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Comment by kcbanner | Hacker News Reader

If you are comparing Word and Markdown to LaTeX I think it's clear you haven't really used LaTeX.

Oh get over yourself. Every one of the criticisms he levelled against latex is spot on, and you pick up on the fact that he mentions Word is easier to use (which, by a long, long way, it it).

> Word is easier to use (which, by a long, long way, it it).

Definitely initially for simpler.

But what about using it collaboratively, merging changes and comparing between versions? Especially large documents with a multitude of authors combined later (think journals).

What about documents with programmatically generated content?

What about consistent formatting for your documents?

What about when Word gets confused by some element in the xml not visible to you?

Sure Word may be easier but there are limitations to it's use.

It's an apples to oranges comparison.

I want to draw a conformal mapping diagram in word and also write a 3-vector of the navier-stokes equations.

Also, I want to do a lot of tensor arithmetic with tons of superscripts and subscripts and arrows.

Tell me how any of this is accomplished in Word please. Saying Word is easier to us is like saying BASIC is easier than C++.

You know what most people would do? Use a dedicated program to create the plots and equations, export it as a PDF, and embed that in Word. Instead of LaTeX being the de facto standard for all publishing, it is relegated to very specialized uses in mathematics and some engineering. If you try to use LaTeX with a biomedical researcher, they will look at you very funny.

Hell, I just had a postdoc send me figures as part of a manuscript draft where she was using Powerpoint to make the figures instead of something more appropriate like Illustrator. Most people who publish don't care about how their documents are created, they just want them to work and get published. Word does a pretty good job for this.

Use the best tools for the job. Most people would tell you that BASIC is easier to use than C++, if you can write your program in BASIC. And if you don't want to deal with learning curve of C++ and you get get by with BASIC, then what's wrong with using a tool that works?

You know what most people would do? Use a dedicated program to create the plots and equations, export it as a PDF, and embed that in Word.

I am not fond of LaTeX. However, for some fields there are simply no dedicated programs, while there are good LaTeX packages. For instance, for my thesis I drew a lot of attribute-value matrices (in the unification grammar/HPSG sense). There is a great packages to draw these structures, both flat and in tree form.

I had some hope that DocBook et al. could replace LaTeX for most uses. It's great in many respects: it's just XML, so easy to machine-interpret. Customising output is easy (via XSL stylesheets). There is good support for producing PDFs (via XSL-FO). And it supports SVG and MathML. There are also great WYSIWYG editors, such as Oxygen. However, that toolchain never became popular, because most people hate XML.

The book that we never got to finish[1] is written in DocBook, equations are in MathML. The Slackware book that I once wrote [2] is also completely done in DocBook.

[1] http://nlpwp.org/

[2] http://rlworkman.net/howtos/slackbasics.pdf

Docbook and DITA are used a lot in the enterprise world.

A good example of Docbook is basically all recent Red Hat/Fedora documentation.

Jesus nothing is wrong. Read my comment again. I'm saying it's an apples to oranges comparison. If BASIC is all you need great. If word is all you need great. If you can get by with importing from gnuplot or R or matlab or whatever great. I'm not saying one is superior to the other. I'm saying that when I want to draw a commutative diagram, I'd rather do it in LaTeX with tikz or the xy package.

I'm sick of the "HN strawman." People on these threads need to read and apply basic critical reading and logical skills.

You don't need to tell ME to use the best tools for the job. I've been telling people that for fucking years. I don't why your comment annoyed me so much but it did.

What I'm trying to say is that for the vast majority of peoe that have to produce documents, it isn't an apples to oranges comparison. For most proe, Word and LaTeX do the same thing. And one of those is vastly easier to use to get their job done. So while LaTeX is the technically superior, Word will still get the job done. And because of the network effects that working with collaborators has, People like me are stuck using Word even if I'd rather have my papers written in something else.

In some fields LaTeX is the easier method to produce documents (good luck with anything more than a simple equation in Word), but those are relatively small niches.

In a similar vein, you might say that to the vast majority of people there is no difference between a screwdriver and a pry bar because most people are content with abusing screwdrivers.

It depends on the job you're trying to do.

But you can't honestly say that Word and LaTeX really have that big of a difference in intended jobs. It seems to me that they are both in the document production business.

And pry-bars and screwdrivers are both in the "levers that provide mechanical advantage" business.

One can be abused to fill the role of the other, and if you look at them both from 1000 feet and squint then both "for" the same thing, but the reality is that when you actually examine what each is designed to do and in which situations each is used, they really have little to do with each other.

You can't honestly believe that pry-bars and screwdrivers are as similar as LaTeX and Word are. It's a ludicrous argument.

LaTeX and Word are for documents - making documents. How they operate is very different. For example, Word includes it's own editor, LaTeX does not. But they are both used for producing documents.

> If you try to use LaTeX with a biomedical researcher, they will look at you very funny.

I'm a biomedical researcher, and I use LaTeX. It's my preferred method of document preparation. I know many others who use LaTeX as well.

I hardly think so. Let's address them:

> "LateX is slow, inconsistent and needs to be ran multiple times to give a correct result"

It is not slow, it runs in under a second on most documents I have authored.

> "Inconsistent"

I'm not sure what tinco meant by this, but it does in fact return the same results for the same file across multiple runs.

> "Needs to be run multiple times to give the correct result"

This is true for things like references, etc. However, this proves to be a non-issue in practice as you are recompiling so often to view changes that references are always up to date.

> "It's syntax is ugly."

I don't see how learning LaTeX is different from learning any other programming language. I don't think that many C++ gurus would call C++ "ugly". Calling a progamming language "ugly" is often the last argument you see when someone couldn't come up with a decent argument against it.

Inconsistent probably refers to the fact that there are subtleties that can mess you up, once it works you are fine, but you may have a blocking issue on the way.

Syntax is important, remember he is comparing it to Markdown, not C++. C++ is certainly ugly and should not be used as the basis for any comparison, certainly not for a word processor.

I think he is just pointing out that general theme amongst these tools. They work for the people using them well enough, so they stay that way forever. It isn't that features aren't added or that they stagnate, it is just that thinking outside of the box is impossible.

>>> "LateX is slow, inconsistent and needs to be ran multiple times to give a correct result" > It is not slow, it runs in under a second on most documents I have authored.

Slow? I don't know about that, but compared to what? Even in word it does need some time to reach the "Save as PDF" menu, right?

>> "Inconsistent" > I'm not sure what tinco meant by this, but it does in fact return the same results for the same file across multiple runs.

Well, there is some truth about this. There is an odd naming scheme if you look at stuff like "enumerate", "itemize" and "description" - beginners get confused by this as they assume it would be called "describe". The same goes for most of the packages. This is somehow historical, but I think it also makes it unnecessary hard to figure out LaTex for beginners, right?

Also the reason why LaTex needs several runs to finally create the full document. Nowadays you would do this differently I guess as there is simply no need to start the program twice if the application would be smart enough to call sub-programs (like biblatex) by itself on the fly. It would still run the same routine several times, but users wouldn't see it and it would be one command for them to build the document. That's another point beginners tend to go crazy about :)

Having said that, I should add that I'm using LaTex (and XeLaTex, etc.) daily and there isn't a single program matching the power and beauty of it - I even design covers for my publications with it. But I'm able to use vim and emacs, right? 90% of the people are bloody beginners and it would be a shame to hide the beauty of a LaTex document from them.

>> "It's syntax is ugly."

Yeah, well...ugly is a bad term to discuss about. I like it and I think the syntax is way cleaner than reStructured text :D

funny that you mention rST. i also talked about it here, and i said that its only syntactical flaw is inline link syntax, and how that’s only a problem if you don’t write a lengthy document with it, because in that case, you don’t want to inline your links anyway.

what is unclean about rST in your opinion?

It is not slow, it runs in under a second on most documents I have authored.

It is slow. On my PhD thesis, it took more than one minute at some point, on an SSD. Not very convenient if you are tweaking figures and equations, and want to preview a change quickly.

I agree that that aspect of LaTeX sucks. That said, as a matter of exchanging practical hints: If you haven't yet heard of \includeonly, you should definitely check it out ;)

Then you did it wrong. You should have just factored your thesis in multiple files, for example used one for each chapter.

That sounds like a workaround.

Actually, it is a pretty useful feature. I break my documents up into multiple files and can compile pieces of them together for different audiences. Want an executive summary of my research just build the abstract + a summary. Want to review the literature with my advisor, build the just the literature review.

However, I will agree that using it to address slowness of a build process is just a hack.

It is, but you have to remember latex is best thought of a programming language that outputs pdfs so splitting into multiple source files is useful, as is source control.

I suppose you would say splitting your C++ into separate source files is a "workaround" for slow compilation times, too? It could be, but both are probably good practice anyway.

My thesis was split in multiple files.

The last time I used Word it was an absolute nightmare to typeset equations in it. In theoretical physics basically every page contains at least one equation, it would be complete madness to try typesetting that in word.

Can one not value the simplicity of an apple, the juiciness of an orange and compare it to a Pomelo, wishing the latter had both?

I would say LaTeΧ can be perfectly well seen as a combination of many aspects of Word and Markdown in the sense that it offers the feature set and backwards compatibility that Words offers, while culminating a legacy, complexity and perceived indeterminism that also plagues Word (though in a different way); and on the other side being a plain text format that can be version controlled and taken apart and shared as snippets.

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