How can I explain the meaning of LaTeX to my grandma?
tex.stackexchange.com
tex.stackexchange.com
However, moving from Word to LaTeX is a bit like leaving one bad relationship for another. Word beats your documents up constantly: splitting paragraphs, applying random styles, auto-numbering lists like a toddler with a calculator, positioning figures anywhere but where you want them, and so on forever. Getting even slightly complex results out of it is a constant struggle. LaTeX doesn't do any of that: your document will be represented perfectly every time; every semantically significant structural element will just work as it should; and you never have to think about presentation at all. It's intoxicating, working with such an elegant tool. But fail to treat it right, get even one tiny backslash in the wrong place, and you get nothing useful, just a screenful of errors.
If this were a movie, LaTeX would be played by Penelope Cruz: she'd take eight hours to do her make up before a dinner date, bewitch all the other diners with her beauty, and then dump her drink on the hero and storm out of the restaurant when he accidentally makes eye contact with the waitress. Word would be Cathy Bates, beating the shit out of some poor writer with a hammer.
Sadly your colorful description is not entirely accurate.
With LaTeX you're in hell immediately when you need to divert just the tiniest bit from what your \package of choice provides. Want a logo in that letterhead? Address format looks wonky? Need a nice looking table? An image in a table even? PDF output looks strangely different from dvi?
Well, any such seemingly trivial detail will be good for countless hours of scuba-diving around the ancient shipwreck of a language that is LaTeX. The little available documentation is usually only served in PDF format, sparse and contradicting. None of the packages interact with one another but most of them conflict in funny ways.
And no least the syntax and semantics of the language itself are closer to ancient greek than a modern markup- or scripting-language.
Yes, the LaTeX-output is pretty. But LaTeX must die. Take the algorithms and integrate them into software from this century please.
Or you could just ask how to do it on #latex on freenode. For something really obscure, you might not get an answer immediately. But many times the channel can be quite helpful. Of course, there are forums, newsgroups, and mailing lists too.
That said, my experience has been that if you're doing something non-standard, it can take work to get a document to look just the way you want it. But once you do, typesetting other, similar documents becomes a breeze. And the results are fantastic.
As for "something from this century", I'd like to hear what you have in mind.
Personally I've always been fond of asciidoc[1].
It even has a LaTeX-backend but I imagine the impedance mismatch must be problematic (I have not tried it).
However, realistically the problem will probably just solve itself in the midterm. Paper is rapidly going out of fashion after all, and so will anachronisms like universities requiring their students to submit content in arcane file formats.
When I divert from a class or a package, I look at the source and redefine it as I desire. I have full control with LaTeX regarding the finest details. Which software gives you full control?
Except I cut out the middle step and just downloaded the standard / most recognizable TeX font, and used it in Word: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Modern
I get the exact same satisfaction out of using Lilypond for music notation instead of Sibelius, Finale, etc.
What's really great is that if I ever need to write myself a short paper that includes math equations, graphics, and staff paper snippets, I can do it all in the same IDE, all using text, and check it into git and run diffs off of it.
I'd like to eventually figure out a way to have this IDE be able to blog some of these papers. Probably some weird combination of eclipse, pandoc, and ruhoh might get it done.
One of the hardest things about LaTeX is deciding how to pronounce it.This is also one of the few things I'm not going to tell you about LaTeX, since pronunciation is best determined by usage, not fiat. TeX is usually pronounced teck, making lah-teck, and lay-teck the logical choices; but language is not always logical, so lay-tecks is also possible.
'not logical'? They've recreated a pre-existing word. The logical way to pronounce it would be the same as the pre-existing word.
Cue Monty Python's Mr Luxury Yacht, whose name is properly pronounced Throatwobbler Mangrove...
Do people here pronounce sex as "sek"?
/incomprehension
Lamport isn't as fussy about such things as Knuth, and the "X" in "LaTeX" is commonly pronounced more like a "k".
Interesting that they gave it a nonsense string of characters(mixed alphabets) as a place-holder rather than choosing a word. Wonder if this is what inspired the performer [the artist formerly known as] Prince.
To me it's like Knuth thought - I know what's missing from my type-setting program .. some crappy nonsense marketingese, I'll give it a Greek name because well, to belittle people, then I'll render the characters offset so it's not even Greek, but we won't use an English transliteration because that's not awkward enough.
Bah.
>Lamport isn't as fussy about such things as Knuth, and the "X" in "LaTeX" is commonly pronounced more like a "k". //
See that sentence is entirely wrong, based on Wikipedia (!). It should instead say the \chi symbol in the \latex logo is commonly given an utterance akin to "k". Something like that.
Perhaps we should just optimise, give the system an English name rather than referring to it as \logo. Right it's called Laytext.
I mean clothing manufacturer Kappa don't get everyone fawning over them rendering their name with an actual kappa.
Don't know why but this annoys me intensely, can you tell.
/rant \bye
So, LaTeX is pronounced "Lay-tech" with the ch from "Bach".
"Lay-teck" is also correct, but "Lay-tecks" is completely wrong.
Maybe this could help. https://stanzebla.wordpress.com/2008/09/17/how-to-pronounce-...
>> When you say a “ck” or “k” you lift a part of your tongue up to your palatine and tongue and palatine get contact. Then the tongue goes down fast and clicks. You don’t do that with a “ch” in german. To pronounce a german “ch” the tongue must not get contact with the palatine. Instead, let your tongue lie behind your teeth, drag it a bit to the back and try to narrow the larynx, now exhale. That’s a german “ch”. It sounds like the wheezing of Darth Vader in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (the original trilogy).
Thing is, I think she'd much rather put up with the minor inconveniences of Word than ever look at another formatting code again. And so would just about everyone else. That's why Word won.
Re LaTeX: The new crop of online LaTeX editors are making it easier to use, taking away the installation/setup barriers amongst other things. I helped to develop https://www.writelatex.com to try to find a way to bring the language online to an Etherpad-like frontend.
I still never had this good an answer for what LaTeX is though - wish I'd thought to ask...
With an online editor, I can send my mom a web link and a LaTeX document which she can easily compile on her iPad! She even can do text corrections for me, even if she doesn't know those preamble things.
2. Grandmothers are stereotyped as giving a damn about what their grandkids are up to.
3. Grandfathers are stereotyped as just nodding sagely as if they did understand, even when they don't.
So I still hope to find the right words to explain why such _programming_ writing is remakably good, while simply typing formatted text with a computer is something different.
A long explanation would be boring to her I guess. So I still hope for some enligthening words. Perhaps here?
It had me at bibliography.
Probably my favorite thing? It's a formatted document that actually interacts nicely with VCS.
I've seen LyX but never used it beyond 'trying'. Has anyone here tried it and what are your thoughts on it?
That being said, I've never seen a written introduction that I would consider satisfactory. If you have a friend who knows LaTeX ask them to sit down with you and show you how to write a paper that includes headings, subheadings, figures, tables and some math equations. It might take an hour or two, but you'll then know more than enough to write basic documents, and google for anything else.
As for LyX, I've played with it, and I strongly prefer using LaTeX in emacs. Mostly because I like that my source document and the typeset document are separate.
I can appreciate the separation that you are going for, but I also have to wonder how much time you spend in LaTeX? If I were writing something that was worthy of LaTeX, it would probably average to less than an hour a week. I'm not sure if the effort is worth it for me. Again, to be completely honest. Whereas if I was doing a lot of writing that I expect to be read, I could imagine the investment being worth it.
I look at like the way I looked at HTML formatting: I knew how to do the markup, but the WYSIWYG editors got me where I needed a lot faster. Having said that, I now find myself handcoding divs and spans and then using more CSS... so maybe that is the argument I need to read up on it!
Well, lots to think about anyway. Thanks!