LaTeX Input for Impatient Scholars | Hacker News Reader

LaTeX Input for Impatient Scholars

karthinks.com

70 pointskarthink25 comments

LaTeX is often written having content and presentation logic intertwined. In contrast, ConTeXt employs the concept of "setups" that make keeping the two aspects of a document distinct [0]. Part 8 of my Typesetting Markdown series [1] shows how to use annotations to write a poem in plain text, then subsequently format it using ConTeXt.

In many cases, authors need only basic TeX, which can be rendered by LaTeX, ConTeXt, and other TeX-based typesetting solutions. My desktop text editor, KeenWrite, provides such basic TeX rendering in real-time. See the screenshots [2] for examples of inline math, variables, and applying different themes to PDF files based on a single source document.

[0]: https://wiki.contextgarden.net/

[1]: https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2020/04/28/typesetting-markdow...

[2]: https://github.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite/blob/master/docs/scr...

> My desktop text editor, KeenWrite, provides such basic TeX rendering in real-time.

Lyx [1] is also great.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LyX

This is an interesting article, with some nice packages.

However, just in case anyone is starting out in LaTeX, I've been involved in over 100 papers written in LaTeX, and wrote my thesis, and it is incredibly rare that I've found the speed at which I can edit LaTeX in an advanced way was my limiting factor.

Nowadays I often use overleaf, which has an incredibly simplistic editor, but makes multi-person editing so easy I find it worth it.

The one 'avanced feature' I do find really useful is finding 'jump to this point in the PDF' from your editor, and 'jump to this point in the LaTeX' back from your PDF viewer back to the editor.

> 'jump to this point in the PDF' from your editor, and 'jump to this point in the LaTeX' back from your PDF viewer back to the editor.

That sounds really cool. Can you give me a link or at least the name of a piece of software with this feature? Is Overleaf it? Is there an offline piece of software with such a feature? Thanks!

Overleaf and VSCode (with LaTeX workshop) support this.

I believe this functionality is provided by SyncTeX. I'm sure it can be used in other editors, but it can be accessed from the right click menu in TeXstudio.

Quite a few TeX-oriented editors support something like this; a couple that I've used personally are TeXShop (macOS only), TeXworks (cross-platform). Searching for "SyncTeX" suggests that others such as TeXnicCenter and TeXStudio also support it.

texworks from a regular miktex install seems to support it via SyncTeX

Latextools through some other means in sublime text can do this as well, both on windows and linux

I have this set up with vim and evince as well. It's very handy.

Just vim and evince? No synctex as suggested (thanks guys!)

Found a nice SO thread explaining the gist of it: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/118489/what-exactly-...

That is a standard latex feature called synctex. Pretty much any editor does that.

What do you think of TexLive?

Damn it, I meant TexStudio.

I've used it, found it works well.

In general when I'm writing latex, personally I spend most of my time writing and editing text, so any reasonable editor will do.

This is interesting and follows the line of [1].

Personally I find it more comfortable to use TeXmacs for quick/throwaway notes, and macros in longer documents for better readability.

[1]: https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-1/

Haven't read the whole article yet, but the state of latex editing in emacs diagram caught my attention. Anyone has a clue what software was used to create it? Found the color schemes and hyperlinks pretty neat.

I wouldn't bother. Fire up MS Word and use your journal's provided template.

Slightly extended, learn whatever your field / journal uses.

Many A.I. or maths conferences won't provide a Word template, only LaTeX. Other conferences and journals I've been involved with are Word only. Trying to fight against the default generally isn't worth the pain.

for some people it makes things easier. Otherwise they would not use it.

And then spend twice the time formatting equations correctly and dealing with things that require workarounds because Word only handles a tiny subset of what LaTeX and LaTeX packages can do? No thanks.

Could you provide an example where you need to spend twice the time to correctly format equations in MS Word?

There is no easy way to get Word to automatically right align equation numbers and number equations you have to fiddle with invisible tables and shove a reference in the right side, there's no equivalent to the "bm" LaTeX package available so instead of just typing "\bm{\phi}" I have to type the whole equation go back and then bold and italicize the phi.

I know, I've had these issues with Word too. But Latex also has some problems. For example, inserting equations and referencing them requires you to _label_ them. I find it unnecessarily difficult to keep track of equation labels in my text. Wish there was a way to assign automatic labels to equations in a Latex document, in a way that they all get updated if you add or remove equations. I can do that in Word and it saves me lots of time.

The relevant difference here is that LaTeX is open source, unlike Word, so any desired functionality can be added much more easily and naturally.

Even if you don't want to do it personally, you can ask the maintainer of the relevant package to add a certain feature and if you're lucky he agrees and does it, or you can pay someone to do it.

It's easy to forget, but you do have the total freedom to make it work for you, unlike proprietary office programs.

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