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Levitating

> it's not like LaTeX is hard to install or anything

that's debatable

> I find Markdown considerably more pleasant

You could try https://typst.app/

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Why not both? KeenWrite bridges Markdown with TeX. I'm the author:

* https://keenwrite.com/

* https://keenwrite.com/screenshots.html

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgyYXwwF_lc&list=PLB-WIt1cZY... (TeX + Markdown)

* https://youtu.be/XSbTF3E5p7Q?list=PLB-WIt1cZYLm1MMx2FBG9KWzP... (TeX + R + Markdown)

How good is it wrt making accessible documents. That's a major issue with latex these days.

What do you mean by accessible documents?

KeenWrite doesn't have a LaTeX integration. Instead, KeenWrite integrates KeenType[1], which is a plain TeX implementation based on NTS[2]. By offering only plain TeX, KeenWrite is technically compatible with either ConTeXt or LaTeX. At time of writing, KeenWrite interoperates with ConTeXt because ConTeXt makes a far superior split between presentation logic and content. KeenWrite can perform the following document conversions:

    (R) Markdown (+ TeX) -> Text (+ TeX)

    (R) Markdown (+ TeX) -> XHTML (+ TeX)

    (R) Markdown (+ TeX) -> XHTML (+ SVG renders of TeX)

    (R) Markdown (+ TeX) -> XHTML -> ConTeXt -> PDF

ConTeXt is able to directly transform XML documents into TeX instructions that are then used to typeset a PDF using a theme[3].

[1]: https://gitlab.com/DaveJarvis/KeenType

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Typesetting_System

[3]: https://gitlab.com/DaveJarvis/keenwrite-themes/

There is tectonic. Downloadable single binary, fetches packages on the fly, hardly gets simpler than that.

I mean, by "not that hard", I guess I meant "not that hard for me"; `nix-shell -p texliveFull` or whatever your preferred distro's install command.

While that requires a certain level of geekiness, I am pretty sure I could still walk my parents through installing it on Windows and get them using TeXStudio or something, so it's not insurmountable. LaTeX itself sort of inherently requires a willingness to do thing in the initially-less-easy way.

That said, yeah a web service is of course much more approachable. If my parents wanted to use LaTeX I would probably just point them to Overleaf.

The installation and first five minutes of any kind of product is hugely make or break. I keep my resume in LaTeX via Overleaf, but probably wouldn’t bother with it if I had to get LaTeX running locally, which has always seemed fairly complex to me (though I’m admittedly no LaTeX has expert and may entirely be wrong).

Fair enough. I just have a Nix Flake to handle this stuff for me now so I just do `nix build`, but obviously that's getting into territory that is super geeky.

This surprises me. On most platforms it’s just a package download and install. On Mac, it’s macTeX. On Linux, it’s whatever your distro calls texlive via the package manager. On windows it’s mikTeX. That’s not exactly complex or requiring any sort of latex expertise. Linux can be the one that requires the most thinking if they don’t have one package that pulls in all of what you need, but I can’t remember it being more than a couple minutes of effort last time I did it on Ubuntu or fedora.

It requires choices and knowing what to install and if things don’t work, troubleshooting the install can be difficult. For a first time task of “install latex”, it’s not the easiest. Especially for newer users. I e done it half a dozen times and I’m still not quite sure if I’ve done it right on my Mac (right away).

On mac: `brew install texlive`

Been using texlive for years (also use it on Windows)

I wasn’t aware of a brew package; I will definitely check that out. I have always been using the texlive installer for macOS (MacTeX), which is very easy to use. Although the install instructions can be a bit long and important to read when Apple breaks things.

https://tug.org/texlive/

Enjoy your 10GB of PDF documentation for packages you'll never use.

Is 10 gigs really that much nowadays? I have to think that if you're frequenting HN you're likely to have at least a terabyte in storage on your personal computer?

It’s not about the HN visitor… it’s about the collaborator or grad student who might be on an entry level computer with 8GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage. The entire system needs to be easy for them to install and maintain. And even if I have 1TB of storage, if I could avoid an extra 10GB of space in my backups, I’d appreciate it.

try MonsterWriter, it caters to exactly this group of users

The fact that you don't seem to realize that downloading 10GB of stuff just to edit/generate PDF documents is completely bonkers just shows how out of touch Latex afficionados are.

As far as I'm concerned, the outputs are pretty good but until somehow really makes no-nonsense software that can do that in an efficient manner, it might as well not exist at all.

The difficulty is getting multiple collaborators to install and pin the same packages, where everyone might be using a different platform/distro.

Example: I might commit a change that compiles perfectly fine with my version of asmath, but it conflicts with the version of asmath in the style guide of some UC Berkeley department/lab.

You answered your own question then: the reason for overleaf is that not everyone finds installing latex easy.

I tried to "install LaTeX" on Mac. I installed latex2html with Brew, and passed it an example .tex. I got `Fatal (syswait): exec " ./images.tex" failed: Permission denied`

I tried to install `texlive` (at your recommendation) also through brew, and got the error `Could not symlink bin/afm2tfm.Target /usr/local/bin/afm2tfm already exists.`

Overleaf just works.

I think you should use what you like and if you like Overleaf then by all means use it.

That being said, I think the package you want is macTex, installable via `brew install --cask mactex`. As stated in the previous post, it's also pretty easy to get it working with Nix, even on macOS (which is my primary OS until T2 Linux becomes actually usable).

Why are you using homebrew for this?

Download MacTex: https://tug.org/mactex/mactex-download.html

and double-click the .pkg file and follow the installer steps.

Installing it is easy, what's harder is making sure all your collaborators have the same packages and versions of everything.

And the majority uses Windows and have never used a command line...

Overleaf new ShareLatex is a godsend when collabing.

I usually use overleaf because I need collaboration. Getting your parents onto collaborative LaTeX is harder, particularly because the continual recompiling of PDFs tends to upset things like OneDrive and Dropbox if two people are editing and syncing at once.

Alternatively you could use Quarto. It's excellent.

https://quarto.org/

While it has lot of functionality you could use to write articles and stuff, it seems more similar to Markdown than Latex/Typst due to any functionality having to be hardcoded in the compiler.

You can inline raw LaTeX: https://quarto.org/docs/visual-editor/technical.html#latex-a...

LaTeX is _definitely_ more flexible than Quarto or... really anything else. Tools like Quarto will get you most of the way without such a steep learning curve.

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