Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwawaytemp2 | Hacker News Reader

So is LaTeX worth mastering? It depends on the researcher: how often do you use equations, how much is fine-grained control do you need over a document, and how much time do you have to devote to learning a new language?

But I use LaTeX mainly because the resulting documents simply look better, and I imagine that’s a major selling point for many.

View on HN

> But I use LaTeX mainly because the resulting documents simply look better, and I imagine that’s a major selling point for many.

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.

LuaTeX seems to be the best for overall typesetting quality. You can get proper rendering of modern fonts.

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 makes LuaTeX better than XeTeX, as far as typography is concerned?

Much better microtype support

> But perfect typesetting can't be achieved (currently, to the best of my knowledge) in any TeX family language.

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?

The standard tool for professional typesetting and book design – Adobe InDesign.

InDesign is great, but how do you typeset equations in it? Genuine question, as I’ve searched far and wide for a viable solution. The best I have so far is ”create in another software and insert as an image”, which is unsatisfactory.

> Adobe InDesign.

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?

It's not a manuscript authoring tool, but I thought we were talking about alternatives for 'perfect typesetting.' I don't think there's any tool that is ideal for both authoring and typesetting, but since we do have this special word 'manuscript' to describe a work that hasn't been typeset yet, maybe it is useful to continue thinking of authoring as a separate task (at least if you aspire to perfection), rather than something that needs to be done at the same time, using the same tools, as typesetting.

Hasn't QuarkXPress been regaining market share due to Adobe's licensing policies? How does that hold up?

Isn't QuarkXPress, like InDesign, more graphical design-focused and not so much manuscript authoring/publishing-focused?

That is my understanding, too, but my understanding of this subthread was about achieving the best possible results in general, rather than just in the subset of manuscript authoring tooling.

Markdown filtered through pandoc to PDF looks as great as native LaTeX, but is overwhelmingly nicer to work with in source form.

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.

The problem with Markdown is its embarrassingly poor support for highly structured documents. Something as simple as writing a multi-level list interspersed with complete paragraphs is a nightmare to do in Markdown. Tables and images aren't a big improvement over LaTeX and require special syntax to scale and position.

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.

AsciiDoc is essentially XML DocBook with a simpler syntax. It has enough structural constructs for large documents. Also DocBook was designed as master format, and is easily render-able into various outputs forms like for printing and for web pages.

I’ve found writing in markdown and converting to other formats to be a very frustrating experience. It only works well for exceptionally simple documents. But as soon as you want something even slightly complicated it falls apart. Side-by-side figures, multi paragraph lists, footnotes, and numbered bibliographies are all trivial in latex and are a huge pain, if not close to impossible with markdown. I’ve wasted huge amounts of time on this.

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.

I'll echo other comments and say that using pandoc to convert from markdown to latex is the best solution I've found. Actually I've written myself a wrapper over it that extends markdown with asciimath (which lets you input math the way you would in a calculator) and improves support for embedding latex directly.

The project: https://github.com/corollari/caoutchouc

Documentation & Rationale: https://caoutchouc.io/

Markdown has about the same feature set of Microsoft's WordPad (the bulit in RTF editor in Windows). If the document you're writing can be structured with simple Markdown, why not just use an RTF editor and enjoy WYSIWYG, graphical image resizing and positioning, and great portability?

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 think the best use case for Markdown is when you specifically want 'not too rich text' – for example, I like the way it's used on Stack Exchange. It needs to be combined with another tool, like a web application, to take care of layout.

I use it because I can easily insert Latex into it for math. I also use it to generate automated reports (e.g. update this document you made last year with new data).

Asciidoc has richer features than Markdown.

Markdown fits in well with Git.

I feel like

- "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.

For equations LaTeX is the best and most comprehensive syntax.

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.

other selling points include great look, reproducible, gitable, makes for great boilerplates, etc.

[Me raises his hand.]

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.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com