Ask YC: Anyone use LaTeX? | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: Anyone use LaTeX?

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19 pointsbcater27 comments

I use LaTeX a lot, but I couldn't find an online version, so I wrote this one. It's very rough in terms of styling, but basic functionality is there. What else would you like to see it do?

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I have used TeX before, but now use OpenDocument in its stead. I know TeX is well loved, and I admire Knuth too, but I think a lot of its benefits have been surpassed by other formats.

Note I do not create mathematical documents, but technical ones. OpenDocument uses MathML for this, but I personally have little experience with it.

Here's why I use OpenDocument:

- Content and presentation are still separated

- I can generate and manipulate OpenDocument just as easily as TeX

- Massive documents are handled just as well in my experience

- XML is easier to transform into other XML dialects.

- OpenDocument is easier to transform into popular proprietary document formats, ie, MS Office. At some point, you need to communicate with non-technical people.

- Metafont produces very poor screen output due its love of bitmap fonts. Yes this can be worked around by TeX users, but there is no reason to expect them to do that.

Knuth doesn't understand usability concepts and wouldn't consider this a bug. I have higher standards (as would most computer users).

Yes, I said that. Remember TeX's goal:

"allow anybody to produce high-quality books using a reasonable amount of effort, and to provide a system that would give the exact same results on all computers, now and in the future."

Anybody. There is no reason to require people to understand a markup language in order to create a presentation-separated document. Nor is there any special requirement to work around an ancient poor-quality custom font scheme that should have been dumped years ago.

I know this is a topic close to people's hearts, but read the goal above: TeX has quite clearly failed to meet it.

If fully implemented, this could be incredibly useful for me. Initial comments:

x The ability to merge in a tex file. That is, allow me to download the tex file from your server, and then send you a new version, obviously you'll track changes.

x EDIT: Bibliographies. Having a single point to place bibtex style bibliographies, and manage them. That would be amazing.

x I don't like that the user login persists at the top of the screen. The UI needs a lot of work, i imagine you're working on that.

x if tex compilation fails, highlight it in red. If it succeeds highlight in green.

x On the file list, next to the .tex file, show the most current pdf file. Ahh apparently you do, you call that view. I don't like that word. I think you should show a.tex a.pdf. View makes me think that you view the tex file.

x Can we upload images? If you're clever, you might be able to figure out a way for figures to be grabed from a url within latex.

x Add some simple templates. When a new file is created, it should have a skeleton that produces a pdf file. If you're on a mac, take a look at texshop.

x Add the ability to jump to the error in the .tex file, this is hard to do apparently, but texshop figured it out.

good work.

I second the suggestion about integrating bibliographies - one approach would be to pull in data from bibliographies managed with http://www.citeulike.org

I've implemented bibliographies and uploads, plus a basic template. Let me know if you think of anything else, and thanks a bunch for the feedback.

Every book I've written (including Hackers & Painters) was done with LaTex.

Have you tried TeXmacs?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=67111

I think it is the option for writing with any degree of complexity: articles, theses, books, etc. Word processing (and Word in particular) pales in comparison. Having all of the bookkeeping and style taken care of for indices, lists, contents, cross references, citations, etc. makes it very nice to work with. I convert everyone I can...

texMacs is great, but is a non-option for many scientists. A large fraction of us are switching to OSX. texMacs runs slowly on osx, but worst, it looks ugly running on a mac.

I use texshop, it's not a texmacs replacement in terms of features, yet, i like it better on my mac.

Can't you convince a few key conferences/journals to accept TeXmacs submissions? For just how much longer do they expect to use TeX anyway?

I've used LaTeX for basically everything: reports, letters, papers, course handouts, Ph.D. thesis, book. Typesetting is superior to word processing in so many ways, but unfortunately LaTeX seems to be going out of fashion. Except for physics and math journals, even technical publishers seem to prefer Word (!) to LaTeX nowadays.

Except for physics and math journals, even technical publishers seem to prefer Word (!) to LaTeX nowadays.

This is a sad state of affairs indeed. Almost reason enough for me to look for alternate venues for publication.

Yes, but it's mostly an esoteric tool to impress people with how smart you are. It's useful for mathematical typesetting. These two statements are not mutually exclusive ;)

I use it in an commercial environment to automatically produce well-designed PDF documents in multiple languages, I recommend the texlive distribution for those getting their feet wet. Hopefully you won't have to use non-default fonts.

My book was written using Docbook SGML with a LaTeX based processing chain and custom style sheets. The publisher ended up importing from the HTML version (the least pleasant of all of the output formats) into Word documents with their custom tags, so it kind of lost some of the magic.

Eventually I ported it to Docbook XML and moving to RenderX XEP for processing, in order to get better (by some definition of better--mainly just better maintained stylesheets, and the tools seemed to handle the length of my book better) PDF output.

Now it's in a wiki at http://doxfer.com/Webmin and I probably won't be back to LaTeX for that particular project.

I do keep coming back to it, though, out of curiosity, every time I read Knuth.

Have you tried Prince or was it too expensive to bother with?

Prince is not all that much more than XEP, I don't think. But, XEP was the first commercial product I tried (after giving up on FOP, since it could only process about 80 pages before crapping out)...it worked great, I paid them $300 or $400 (I don't recall exactly), and got back to work.

I have never tried Prince. I probably won't do another book in Docbook, though I don't know what I'll replace it with, since I generally hate WYSIWYG word processors. I'll probably end up writing in markdown in vim. ;-)

I wrote my PhD thesis in it, but these days I write most documents in html and css to be honest.

Same here.

If you use "Prince" (princexml.com), you can turn HTML + CSS into a decent looking PDF. I've been writing my papers for the last year in plain text Markdown, then piping it through a script to make PDFs. It works pretty well for me.

I wrote my CS thesis in college in LaTeX. I used TeXShop in OSX and it was great. Tried various word processors first (MS Word, Open Office, ThinkFree Office, Neo Office) and with all of them I spent 90% of the time just trying to format block quote code segments, leaving me with little time for actual content. Formatting the code snippets in LaTeX was a breeze. The only think that got a little annoying was tables that spanned over multiple pages, but that's a reasonable price.

Yes. I use it for everything. It's been five years since I used a word processor.

Wrote my theses in LaTex. It's excellent for large documents.

Used to all the time in school, now only occasionally.

I have to use LaTeX for my number theory & elliptic curve cryptography class. I'll be sure to use this on the next team-project.

I've made a lot of changes, and things are looking, feeling, and performing better than ever! Let me know what you think.

I use it for writing some papers, otherwise I just use asciidoc.

Lap dancers?

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