Hacker News Reader

Comment by ulrikrasmussen | Hacker News Reader

That's also been my own personal experience, and I have a CS background and have written several papers and a PhD thesis in LaTeX. I have done many detailed figures in TikZ and done countless presentations using Beamer.

I have no idea how to implement anything in TeX on my own besides rudimentary macros. I did once try to implement a simple typesetting package for typesetting some particularly gnarly natural deduction trees, and I thought it worked fine for a few examples, but then it broke down in ways that was completely non-obvious to me.

The computational model of TeX is really, really opaque to me.

View on HN

If you had opened and read the TeX book, you'd understand it.

Oh, you mean those 500 pages of dense Knuth writing?

Dense? The TeX book is a total delight to read.

Not for people who are fun at parties

Oh definitely, let’s do a PhD in Latex and its worthless toolchain before start writing the actual thesis.

Software should be invisible and not a hindrance to our ability to express ourselves.

Reading a single book is not equivalent to a PhD in LaTeX.

A single book on latex only covers you until the introduction of your thesis. Then you will need to add a table. That’s a different book. Then you will need to align your equations. That is another book. Then you will need a graph. This is a freaking library of books.

I mourn for the time I wasted on Latex. For nothing.

That's not even close to be true.

I am the proud owner of all 5 five volumes and Digital Typography. I have been in front of a computer for almost every single day for around 45 years. I speak and write several languages, including Chinese and Japanese. I am regularly coding in several programming languages and consider myself fairly fluent in things like HTML and CSS. I have worked as a typesetter and assistant editor of two medical periodicals.

I could go on but what else in the world do I have to add to that so I can say "as for me, I opened the TeX book, read it, and understood it" or "I know how to use LaTeX, confidently"?

I don't know the answer to that question, but I do know the answer to the question "is TeX / LaTeX a well-designed, user-friendly, sane software?". The answer is no, no, and no.

Millions of people love to use LaTeX and use it daily. Your experience is just a personal opinion.

Your claim is just a claim.

Millions of people love traffic jams which is why they're happy they can have them twice a day.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com