The Beauty of LaTeX

by wwortiz • 16 years ago

84 45 16 years ago

FalconNL• 16 years ago

Alternatively, for those who want good-looking text but prefer the WYSIWIG approach: just use a half-decent DTP program like InDesign, which will get you everything mentioned in the article except for the per-character transparency.

scott_s• 16 years ago

Lyx is a Latex editor with WYSIWIG features: http://www.lyx.org/

omaranto• 16 years ago

Also checkout TeXmacs: http://www.texmacs.org/

stan_rogers• 16 years ago

To pick a nit, Lyx is WYSIWYM (the M being "mean") -- they point that out a whole bunch of times in the doco.

alok-g• 16 years ago

A hyperlink is meant to be clickable, and it is not in either Lyx or TeXmacs. In this respect, they both fall short of WYSIWYG/M.

ugh• 16 years ago

InDesign is an absolutely awesome program, my favorite from Adobe next to Lightroom.

Mac OS X’s font palette (while sucky in general and in dire need for a makeover to improve its UI — it’s like vintage 2000 or so) also offers you many of the mentioned features: 1 and 3 are on by default everywhere (type ‘shuffle’ into the Spotlight searchbox, ‘ffl’ will be turned into the appropriate ligature), 2, 4 and 5 are accessible through the palette but I don’t think OS X is clever about line-breaks (at least there are no settings to fine-tune). Don’t know about transparency. It is available to you in every program which uses OS X’s standard method of text input (like Pages or Safari).

alextgordon• 16 years ago

OS X's text system does have per character transparency. It's not exposed by TextEdit but it is exposed by Pages's color picker.

You could retrofit smart justification onto the text system, but it would require some non-trivial code (namely an NSTypesetter subclass). It's not easy, but it's possible.

Niten• 16 years ago

Another advantage of LaTeX over WYSIWIG alternatives is its simple plaintext representation. If we can still open any documents from our time period in 200 years, we'll be able to open that old LaTeX document of yours, because it's just ASCII (or Unicode in the case of XeLaTeX). And given the portability and simple requirements of the open source, exceptionally well documented TeX code base, it isn't far fetched to imagine someone could even run your documents through the actual LaTeX typesetter, if they really wanted to, 200 years or so from today.

Do you think anyone will still be able to open your documents in Adobe InDesign 200 years from now? This may not matter to everyone, but if it matters for your purposes, LaTeX has a clear advantage here.

EDIT: I'm not affiliated with the author of this article.

michaeltwofish• 16 years ago

While longevity may be important, I think there are other more interesting advantages of plaintext, namely that I can edit in my editor of choice, I can use a host of existing tools, such as sed, grep, etc, to process it, and it plays well with standard source code management systems.

imd• 16 years ago

This needs to be updated to compare against Word 2010. It's not there yet (and will probably always do line-by-line breaking, because who wants their text to jump around while editing?), but it can also do things that are not easy in LaTeX (where any custom thing requires somewhat deep knowledge).

derefr• 16 years ago

> and will probably always do line-by-line breaking, because who wants their text to jump around while editing?

What about "re-flow whenever you leave everything alone for two seconds"?

pak• 16 years ago

This. It's not like it doesn't already do some heart-stopping repagination every time you drag borders or type into a table that crosses a page boundary, or when you drag around any object that is being word-wrapped.

cma• 16 years ago

WYSIWYGWYLEAFTS

icarus_drowning• 16 years ago

Or perhaps a command to re-flow document invoked by the user?

dmlorenzetti• 16 years ago

For some reason, a lot of articles about LaTeX focus, like this one, on typographic features such as ligatures and line breaking. For me, where TeX earns its keep is the macro capability. While primitive as a programming language, the ability to define your own commands is a powerful tool for enforcing consistency and reducing effort.

Two examples from work. For a proposal, we had to produce two documents, a short and a long one, with common titles and introductory paragraphs and cross-references and such. With LaTeX, we actually wrote just one proposal, with the contents embedded in TeX macros. Changing the macro definitions let us produce what became two "views" of the same material.

Second, for a paper on sorption modeling, we used macros for all the physical variables, to make sure all the equations "read" correctly (e.g., writing "\cSorbBulk" rather than, say, "C_b"). Halfway through the paper, we decided on a new notation for distinguishing between gas- and sorbed-phase concentrations. It took maybe five minutes to update the pertinent definitions and re-set the paper.

JadeNB2• 16 years ago

This is an excellent point. For me, the word change on your first line is what really demonstrates it: many people conflate TeX and LaTeX, because LaTeX is TeX; or, to put it less controversially, LaTeX is written in TeX (rather than other (wonderful) extensions, like PDFTeX, XeTeX, or LuaTeX, all of which require source-level changes). LaTeX 3 (http://www.latex-project.org/latex3.html) takes this even further—and all this drives home the point (which I hope I may safely assert here as fact) that it's often much better to start with a simple programming language and customise it to your need, than to have a high-level programming language painstakingly customised and tuned for an application that turns out to be two millimetres to the left of the one that you actually want.

crazydiamond• 16 years ago

>it's often much better to start with a simple programming language and customise it to your need, than to have a high-level programming language painstakingly customised and tuned for an application that turns out to be two millimetres to the left of the one that you actually want.

I am interested to know if you had other examples in mind when you said this. Disclaimer: not trying to start a discussion on languages, or lang war.

jonsen• 16 years ago

"late x": unknowns late in the process ;-)

HilbertSpace5• 16 years ago

That's why I use TeX. I understand it fairly well, have a lot of macros that work well, and can write more macros easily. So I have own macros for table of contents, cross references, numbering figures, tables, chapters, sections, theorems, etc., bibliographic entries, verbatim, putting text from TeX on figures, putting a frame around foils, lists, etc.

With LaTeX, (1) I would have to learn more and (2) to write macros, I might have to understand and then fight what LaTeX assumes. Also the LaTeX documentation is much larger than 'The TeXBook'! So, I just stay with TeX.

Also for me a big, HUGE, point is that input to TeX (or LaTeX) is just a simple 'flat ASCII' text file, and for those I use my favorite, programmable text editor, the same one I use for writing software, e-mail, and much more. E.g., when I need to do some special thing to a TeX file, I can write an editor macro to do it.

Net, in my general purpose, long lasting collections, I have about 150 macros for TeX, about 150 for my programmable editor, and about 100 for command line scripts. So, that's 400 names to remember? No, from my editor, I can quickly see all the names of all the macros and, of course, for each macro its source. Searching for macros? My editor is great at searching! Lacking anything else, I can quickly pull all the macros of one collection into one temporary file and just search that. I have no difficulty finding macros! Works well.

Not to be missed, I run TeX from a scripting language which is 'smart' enough to do the converstion to PDF, etc. So, I minimize clicking. It's easy: I just have a little text window, and to see the results of a change in my TeX input I just hit the retrieve key in that window and then Enter. It's FAST.

Broadly I like 'windows', lots of windows, even for just one piece of work. So, for TeX I will have at least three, one for each of my text editor, the TeX DVI preview output, and the command line scripts. For my current software project, putting a Web site in front of some of my other software, I have about 15 windows with a mixture of Web browser windows and my editor windows. To open all those windows at the start of work, I have a simple script. To arrange the windows, I have a simple script. When the windows on the screen get to be a mess, I have a simple script that will arrange them and can be executed with an icon on the UL corner of my screen.

Lesson: One 'application' that has just one window and tries to do everything within just that one window is less good than just using the ability of the operating system to display many windows. So, right, "Look, Ma, no IDE!". And no Word, either.

End of my contrarian view of graphical user interface!

marktucker• 16 years ago

I agree. While I enjoy that it just makes everything look OK (since I don't care about most of the details), the best parts are the super easy macro definitions and being able to write equations (almost) as fast as I could by hand since it's all text -- I took notes for my physics and math classes in latex. Awesome packages like PGF/tikz, beamer(!) and listings are icing on the cake. Then again, the error messages are abysmal and placing tables is a huge chore.

tome2• 16 years ago

The macro ability is useful, but painfully leaves much to be desired.

The scoping rules are incredibly primitive and there's no namespace functionality. However, you can curry macros! How funky is that?

HilbertSpace5• 16 years ago

TeX itself has a really nice 'architecture' for a 'stack' with dynamic storage allocation and scope of names.

kmfrk• 16 years ago

That's true, but I usually regard articles or posts like these as sales pitches for LaTeX to people who use Office or something similar.

They may not mention the best features, but they are possibly the sexiest to people new to LaTeX.

Having said that, I'd love to see more articles emphasizing the feature you are praising. Different audience, different sales pitch.

10ren• 16 years ago

The danger of LaTeX is you end up in the thrall of its beauty, forgetting your quest.

madair• 16 years ago

Is this a cargo cult?

Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck.

gorog• 16 years ago

Definitely. Those who write for the web don't need TeX. Those who write for print must not do the job of their editor. Manuscript standards are technically minimalist. They must look like they were written on a typewriter. LaTeX is for self-published authors and scientific papers (only because TeX was the first solution with a decent way to write equations).

eru• 16 years ago

You can also use it for typesetting CVs and whatever people use Microsoft Word for.

The syntax is a bit antiquated, but its bearable.

I just which web browser would get the typography right one day.

upinsmoke• 16 years ago

Used it to write my thesis. Much better result than Word.

HilbertSpace5• 16 years ago

Okay, but my CM fonts in PDF are WAY too light.

Any suggestions of a way to get darker CM fonts in PDF?

lsb2• 16 years ago

If you've got a bunch of math, I'd say stick with CM, unless you want to reconfigure a bunch of stuff. For mostly text, set with sturdy fonts, you can use the "Serif" and "Sans" in Ubuntu with \usepackage{bera}, which stands for B[itstream] [V]era, but without the Bitstream(R) Vera(TM) name. Larger x-height, greater stroke-width, a solid look all around.

HilbertSpace5• 16 years ago

I was afraid of that.

My understanding is that the problem with the CM fonts in PDF is actually not the CM fonts as in Metafont but in the conversion of the CM fonts to what PDF wants. So, that conversion was essentially by hand by starting with magnified TeX output and taking 'outlines', in part because what Metafont assumes for 'pens' conflicts with what PS does with 'pens'. So, from the last time I looked, it seemed that what I needed was just some new conversions of CM to what PDF wants.

Actually with the TeX distribution I have, there are some nice fonts for just text, maybe Century Schoolbook, etc. But, again, I never want to give up on math or the AMS symbols.

Uh, I just use TeX and not LaTeX!

gchpaco• 16 years ago

CM is a very light font. I used to set things in Palatino and AMS-Euler, which cooperate surprisingly well; CM and Euler do not get along very well. If you decide you want to use that, the following magic will set it up in normal LaTeX.

  \renewcommand{\rmdefault}{ppl}
  \linespread{1.05}
  \RequirePackage{eulervm}
  ==1==
  \AtBeginDocument{\normalfont}
  \RequirePackage[T1]{fontenc}\relax

If you want to use Helvetica and Courier for SS and TT respectively, insert the following at ==1==.

  \RequirePackage[scaled]{helvet}
  \renewcommand{\ttdefault}{lmtt}

zokier2• 16 years ago

It annoys me that Latex is compared to Word, when they are bit different systems. Word is a word processor, and Latex is typesetting system. Much fairer comparison would be against Quark or InDesign, which are designed for typesetting.

spicyj• 16 years ago

One problem is that Quark and InDesign are expensive, bloated pieces of software whereas LaTeX and Word are free and easy to obtain (okay, Word isn't free, but it's ubiquitous).

zokier2• 16 years ago

InDesign is bloated while Word isn't?

nanairo• 16 years ago

You are correct, of course, but Latex and Word are the two main tools to write essays and such. In other words while they may be different systems, they are used in place of each other.

I've never seen someone editing an essay in InDesign (though I am sure there are such people).

The Beauty of LaTeX

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