The Beauty of LaTeX (2011)

http://www.nitens.org/taraborelli/latex

by pmoriarty • 12 years ago

197 127 12 years ago

bbcbasic• 12 years ago

I would like to start using LaTeX actually. I like that LaTex would work will with source control, and that you can use a simple editor like Vim to edit.

I hate using word and have a load of random formatting applied to my document. I am fed up with using the 'format painter'!!!

praseodym• 12 years ago

It works well with source control, but be careful to split long sentences over multiple lines. Most merge tools are a real pain with long lines.

ivan_ah• 12 years ago

If you haven't tried it already, look into `latexdiff` and `scm-latexdiff` which are awesome for generating diffs.

myg2042• 12 years ago

A good advise is to split sentences between lines at logical places, like commas, dots, etc so the diff will be easy to read.

arooaroo2• 12 years ago

Go for it - it's simpler than you'd imagine. You may find this beginner's guide a useful starting point: http://www.andy-roberts.net/writing/latex/

[disclosure: I'm the author]

diogofranco• 12 years ago

Thanks for writing these, i found it easy to pick up latex by following them.

BinaryIdiot• 12 years ago

Thanks, these look great! I've never used LaTeX but I've heard so much that I think I'll take a look at it now.

cLeEOGPw• 12 years ago

One of the things why ms word will always be miles ahead of latex is that it doesn't need a guide to start writing a document.

pXMzR2A2• 12 years ago

The best all-around resource I have come across thus far is https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX

arooaroo2• 12 years ago

It's certainly a great resource and extremely comprehensive. Personally I think it a bit too detailed to be an effective beginner's guide.

And I say this as one of the credited authors of the LaTeX wikibook (https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Authors)

Therefore I'd still plug my own Getting to Grips with LaTeX as a good starting point for newbies: http://www.andy-roberts.net/writing/latex/

I promise that's my final plug :P Quite frankly I'm just happy people want to learn LaTeX other word processors.

jvehent• 12 years ago

I prefer HTML & CSS, maybe with something like restructuredText on top.

Argorak8• 12 years ago

For print-quality stuff?

andrey-p3• 12 years ago

It's a bit finicky but it's possible. Text is vector so as long as you use print-quality images and shrink them down to screen size using the width and height properties, you can have something that looks pretty good on both print and screen.

(I've self-published a book that way and was surprised at how well it worked.)

mkozlows3• 12 years ago

Yes. CSS (in Chrome and Firefox and modern IE; not Safari, despite Apple's typographical reputation) supports OpenType features like ligatures, stylistic alternates, kerning, true small caps (not using the CSS font-variant property, using the font-feature-settings property), lining/oldstyle (and proportional/tabular) numbers, etc.

HTML/CSS typography can be very sophisticated.

mFixman• 12 years ago

I prefer having coffee for breakfast than LaTeX.

dnautics3• 12 years ago

I know this is being downvoted, but there is something to this statement. There's a lot in LaTeX that is getting obsolete and needs to be fixed... I personally think that a JS-based "cleanslate" alternative to LaTeX would be awesome.

Argorak8• 12 years ago

The statement is being downvoted for glossing over 2 huge technologies in a sentence. What, for example, is the "obsolete" things you are speaking about? (not that I want to argue that there are none, but give us something to talk about)

sklogic• 12 years ago

Nothing JS-based can be awesome, because JS is inherently disgusting.

There are some clean slate attempts, done with much better languages. See Patoline, for example.

bsmith• 12 years ago

I used HTML & CSS for my resume: http://thisisbrians.com/resume.html

fantispug5• 12 years ago

That's great if people are viewing your resume online, but the print version looks very ordinary; there's a page break within a block, the format is dull (you even set a print stylesheet), and, for instance, the kerning is mediocre compared to TeX (e.g. in Europe). Your resume even compete on any of the points that (La)TeX is good at.

grayclhn• 12 years ago

Dude, take "Skateboard club at Georgia Tech" off your resume. Especially since it looks like you either quit or were kicked out of your role as founder and president after your first year!

Argorak8• 12 years ago

I would also like to encourage you to have a look at ConTeXt. It goes the other way for LaTeX and wants to think you about layout more. I use it to create all my slides and have far more fun than with LaTeX beamer for that.

kaoD2• 12 years ago

Mind sharing a link please? ConTeXt is not really searchable.

thangalin• 12 years ago

http://wiki.contextgarden.net/

inclemnet2• 12 years ago

Did you actually try? Search engines are powerful, e.g. googling 'context tex' or 'context typesetting' returns pages of relevant results.

zvrba• 12 years ago

Ah! Imagine my pleasant surprise when I discovered that ConTeXt has built-in features that you need a bunch of different LaTeX packages for. It was painless to, for example, flow text around figures.

The bad thing is... academic journals and conferences accept only LaTeX. Research articles often end up packaged in a larger work like a PhD dissertation. Amending markup from LaTeX to ConTeXt is painful. So one ends up using the inferior tool (LaTeX) for typesetting one's own larger work too, like I did :( (Though I used Koma-script classes instead of standard LaTeX classes.)

emersonrsantos• 12 years ago

You can have the best of both worlds (TeX and WYSIWYG) with LyX and possibly other editors that I didn't use much (Maple used to render to LaTeX 20 years ago and it worked kinda nice).

stan_rogers• 12 years ago

Well, WYSISOROWYMG (what you see is sort of reminiscent of what you might get), provided that you don't need to use much in the way of ERT ("evil red text", the LyX derogatory term for LaTeX literals). LyX prefers WYSIWYM (what you see is what you mean). The only way you can get anything approaching a layout view while typing is to carefully adjust the editor width, and even then line breaks will only be approximate (because hyphenation hasn't been computed) and there's no indication of pagination. I like LyX for straightforward documents, but it's not WYSIWYG, and it doesn't claim to be.

quink• 12 years ago

Year is wrong, BTW.

I remember reading this a few years before 2011.

Edit: here we go, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1173226

mturmon• 12 years ago

Thanks, the earlier discussion you found was pretty good IIRC.

baddox4• 12 years ago

Common ligatures are essential to professionally typeset text.

I like the idea, and they're aesthetically great, but I think they're too rare now for it to be wise to use them. People will be confused and distracted. I have only one anecdatum, which is that Slack chat uses a font with ligatures, and I have heard several confused comments about them. For niche professional documents, like research papers, I'm sure it's accepted and expected, but you're probably already using LaTeX for those anyway!

pXMzR2A2• 12 years ago

For niche professional documents, like research papers, I'm sure it's accepted and expected, but you're probably already using LaTeX for those anyway!

I think by LaTeX you mean Microsoft Word. For social sciences, at least.

saryant• 12 years ago

Back in college I would typeset my polisci and literature papers in LaTeX. Professors would write notes about how great my papers looked, they were so used to Word.

baddox4• 12 years ago

Oh, that could be. Mathematics and computer science are the only fields for which I've read many papers, and they tend to be LaTeX.

TTPrograms• 12 years ago

That's pretty presumptuous to assume all research papers are like those in social sciences...

Sharlin• 12 years ago

In hard sciences LaTeX is pretty much the de facto standard. So much that most people in those fields automatically assume papers that don't have the LaTeX look to be subpar science. Of course, one of the reasons for its prevalence is the math support that's lightyears beyond anything Word can offer.

fosap5• 12 years ago

I get a teaching degree. Every discipline as it's own formating requirements. For CS and Physics things have to look good, but there is not too much specified. Everybody uses TeX, length is measured in characters, not pages, usually there is no minimum length, but a maximum length.

For pedagogics there are huge (like 30 pages) formating requirements. The formating requirements itself are incredible ugly and often quite objectively bad. Such as lots of widows and orphans (even in tables!). The document is distributed as a .doc file, and yes it does look like this even in Word, it's not a fault of LibreOffice. Length is measured in pages and the critical limit is the minimum length.

On the subjective side they IMO made the worst possible choices. Arial (or similar), 12 points, almost no margins, 150% spacing between the lines, italic and bold headings.

It looks very bad, is MS Word centric, but they have the nerve to make a style guide longer than a page.

Also, looking at psychology papers, it seems to me that non technical fields have a thing for shitty typography.

TacticalCoder• 12 years ago

"...but I think they're too rare now for it to be wise to use them"

The ligature of 'f' and 'i' is not "rare" and it is not "unwise" to use it. Actually many professionally typeset books are using it: it's not an "idea" as you wrote. It is something very real and often used.

It is so common and so good looking (I'd even say "so perfect") that you probably never noticed it but I can assure you that it's used in many of the books / newspapers / magazines you've read during your life.

I've written and typeset about a dozen book (one with LaTeX, all the others with QuarkXPress: it was before the InDesign days) and I can tell you that when I see a non-ligature "fi" I directly notice it because it is really poor looking.

Of course in addition to LaTeX, both QuarkXPress and Adobe's InDesign and several other professional typesetting software do the common ligatures.

baddox4• 12 years ago

I'm usually fairly cognizant of ligatures when I'm reading, but obviously I can only comment on the things I have read with my imperfect memory. The book I'm reading now (Harmonic Experience by Mathieu) is certainly what I would consider to be professionally typeset, and it does not use the "fi" ligature. Godel, Escher, Bach, on the other hand, does use it from what I remember. The Lifebox, The Sheashell, and the Soul does not use it (I just checked). From my memory, few of the physical novels I've read used it, but I'm not too confident in that memory because all of my novel reading has been done on a Kindle for several years (the portability and convenience won out over typography). I've read almost no physical newspapers or magazines since I was quite young, so you might be very correct about that.

It really comes down to who your audience is, and perhaps it's true that most things you would even consider using LaTeX for are intended for an audience savvy enough to not be distracted by ligatures.

suchow• 12 years ago

That's surprising because if you pick up any professionally typeset book or magazine, you'll find ligatures all over. Some of them are quite subtle (e.g., the fi -> ﬁ ligature). I have to imagine then that your colleagues are getting distracted not by the presence of ligatures in general, but by a few decorative ligatures or characters present in the Slack font, which looks to be Lato. For example, Lato's ampersand is missing a chunk in the upper loop (https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Lato).

baddox4• 12 years ago

I don't find the "fi" ligature to be at all subtle. I commented on my reading experience in this other reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8615657. You're right that Lato has some peculiar glyphs, but there have definitely been specific comments in my office about the "fi" ligature.

krig• 12 years ago

I also don't like the ligatures that Slack uses, but it's entirely a problem with the font they use, not with ligatures in general.

riobard• 12 years ago

(La)TeX the typesetting engine is great, but (La)TeX the language is clunky. Without proper support for namespace, it's rather difficult to abstract and write macros without worrying about side effects. I have real troubles to guess which package a command is from.

Are there any alternatives that have solved this problem?

fosap5• 12 years ago

Namespaces are the least of my worries.

TeX is not a programming language, it's two programming languages. These languages have a self modifying syntax and is parsed with state machines that can be changed. Changing the syntax into something meaningful other is yet quite impossible. It's meant not meant to be able to read markdown or xml.

These Languages are so odd even division of two variables is non-trivial, yet both are truing complete and servly limited, a classic turing tar pit, even division of two variables is nontrivial.

The hole TeX thing is a huge state machine, and uses imperative paradigms, while declaratives would have been much nicer.

All that leads to a horrible, monkey patching coding style.

On the internals there are other horrible things: Unicode was known when it was invented, font formats are a mess (even with XeTeX; I think I can't have another mapping for my the cursive style of a font then for regular. Good thing is the very verbose documentation for fontspec does mention "mapping" twice)

Argorak8• 12 years ago

You fall into a simple trap: TeX is not a programming language. At all. It's a typesetting DSL. Whether it's a good one is another thing.

bhaak• 12 years ago

Unicode was known when it was invented

Certainly not, not even latin-1 was existing when TeX was created.

Argorak8• 12 years ago

http://patoline.org/ tries to be better and it seems like the authors have a good grasp of typesetting.

fosap5• 12 years ago

I want to belive, but i have seen serveral TeX alternatives (Such as ANT [1][2] and Rhinotype[3]), but they all die very quickly.

Esp. ANT would have been a fantastic improvement.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20090310012257/http://ant.berlio... [2] http://sourceforge.net/projects/ant.berlios/ [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6668551

hbbio• 12 years ago

Patoline is a great project, that I have mentioned a few times in comments.

To start gaining traction though, it should migrate from darcs to git, and move their own repo to github. It would enable people to contribute more easily, as well as bug reporting and editing the documentation.

Turing_Machine• 12 years ago

The tarball is still there, though.

pervycreeper• 12 years ago

Couldn't that be solved by a new language that compiles to Latex?

jordigh3• 12 years ago

Well, you would probably compile to TeX, not LaTeX.

I don't want a new language, myself, because new languages are much more difficult to migrate to. Personally, I just want an implementation that knows how to produce good error messages despite LaTeX's macro implementation. By the time TeX sees the results of the LaTeX macros, it loses the context for producing meaningful diagnostics.

fantispug5• 12 years ago

Some effort is going towards this in LaTeX3 (see the experimental package: http://www.ctan.org/pkg/expl3).

jordigh3• 12 years ago

Really? What evidence do you have for that? This thing has been promised for decades now, since the early 1990s.

taeric3• 12 years ago

I think the best alternative out there, honestly, is to just write simpler papers. Having finally started digging into the some of the core works of Knuth, I must say that the source and the results both read fairly well. There are macros, but they are judiciously used.

Probably doesn't hurt to adopt his style of reuse. Which is not necessarily to "link" to a full blown library of macros for purposes, but to pick and choose some that you wish to use. Possibly even just redefining them yourself.

gchpaco• 12 years ago

That's easier said than done. To make some of the mathematical equations work and be legible in several of my papers required a lot of subtle positioning; this was not helped by strict conference page limits or requirements for e.g. 2 column layout (which exposes a lot of weird issues with LaTeX's rendering, which then have to be dealt with). Knuth's original papers, lovely though they are, are much simpler. If you want an example, consider Figure 4 from http://sigwinch.org/Graham/papers/Interface%20Grammars%20for... which was really quite tricky to lay out. I don't have the source code with me right at the moment for some reason, but I recall it being very tricky to modify.

Perhaps this means we should be trying to do simpler stuff, but I'm pretty sure that's impossible in the conference driven world I found myself in.

patrickg3• 12 years ago

Not really an alternative to classic LaTeX (scientific articles, homework and college / university work) but for database publishing (XML -> PDF):

https://github.com/speedata/publisher

manual:

http://speedata.github.io/publisher/manual/index.html

built on top of (Lua)TeX.

brodo• 12 years ago

There is ASCIIDOC and ASCIIDOCTOR http://asciidoctor.org/ I wrote my thesis with it. If you want to publish HTML, it's great. For PDF the current way to go it is to compile to DocBook and from DocBook to PDF. But there a ASCIIDOC to PDF renderer in the works.

mangecoeur• 12 years ago

I agree - clearly a lot of work has gone into typesetting algorithms, but the language and package ecosystem is a mess, and there's not a good enough separation of presentation and content. A lot of macros and commands should really go in the template rather than the document, a lot of others could be made redundant.

Personally I'm a fan of markdown->latex->pdf using pandoc, although figure/table/equation numbering is still a bit of a hack (though there's wip plugins for them, or you can cheat with some embedded latex)

paulgerhardt• 12 years ago

Is there a current goto standard to get this functionality in the web browser? A javascript framework that supports ligatures, river elimination, dynamic hyphenation and so on?

chronial3• 12 years ago

It should be noted that word does indeed support all ligatures and glyph variants since Office 2013. Transparent text is also possible, put I guess it already was back then.

TylerE• 12 years ago

Until it supports something like the Microtype package, it won't come close - see http://www.khirevich.com/latex/microtype/ for instance.

boshie• 12 years ago

A very useful tool for writing LaTeX when you are often switching locations is ShareLatex. You can write LaTeX in your browser. It allows collaboration too, similar to Google Docs.

https://www.sharelatex.com?r=890185d4&rm=d&rs=b ( <- referral link, a referred user enables me to add more collaborators to my projects. Here's a non referral URL: https://www.sharelatex.com)

rspeer• 12 years ago

This article claims that "LaTeX supports Unicode". Does it now? Can you just drop in encoded characters from any language your fonts support, and get them rendered correctly? That would be a huge breakthrough, and last I knew, this is not at all the case.

LaTeX supports rendering various kinds of diacritics and math symbols, through its own mechanisms that aren't Unicode. If you want Unicode, you need to use a separate project called XeTeX. XeTeX's home page [1] introduces it as "Unicode-based TeX".

[1] http://xetex.sourceforge.net/

qznc5• 12 years ago

It works for stuff like äöü. It does not work with math mode stuff like \sum.

For UTF-8 write into the preamble: \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

Derbasti2• 12 years ago

You are talking about pdflatex, which is the default latex compiler in many LaTeX distributions. Most distributions also ship xelatex, which is the LaTeX compiler of the XeTeX project.

XeTeX and xelatex indeed do support all the wondrous diacritics and Klingon symbols of unicode fonts (TTF or OTF, no less). However, LaTeX math still has to be written with \LaTeX symbols in order for the math engine to lay out symbols correctly. After all, a \sum is conceptually a different thing than a \Sigma. You can easily type your Euro Signs, typographic quotes, or Klingon symbols as unicode, though.

By the way, lualatex, from the LuaTeX project, behaves the same, although somewhat slower and infinitely scriptable in Lua.

honorious• 12 years ago

I have been using LaTex for many years and I like it, but what's stopping other document editing software (like Word) to reach the same level of quality of results? LaTex has been around forever, but nobody else is close to that quality.

wodenokoto3• 12 years ago

Even on modern hardware it takes quite a while to compile a latex document (seconds!). Word basically has to compile the entire document with every key you click in order to show you the WYSIWYG interface.

fantispug5• 12 years ago

A lot of that, though, is actually loading LaTeX packages itself.

TeX underneath is really very speedy; on my several year old laptop it can compile several hundred pages in around half a second (and pdftex takes around twice as long).

I believe it's also possible to perform optimal line breaking algorithms incrementally, so you wouldn't have to reset the whole document as you add to the end of it (although you may as you add to the start of it, but that happens in Word anyway).

jules• 12 years ago

Lyx is a WYSIWYG editor for Latex. It shows you quick typesetting in the WYSIWYG editor, but you can compile the underlying Latex document for beautiful typesetting.

JadeNB6• 12 years ago

I think that the best answer is that nothing's stopping them, but no one is demanding it. Word's type-setting is good enough for most, and so Microsoft has no particular reason to make that aspect of it better (but don't get me wrong—I am no Word apologist, and use LaTeX almost exclusively).

dendory• 12 years ago

I wrote a quick tutorial to LaTeX a few weeks back for those who might be interested in starting using it. http://dendory.net/?w=544fb21d

amelius• 12 years ago

My main problem with LaTex: it is not composable. Explanation: you can't plug a random piece of LaTeX inside a random container (environment or macro), without it being formatted completely wrong, or without it triggering all kinds of error messages.

Composing objects hierarchically should be natural (easy), and the user should not be required to read tons of documentation for each case.

I think HTML does a lot better in that respect (though it has its flaws too).

Derbasti2• 12 years ago

In general, I dislike the stateful nature of LaTeX. There are many commands that change some variable at some point in the document, which might have ramifications way later, with no easy way to trace it back to the original command.

Some kind of consistent, closed, scoping would greatly benefit many areas of LaTeX in my opinion.

ginko• 12 years ago

The thing that makes me wonder is that all these typographical features should be easily supported by a WYSIWYG editor. From my perspective all it would take would be for Microsoft to buy some professional grade fonts and to put a couple of developers on the problem. None of this seems like it's inherently incompatible with the WYSIWYG workflow.

Am I overlooking something here?

bjz_• 12 years ago

Typeface designers are really annoyed about this. It's not just Word and Pages that don't have this stuff available to users, even Adobe is behind on it.

OpenType was introduced in 2000. It is now 2014. How is it possible that [...] users are still unable to properly access and exploit these fascinating typographic possibilities because the font menus in apps with typesetting capabilities have barely evolved?

http://ilovetypography.com/2014/10/25/why-a-better-opentype-...

_acme• 12 years ago

Why do people compare LaTeX with Word? Shouldn't the comparison be against QuarkXPress and InDesign, software products which are designed as layout tools, not word processors, and can easily address all of the typesetting issues as LaTeX?

fafner• 12 years ago

I still remember when I was binding my thesis. The printing shop offered the option to engrave text on the book cover. But they only accepted Word documents as template for it. I gave up as soon as I tried to do smallcaps in Word.

The thesis was nicely typeset in LaTeX and it would have been ridiculous to make the cover look far worse than the actual text.

The engraving was supposed to be something like 3€ per line. But it didn't even support basic typographic features because of Word. That was just ridiculous. That's why my thesis has a plain cover and the shop lost 12€ (- expenses) per copy.

acrostic• 12 years ago

Lout (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lout_%28software%29) is a nice alternative to TeX and co, with a much better language. It uses the TeX typesetting algorithms underneath so quality is similar. But it suffers from the inverse network effect: its good, but few use it, therefore few use it :-( Hope mentioning it here gets some new customers.

The Beauty of LaTeX (2011)

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