LaTeX Templates
latextemplates.com
latextemplates.com
In the end we've opted to keep it because LaTeX is so good at doing what it does, and because our dependencies can be hacked to use XeTeX (for UTF-8 input) and so we are working to ensure that XeTeX support gets back upstream instead. Additionally for documentation LaTeX source is quite easy to read compared to the alternatives like DocBook, and LaTeX is also much more expressive.
Sooner or later I expect we will factor out our invoice logic into document classes and packages and try to get that on CTAN. Maybe then it will be worth putting many of our templates on a site like this one (this site even)
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}* A directory and git repo for each paper (use your own VCS as desired)
* A separate git repo for my global bibtex file and a few heavily used .tex files (i.e. tcilatex.tex for sciword coauthors); this repo is set up as a submodule for all of the individual papers and they refer to their local version of the bibtex file.
* Really short, memorable bibkeys in the bibtex file (I first saw this recommended on I think stack overflow, but can't find a link right now). For a single author, first three characters of the name and last two characters of the year: Engle (1982) becomes Eng82; (by example...) Engle and Granger (1987) becomes EnG87; Sargent, Williams and Zha (2006) becomes SWZ06; etc.
This way I can just type most of the citations I need off the top of my head. The few I can't remember, I'll forget the year and searching by the first author via reftex takes about 5 seconds.
But, more and more for personal and not-for publication notes, I find myself just typing in the unicode and sticking with a plain text file.
edit: I'd love to hear other people's setup too, it took me a while to converge to this one and I'm sure there are better approaches.
I use Papers which is available for Windows and OS X. Their software is quite easy to use. Papers can export your library to BibTeX, so I simply export it to the directory of the document I'm writing, include it as usual.
Now the best part, for referencing as I'm writing... Papers comes with this overlay when you press Control+M in OS X. This overlay consists of just a box to type in, you type the title of the paper or author names and it comes up with a search result, select the paper you want and press enter, you can then press enter again to add a LaTeX citation into your document or add more papers to cite multiple papers at once. Since you've exported the library to BibTeX using Papers, the citekey matches. I can't imagine how any solution could be easier than this.
If you update a paper's citation details (say someone's working paper gets published, so you have to add a journal, etc.) how do you make that change across directories? Do you re-export from papers for each one?
Keynote is great here, because the default settings are pretty great as it is, so you have fewer ways of deluding yourself into thinking you are being productive, when you are actually just procrastinating by rearranging the furniture on the Titanic.
I work in a academic environment as well, and I give it another 10-20 years until it will be widespread for everything - currently my supervisors want me to write everything in .doc as they don't know LaTeX and don't want to learn (no time, which I can understand).
It's not very widespread in the life sciences, I'm afraid.
My argument against "give it another 10-20 years" is that LaTeX has already been around forever. I know people even in math, physics, and CS that never use LaTeX (in favor of Word). Which I find silly and strange, but it is what it is.
Of course, I'm hoping that new online editors like SpanDeX.io and LaTeXTemplates are the adrenaline shot that LaTeX needs for wider adoption.
If I wanted to increase LaTeX adoption, I would get undergrads hooked on it. I bailed to LaTeX my second year of undergrad and never looked back. Even with papers for the english department it was great, if only because it just looked that much better than all the Word formatted papers from my peers. The fact that it made bibliographies dead simple was just icing on the cake, it practically felt like cheating. Get undergraduates to understand those "sly" benefits and they'll be willing to take a night off from binge drinking to learn it. At least more willing than a grad student anyway.
Some of us even became proficient enough to take notes real-time during discrete math and numerical calculus lectures.
> Even with papers for the english department it was great, if only because it just looked that much better than all the Word formatted papers from my peers.
Back in college I used to get compliments on how good my papers looked from humanities professors just because it was typeset in LaTeX. Fun times.
(OT: I also got complimented in high school for my physics coursework being typeset nicely. :D None of the other teachers seemed to really notice, though.)
(Yes, their website is ancient)
I am a long-term Latex user and have recently tried one of those online editors. I have two basic gripes with all of them: It's not vim and I don't want to put my papers onto someone else's cloud. Except for that, it seemed nice but the editor itself was a bit sluggish compared to a local program. Continuous compilation is also a good idea, but compared to compilation on my local computer it was just slow enough to drive me insane (wait around for 2-3 seconds every time that I want to see a change...).
But I can imagine that, if they can be made snappy, they would be quite a nice starting point for novice users and people who don't want to maintain a local installation.
Fair enough -- use Lyx. It's free and open source. It doesn't require you to take the security and other risks of a cloud scheme.
I don't understand why more people don't use Lyx for Latex production. It's not as slick as some Web-based apps, but it also doesn't have their drawbacks.
LyX is still not Vim. Or Emacs, for that matter. That may sound a little closed-minded, but when you basically spend your entire life in one editor (as a programmer) adapting to a different editor is a big pain, and very frustrating, because nothing works the way you expected it.
In my experience emulation of these editors in others is shoddy at best (I'm looking at you, SublimeText.) Not to mention I'm losing my favorite plugins, that I've grown used to. The only acceptable Vim emulation I've seen is Evil — for Emacs. And even there I couldn't stand to use it.
All true. It took a while for me to be productive with Lyx -- it's too different from most other editing environments. In fact, one of the first things they say in their documentation is that Lyx isn't a text editor -- it's really meant for document creation, not everyday editing. So that's an entirely valid criticism.
Nevertheless, after one ascends the difficult learning curve, the results can be beautiful, classic LaTex output, with little effort.
http://yihui.name/en/2012/10/lyx-vs-latex/
Enjoy the read.
latexmk -pvc
It seems to go around in cycles. There is a very heavy anti-LaTeX movement that I occasionally run into. There are also a lot of people who use it and would not recommend anything else.
> My argument against "give it another 10-20 years" is that LaTeX has already been around forever. I know people even in math, physics, and CS that never use LaTeX (in favor of Word). Which I find silly and strange, but it is what it is.
This is very true. And what I find more annoying is the argument that we need to move to DocBook because somehow that's more accessible (and yet it isn't either as accessible or as powerful).
There are a few things that hurt LaTeX adoption in some environments though and I want to mention here. These are generally from my experiences participating on various TeXLive-related email lists.
There is an expectation at least in the XeTeX community from what I have seen that everyone will manually upgrade to the latest and greatest quickly. With many of the TeX distribution, there isn't a lot of thought given to long-term support. This makes things like running hosted services for mission critical apps which use LaTeX somewhat problematic.
I ran into the dreaded "we can't start because you are using something 7 years old" message and the only help I could get was "upgrade." Not helpful when trying to package software that people are running on production services. Not helpful at all.
I will follow up with you on email (from my personal account, chris.travers@gmail.com). I think that one of the things that LaTeX really needs to get wider support is a set of community resources for longer-term support, for people who are happy to accept workarounds if it means being able to support earlier versions etc.
I am in the process of trying to get a hosting service up for LedgerSMB and we use LaTeX for a lot of stuff internally (the hosting solution will use XeTeX). I think a rising tide here would help both us and the community out.
> Of course, I'm hoping that new online editors like SpanDeX.io and LaTeXTemplates are the adrenaline shot that LaTeX needs for wider adoption.
I think it may help. It certainly comes along at a good time.
One reason is that Word is actually decent for writing papers these days. I still use LaTeX mainly because I prefer to write in vim rather than in a WYSIWYG editor, but the difference in output quality is much smaller than it was 10 years ago. For example, Word does auto-hyphenation now (though it's off by default), which is necessary to make the common 2-column justified conference-paper format look at all decent. The kerning has also improved, and the reference-management story is much better than it used to be (there's a built-in reference manager that works ok, and Zotero integration is very nice). Figure placement still sucks, but it sucks in LaTeX too (in a different way).
Another reason is that when collaborating with people outside academia, they rarely know LaTeX. So I find myself writing my own papers in LaTeX, but collaborative papers in Word. Many people from industry really like Word's "track changes" mode as well.
[0] documents containing text, headings, notes, figures, tables, code listings, mathematics, hyperlinks, lists, references.
pandoc text.md --parse-raw -t latex -o text.tex
As I see it now, the variety of editors for Mac, Windows and Linux may cause problems when migrating from one environment to the other. Hopefully this will be over with tools like SpanDeX.
BTW, congrats for your tool, have been using it for few hours and feels awesome.
It even has a snazzy guide for setting it up on Stack Exchange: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/6483/setting-up-a-lat....
It’s pretty much all you need, and configuring LaTeX can turn into a rabbit hole you will never get out of. Try writing your project in tufte-latex, and I am sure you’ll find that it fits the bill perfectly. I do recall something about having to install an additional package to colour the hyperlinks or something to that extent, though.
I have some old templates—even some boilerplate lying around—so you can drop me a tweet or something, if it isn’t working for you, and I’ll throw something up in a gist.
As I've recently been looking at writing up a CV with LaTeX, I've seen quite a few rather awful templates -- and the site happens to list both examples of the worst and best I found after a quick search on CTAN...
For others that are interested -- the best resource I've found so far is actually a nice blog series on using the article-class for CV:
http://www.texdev.net/2011/11/05/writing-a-curriculum-vitae-...
Also worth a read (but cover much of the same):
http://texblog.org/2012/04/25/writing-a-cv-in-latex/
edit: typo, minor clarification
> You will not go far wrong if you remember two simple guidelines at all times:
> 1. Never, ever use vertical rules.
> 2. Never use double rules.
Violating half the 'nevers'!! But, more seriously, the documentation for some LaTeX packages is breathtakingly good (booktabs, amsmath, beamer, tikz, to name a few off the top of my head) and it would be really helpful if the site pointed newcomers to some of it. Especially in the case I mentioned, where the template is just a demonstration of one package.
I have a client who needs to put a large volume of brochure-ready technical specifications on both the web and rendered as attractive downloadable as PDFs, in a hopefully machine-readable format. Really curious if LaTeX is ever used as a solution in commercial applications where business users are most familiar with word - or is that the wrong application?
Exporting to HTML via htlatex is possible, but may require a lot of fine-tuning. Depending on the content, it may be easier to generate the LaTeX/PDF and HTML separately, or to generate only parts of the HTML using htlatex.
LaTeX special symbols are much easier to use than UTF8. It is easier to type -- and be sure that you have properly entered -- en-dashes, non-breaking spaces, fractions, degree symbols, directional quotation marks, and other non-keyboard characters.
I love it and I'm going to use the code template for my next assignment.
You have anything to draw DFAs?
This collection is definitely going to make me use LaTeX one of these days. Of course, I've been saying that for decades now.
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}I haven't had a lot of luck with inputenc. My understanding is that it breaks things up into escape sequences internally which is neat but doesn't give you some things that would be nice because your default fonts don't support it.
I have used xetex a bit more and found it more helpful. However it has some other rough corners
Luatex also handles UTF8 natively. Answer is "it's complicated." And hence your solutions depend entirely on what you are trying to do.