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Comment by max_ | Hacker News Reader

How does LaTeX compare to software applications like Scrivener

LaTeX is more of a typesetting application, where Scrivener provides much more tooling around story telling. Scrivener provides you with tools like corkboard and outliner, which lets you have a place to store ideas and todo lists for what you are working on. You can rearange a chapter in your book by clicking and dragging it to the new location. The formatting is similar to Word or OpenOffice, in that, what you see is what you get.

LaTeX on the other hand (or more specifically, TeX) is a set of macros that will generate formatting for you. Usually, the output is a DVI file, but can also be a PostScript or PDF file.

LaTeX is all plain text. It only handles document processing, turning the LaTeX document into an outputted formatted document.

Edit: You can still include images etc. Pandoc allows you to convert between LaTeX and many other formats. What you can do with LaTeX is almost limited only by your imagination: https://www.latex-project.org/publications/2020-egreg-TUB-tb...

LaTeX is horrible and dated, but if you need to produce a thesis, or a thesis-like document it can't be beaten.

When I used LaTex for my (sociology of computing) PhD it made it look I'd put far more effort into the document formatting than I actually had.

I know it's a lot of setup, but how exactly is it horrible? I can imagine writing something in MS Word or Google Docs being horrible as the document grows. At least with LaTeX you can use a text editor, even vim if you want.

Everything needs to be Googled, all the time. Want to include an image? Google it. Install a package. Google more for arguments. Want to center the image? Google. Want to insert a table? Google. Oh a line in the table is too long, how to wrap it? Google. Decide between 3-4 options all having different shortcomings. Install new package. Which requires different arguments than the other command. Google. Insert an accented letter? Google. Insert a Chinese character? Google, package, google.

Everything is a pain to do, and I just described the happy path. If you try to do something a little tricky you easily run into incompatible packages wreaking with each other. Word has its shortcomings for sure, but for writing a short paper it’s a magnitude or two more easier and faster (except when a coworker uploaded it in Google Docs with deleted the styles...)

>Google. Insert an accented letter? Google.

No. Just use unicode.

Well, use LuaLaTeX or XeLaTeX as your engine, and then just type in unicode.

Also search for errors about missing glyphs in your font.

To be fair I've used lots and lots of Unicode (here: "characters not contained in US-ASCII") in XeLaTeX but have also had the need for some symbolic / numeric codepoints. I can tell you the syntax to do so is horrible. And yes I'd have to google that syntax before I could do it again.

Latex doesn’t support unicode out of the box. And when it does, there are still issue with fonts.

Spaniard user here, with some experience with LaTeX and Spanish with utf8 settings.

It supports it fine.

Isn't there a downloadable manual that you can use for looking up information?

It’s just extremely complicated and the ecosystem has badly aged (yeah you need makefile and docker if you want to do it right, and nobody uses docker)

First time I heard docker as a prerequisite to TeX usage. Cross-platform comprehensive LaTeX distributions have been there since at least the mid-90s.

And the ecosystem actually is quite good these days. You always had pretty good editor support in the "nerdy" ones, but these days there are also friendlier frontends like Lyx, Texpad, Texstudio or the collaborative web-based Overleaf.

The backend isn't that bad, either. The days of specialized output and font formats are gone, using any system TTF/OTF and producing PDF is easy enough with pdfTeX, luaTeX adds lua-based scripting to that and ConTeXt does all that plus better access to layout primitives and typographical features. And I'm sure the Rust Rewrite Liberation Front is active in TeX, too.

The worst thing in the TeX world, ironically, is documentation. There's a lot of stuff out there that didn't keep up with all the new features and possibilities.

It’s not a prerequisite, the proof is that no one seems to use docker to build latex. That’s what I meant: it’s an ugly mess and you’ll spend hours trying to compile things like you’re dealing with autotools and a C codebase, and people don’t even use docker.

I wouldn’t say the ecosystem is good. Every time you want to add a new extension you’ll be in a world of pain. I prefer customizing emacs at this point.

> using any system TTF/OTF

As if any typeface could possibly be superior to Computer Modern Serif.

Knuth's own Concrete Roman stares awkwardly…

> It’s just extremely complicated

Depends on what you're trying to do. To publish an article or book - no it's not very complicated. There's a vast package ecosystem and knowing where to turn can be daunting, but there is great community documentation out there such as by Overleaf[1] and the community on stack exchange is lively and lovely.

Building your own functionality can be complicated, however partly this comes down to LaTeX being a very different programming paradigm to the conventional C-like languages.

> the ecosystem has badly aged

Care to substantiate?

> you need makefile and docker if you want to do it right, and nobody uses docker

Simply untrue. If you have a setup that warrants more than a conventional setup there are native-LaTeX build tools like arara which are simple to use.[2]

[1] https://www.overleaf.com/learn/latex/Main_Page [2] https://gitlab.com/jm4rc05/arara

I forgot Overleaf, they are single handedly making latex user friendly

I'd say 'single handedly' is a bit of an overstatement, but Overleaf are definitely doing a great job.

> (yeah you need makefile and docker if you want to do it right, and nobody uses docker)

what? Just make and the texlive setup.

I you want something bullshit-free, install texlive on slackware, it brings the full setup.

Once you've got your document working the way you want it it's lovely. It's the journey that's bumpy. This is the same complaint PhD students have been making for at least thirty years.

Yes, initially it is far more effort into the document you want to create. But once you start to be familiar with the marcos and packages, then it become easier to do the document formatting. Honestly, I am still learning how to use LaTeX and I found it to be superior to Word because LaTeX allows me to edit it at the source (allowing finer control over the document) than relying on Word's WYSIWYG or any word processor to provide a virtual page until it is printed. The issue with WYSIWYG processor, there are chances that formatting will move around or clipped out the pages. That become more work to figure out how to get to fit in a single page, despite that WYSIWYG shows it is in the single page (the printed document show two pages). It is more hell to work with the table in Word than in LaTeX as Word have a weird table padding (really really hard to control this than in LaTeX) that lead the document to look a bit off.

I started learning few weeks ago and now working on two additional documents because I start to understand of how to use it and it become quicker from there. But again every person have a different approach with learning LaTeX.

The best looking documents from MS Word are the ones where the author hasn't put any effort into formatting except using the built in styles for headings and paragraphs etc. The only difference is LaTeX makes it obvious that this is the way whereas Word makes it easy to do the wrong thing and use ad hoc formatting.

Agree, pandoc makes the best word files IMO. It doesn’t allow you to make too many style formatting changes so write in markdown and use pandoc to create the word file using simple headers, standard formatting.

Seems hard to replicate this approach in word in my experience without good discipline

Indeed, I've used pandoc to deliver above average looking documents easily on the occasions it's been required. On the rare occasions I've had to use Word directly I didn't struggle to stick to the theme, though. What did you find difficult?

I’ve just never really used word by sticking to a theme, and tend to end up using custom formatting quite a bit e.g. I use heading 2 where I shouldn’t and should be using heading 1, use paragraphs in the wrong place etc.

Use some custom formatting in a paragraph when I should be using a preset default etc

Latex allows you to control pretty much everything about how things look, yet it also mostly focus on content first by default.

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