the output.
Funny story: when I was in university we had secretaries that knew how to use latex. Reason: several of the elderly math professors had no clue how to use a computer and were used to handing their papers in handwritten form to the secretaries for further processing. It's easy to forget that computers and word-processors are relatively new tools and that people have been publishing scientific work for centuries. Even Latex is not that old. Ultimately it's about the content, not the tools.