
Equations system with a black rectangle in LaTeX - gus_massa
https://gus-massa.blogspot.com/2020/06/equations-system-with-black-rectangle.html
======
JohnHammersley
We struggled with this, especially for collaborative projects, and it was one
of the motivations for WritelaTeX (now Overleaf[1]). Having more eyes on the
problem (on a shared doc), especially the ability to loop in LaTeX experts,
usually resolved many of these similar types of issues.

[1] [https://www.overleaf.com](https://www.overleaf.com)

Edit: for avoidance of doubt, I'm one of the founders of WriteLaTeX/Overleaf
-- we've been providing LaTeX compilation-as-a-service for ~8 years now!

~~~
azalemeth
My colleagues and I use Overleaf for writing journal articles -- it's a really
great tool. Thank you so much for writing it. I just really wish I could get
my university [Oxford] to pay for it!

The bean counters don't have a problem paying Microsoft the amount of a small
African nation's GDP per year, but I pay for my Overleaf pro account out of my
own back pocket, and can't even claim it back on expenses...

~~~
enriquto
> and can't even claim it back on expenses...

This is ridiculous, how on earth a serious university have come to that?. If
you need a laptop or an external disk you need to also buy it yourself?

~~~
azalemeth
As far as I can tell, in my department Overleaf isn't liked because it's (a) a
personal service, (b) a subscription, and (c) from a company that they don't
have in a labyrinthine Oracle-provided, horrific and IE5 "preferred" online
purchasing system [which typically takes ~8 months to be added to]. Of these
(b) is really the biggest bugbear because my research fellowship has a fixed
budget for a fixed term and monthly subscriptions are basically anathema to
the way that they do accounting.

I have one piece of commercial FEM software that is only ever "licensed not
sold" [annually] -- an annual license is ~£1k; a perpetual one ~£100k. It's
quite clear that the company want to go in that direction. I hate it. I don't
like subscriptions, and I get riled by central university finance departments
every single time...

Ironically, laptops and hard drives etc are quite easy to purchase: they count
as 'consumables' and I have never worked in a department that actually audits
their lifecycle properly -- much like lab reagents, once they're bought, the
university [or my interactions with it at any rate] doesn't seem to even care
if the first thing I do is throw it in a bin. This is a Good Thing™ as far as
I'm concerned. Having decent computing wherever I am is absolutely key to
getting my job done.

Slightly more on topic, the other thing I would say is that quantitative
departments are very good at teaching their students LaTeX, but not
necessarily teaching them to it _well_. I won't exactly say that learning TeX
made me a better physicist, but it definitely helped me communicate like a
professional one. I interact a lot with doctors and bioscientists -- I
basically work in medical imaging -- and trying to cross that divide is very
hard; we forget that doing a physics degree gives you lots of transferable
skills. Overleaf is _excellent_ at providing a "user-friendly face" for
projects that I can share with doctors -- they don't need to understand the
code, nor have the distribution installed locally; they can just contribute to
a paper in progress quite easily, and in particular it's "track changes"
feature is something that they like. My team and I tend to use git and %
comments, but the value of a web UI is definitely there.

Debugging problems like alluded to in the original article is _definitely_
easier locally, however.

~~~
enriquto
> Debugging problems like alluded to in the original article is definitely
> easier locally, however.

Notice that you can have both things here. Each overleaf project is actually a
git repo that you can clone and edit locally.

------
ComputerGuru
Yeah, debugging LaTeX absolutely sucks. I always fantasize about some
strongly-typed variant and even wonder if XML would make a nicer Tex language.

~~~
dmurray
This is the kind of side project I should have seen 100 times on HN, but I
don't remember ever seeing one. Why aren't there alternatives to LaTeX out
there? [0] It's OK to have respect for Donald Knuth but still accept that
language design has come a long way since 1984.

[0] Of course there are plenty of alternatives to LaTeX. Microsoft Word is
just one. But I mean a language that compiles to TeX.

~~~
msla
> Of course there are plenty of alternatives to LaTeX. Microsoft Word is just
> one.

Only to the extent modelling clay is an alternative to CAD/CAM software and
CNC tools.

There might be a GUI replacement to LaTeX, but it would have to be a graphical
way to manipulate structure, not a WYSIWYG system. And anyway, WYSIWYG is
hardly ever WYSIWIG [1], or WYSIWTG [2]. (More like WYGIWYD [3], or YAFIYGI
[4].)

[1] What You See Is What I Get

[2] What You See Is What They Get

[3] What You Get Is What You Deserve

[4] You Asked For It, You Got It

~~~
Cyph0n
> There might be a GUI replacement to LaTeX

The closest thing I know of is LyX. I actually started with it before diving
into LaTeX.

[https://www.lyx.org/](https://www.lyx.org/)

------
Item_Boring
What I don’t quite understand is why array was used here in the first place
instead of equation* or similar.

Anyway interesting post I wouldn’t have guessed that carries onto the next
array. Why does it only affect the first cell (or first part of the first row)
though instead of the whole row?

~~~
gus_massa
It was a third hand file with a lot of packages and the content was quite
different, so perhaps there was a good reason in the original file that was
lost in the minimization or perhaps the problem is that sometimes people
prefer to reuse a few environments for all the possible constructions.

About the first cell: IIUC You can determine the color by the row, the column
or by the individual cell, so the color is recalculated in each cell. For some
reason, it fails in the first cell. I'm still curious.

------
leephillips
You could base a new package on this. \usepackage{blackout}

~~~
diarrhea
The censor package does pretty much this:
[https://ctan.org/pkg/censor](https://ctan.org/pkg/censor).

