fanpu

Yes, but it is precisely because they are trying to get a slice of the pie from large studios that whatever happens to indie devs with their changes are just collateral damage

The title is actually perfect, but requires some context, after which you might appreciate its tongue-in-cheek beauty:

The author studied at CMU, where the proudly-paraded slogan for an introductory functional programming classes is "Functions are values", which has an almost cult-like status - appearing on their TA hoodies, laptop stickers, and so on.

Other classes soon caught on, first with the imperative programming class declaring that "Functions are pointers", then the introductory discrete math class's "Functions are tuples", and even "Functions are relations" from the databases class.

So viewed in this lens, passing up the opportunity to title it what it was would have been unthinkable.

Overleaf (https://overleaf.com/) is pretty popular for this, and also tracks things like edit history

> Many LaTeX tricks only get passed down from advisors to students, or from collaborators to collaborators.

Which is a great point on why the average quality of LaTeX homework submissions by undergraduates without any research experience usually makes for a less-than-ideal grading experience. And this is not about the nit-picky mistakes, but the visually glaring ones.

Wish I knew about autoref earlier, it also increases the area spanned by the hyperlink generated to the entirety of "Figure 1" instead of just "1" in the case of ref.

Interesting explanation on how it developed historically. I've seen mathbf used in some books, but I guess old conventions are hard to change.

Ah, I guess that's what happens when you do both Markdown and LaTeX in the same document! Thanks for pointing it out, I've also been pretty sloppy with hyphen and em-dash in normal writing. Maybe someone could write a similar post for online HTML content in the future?

Should be fixed now. First time hearing about Muphry's Law, definitely gave me a chuckle!

Thanks for flagging the image issue, I think there's an issue with the responsive image serving code that doesn't work consistently across browser. Temporarily disabling that for now & pushing a new update.

Also, you are right about using \mathrm{d}x. Another friend also just flagged it to me as well, I will update the post regarding this!

Refreshing might help (my guess is it might be due to img fallback issue), thanks for flagging this and I'll be investigating!

Thank you! :) and sure!

I was initially dreading that it would be something inefficient like the equation symbol selector in Word, but after viewing the video demo on their website and seeing the speed of typing aided by heavy use of shortcuts, I'm intrigued. I'll try it out someday!

There are tools (i.e https://mathpix.com/) that actually does a pretty great job at LaTeX OCR, although you'll need to re-create labels and the like. I was pleasantly surprised that it replicated alignments & chose the right font faces while using it.

Realized I misunderstood your question. IMO the main design problem with LaTeX from a usage-standpoint is that there are too many ways of achieving the same thing, and oftentimes none of them is a clear winner. It's still the best option for a usable, programmable typesetting language that we have (i.e writing for-loops to draw structured graphs in TikZ...)

Great question! Is there a specific domain/example that you have in mind? I don't think people intentionally use archaic language if their goal is to educate and enlighten, but in papers it is quite common for unnecessary jargon to be peppered in, which while probably obvious to the author, makes it hard for people new to the field to break in.