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Comment by orbifold | Hacker News Reader

It's too bad that most people are hopelessly computer illiterate, so that a separation between presentation and content like it is achieved with latex is out of reach for most. Countless hours wasted on adjusting margins, font sizes and filling out chain letter templates in Word.

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I can't agree.

I have written quite a lor of work in LaTeX and I am still perplexed by floating images and I can never tell where floats (images, tables) will be or should be, because it always jumps randomly from page to page.

My roommate at college had a thesis with lots of images and tables and he basically gave up on LaTeX because of that.

Also, installing fonts to MS Word is trivial. Installing fonts to LaTeX ... well... not so. You need to use XeLaTeX. Which breaks some other things. I tried to use bibtex with xelatex, and started to do some weird issues, until I found out that the texlive packages in debian/ubuntu repos are outdated, so I had to uninstall them and install it again from the website, and then something else broke.

Meanwhile MS Word just works as it is. And you don't need to learn the weird table syntax. And the weird floating logic. And the difference between TeX, LaTeX, XeLaTeX, BibTex, Texlive.

Agreed. LaTeX is a mess. Its basic idea is fantastic. But its implementation is a brittle, entangled, inconsistent, old mess. Could use a fresh backwards-INcompatible reboot.

Regarding your comment about floats in LaTeX, of course you don't tell LaTeX where they go. They float. That's why they are called floats. If you don't want them to float, don't use the float environment. ( Or use the float package and the [H] option, as explained on https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/8625/force-figure-pl... ).

Separation between presentation and content is a brilliant concept, but every time I write a document in LaTeX I end up having to do all kinds of fiddly things to make things look right. If your paper doesn't conform to certain constraints you end up dealing with the presentation domain anyway. A very simple example is line breaks in equations: you don't know how much you can fit on a line until you render it, and LaTeX will run your equations off the page instead of wrapping them intelligently.

Don't get me wrong, LaTeX is still the best document processor I know of, and I use it all the time. I'm just saying that the "separation of domains" idea is a bit of a fantasy.

> If your paper doesn't conform to certain constraints you end up dealing with the presentation domain anyway.

After having read some of Edward Tufte's material, this struck me. I think the main point is: "make it legible" and (Tufte) "as informative as possible". If its not maximally aesthetically pleasing, then so be it.

EDIT: I apologize if this is trite, but I think that's really the whole philosophy of (La)TeX.

There is truth to this -- I do sometimes get caught up in irrelevant presentation optimizations. But sometimes the default output is clearly "wrong", or even nearly illegible. In the ideal world I have someone else (i.e. a publisher) to think about this stuff for me, but unfortunately that's not usually the case.

I'm pretty computer literate and I like the idea of separating presentation and content, but I've yet to find a really great implementation of it. HTML/CSS is a mess, and LaTeX is nice but very difficult to use.

Markdown seems to be the best, but isn't exactly wonderful. I wouldn't ever try to convince everybody I know to use Markdown for everything instead of Word!

I agree. We need something inbetween Markdown and LaTex. Markdown is not powerful enough and LaTex is just a pain to get started with.

BBCode?

[b][i][o][u]BBCode is just gimped HTML.[/u][/o][/i][/b]

This is the reason I use Org-mode. It provides simplicity of formatting like Markdown, but provides enough flexibility to export to format of my choice as needed. (Mainly, when I provide documents to others, I just generate PDF via LaTeX, but other formats including MS Word can be created fairly easily via ODT export.)

Latex is very easy to start with. Just learning a dozen commands will allow you to create many documents. What is a pain is customization, but remember that Latex was created so that only experienced designers would be required to customize a document style.

Do you know a good tutorial/howto to get started?

pandoc's markdown (the specification) is powerful enough, and pandoc (the software) can translate it into LaTeX easily.

I like textual markup formats and separated styling. But my experience has been that Latex is "unbeatable" when it comes to wasting countless hours fighting your tools. It is great in some ways, but incredibly bad in others. (Random placing of figures, unbounded reruns, incompatible package hell, no stderr / stdout separation, unfixable warnings bloat, ...)

I must have been lucky then, I've written several 50+ page documents with latex that included figures, footnotes, equations and citations and rarely had to do more than select a documentstyle and occassionally align multiline equations. The only real pain point were figure environments, otherwise I never adjusted any of the preset values and ended up with more than acceptable documents.

Maybe you have a higher tolerance for these problems. Or were you learning from better resources that you can share?

I'm currently writing my (150 pages so far) doctoral thesis in LaTeX. The "flafter" package helps somewhat with the placement of floats, but generally if you put your float definitions where you refer to them it does the "most sensible" job. It is after all having to place floats at the top and bottom of the page only, or if necessary on a whole separate float-only page, while using no more than \topfraction of each page at the top, \bottomfraction of each page at the bottom, and ensuring there is at least \textfraction of each page left to text. The default values of these variables are a little too restrictive, so one of the first things I do is redefine them, which allows LaTeX to put the floats in more sensible positions.

It's ironic that you present Latex as a way to not waste hours and hours (or should I say days?) on getting formatting right. Of course if you have a simple and/or standard layout and want to keep all settings as they are provided by the environment, then fine. (I should probably add 'and are on a unixy system'). Otherwise - ...

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