
The Beauty of LaTex - mapleoin
http://nitens.org/taraborelli/latex
======
uggedal
LaTeX gives you great defaults and can yield truly beautiful results if you
put in some time:
[http://www.duo.uio.no/sok/work.html?WORKID=81971&lang=en](http://www.duo.uio.no/sok/work.html?WORKID=81971&lang=en)

Edit: source code of this thesis in LaTeX can be found here:
<http://bitbucket.org/uggedal/thesis/src/>

~~~
psyklic
"Putting in some time" being the key words :)

~~~
tel
Absolutely. There is no free lunch. Typesetting is a difficult job and unique
typesetting is still considered a innovative profession. Latex is a wonderful
tool for doing it, but you still need skill, creativity, and drive to use it
masterfully.

That being said, Latex defaults have more typsetting heritage influencing
their design than anything WYSIWYG tool. If you can handle the tradeoffs
selected, it's a fantastic default route.

~~~
jff
With LaTeX, I was able to compose and typeset a full IEEE-format paper, full
of diagrams and equations, in a day. I've done the same in OpenOffice, doing
part of the work in Word, and I spent half the time fiddling with the figures
to get them placed decently, and in the end it still didn't look nearly as
nice as the LaTeX version.

I don't know many LaTeX tricks, mostly how to make sections and subsections,
insert a figure, add some citations, do monospace text for code, but I can get
beautiful papers out of it.

~~~
_delirium
A big drawback I find is that this sort of ease is only true if there is a
LaTeX stylesheet already in exactly the format you want. Not all conferences
provide LaTeX stylesheets, in which case you have a huge hassle, because the
stylesheet language for making your own is terrible.

~~~
tel
I agree and disagree. TeX isn't a terrible language, but it's not a modern
language either. Additionally, there's a lot of environmental complexity
knowing that typesetting is a complex business.

Writing a fluff template language that compiles to Sty files would be a great
project.

------
jwr
I used to do all my work in LaTeX, but recently gave up: life is too short.
And before you do the "vehemently disagree" thing, think about the last time
you had to typeset a text in LaTeX with lots of figures (as in, 2 or 3 per
page), or tables. Enough said.

Pages on a Mac gives me all of the typography features outlined in that
article. Actualy, it gives my pretty much everything I need, except for
unbreakable spaces (argh) and good support for numbered figure captions.

Positioning LaTeX as a "competitor" to WYSIWYG is wrong, instead one should
mock Word and OpenOffice for poor typography features.

~~~
Lewisham
I use LaTeX specifically _because_ I have lots of figures. Word's handling of
figures is monstrous: moving them around at the drop of a hat is just awful.

Tables are definitely easier in WYSIWYG.

Some sort of typographic valhalla would be Markdown syntax with LaTeX
equations and figures, BibTeX bibliographies and WYSIWYG tables.

EDIT: It looks like Pandoc does this! Awesome!

~~~
eru
Interestingly, I like tables in LaTeX better. Not because I like the syntax of
LaTeX, but because it is much easier to get a program to spit out LaTeX tables
(and have LaTeX use them automatically) then dealing with WYSIWYG.

~~~
chronomex
Failing that, you can take your data (originally suitable for gnuplot) and
make it suitable for LaTeX to \include{} via

    
    
      cat data.tsv | sed -e 's/<tab>/ & /g;s/$/\\\\/'
    

And then you can put all this into a Makefile or whatever you prefer. :)

~~~
tel
I do this using org-mode's tables pretty frequently. It's the way I generate
95% of my Latex tables.

------
mark_l_watson
Good article but the author concentrated just on great output quality. There
is another huge advantage: it is easier and less time consuming to write using
Latex. I have used Latex, OpenOffice.org, and Word to write books in the past.
Using Latex has the smallest overhead because it is so easy to move chapters
and sections around, etc. Another advantage, which I am using now, is that I
am writing 2 editions of the same book (using different programming languages
for the examples), and using Latex greatly facilitates using common material.

------
buro9
Whilst we're all here... can anyone recommend a piece of software for writing
a thesis?

I'm struggling with MS Word at the moment as I seem to be locked into a fight
to the death with Styles.

I've tried Scientific Workplace but actually found it to be such a non-
intuitive interface that I consider it a substantial obstacle to overcome.

Currently I'm: Using MS Word to: * Layout the document, keep track of
references and figures. Using MS Excel to: * Produce charts Using MS Visio to:
* Produce images of graphs * Produce images of database schemas

It works, but it's clunky and those damned Styles are driving me nuts.

I'd love: * A LaTeX engine for Windows that makes things very easy to get
started and very intuitive. * A way of generating charts and having a lot of
control over the precise layout of the charts * A way of producing tables
(database schema), vector graphics (graphs, and also relations for those
database schema) * Keep track of my references in a way that can automatically
update the master document and produce the bibliography

In my mind this should be a LaTeX application and perhaps something else for
the references. But I'll be damned if I've ever managed to find something that
makes adopting and using it as easy as I want it to be, and so I stick with MS
Office.

Please help! Before these styles ruin my day again.

~~~
pierrefar
I wrote my thesis in LaTeX under Windows. My tools were:

1\. <http://www.texniccenter.org/> Great UI to get you up and running. You
still type in LaTeX markup, but you can compile to PS or PDF very quickly.

2\. OpenOffice to produce the images, which are exported as PDF. LaTeX has a
way to include PDF files directly into the output.

3\. For anything else, get a PDF printer and generate PDFs that way. You might
need a PDF editor to set the bounding boxes properly though, so it will take
some hacking.

4\. For bibliography, I used a very hacked up system. EndNote allowed export
in a format that LaTeX understood, except that it had a bug in the output
markup. So I wrote a quick PHP script to fix that and add a unique,
deterministic, ID for each reference so I can refer to it in the text. Worked
a treat.

~~~
merraksh
I make most of my with xfig and export to .eps. I also use the LaTeX package
psfrag to include LaTeX math formulae in images.

~~~
vog
I'm using Inkscape instead of xfig for drwaing graphics.

However, there's also _TikZ_ \-- a LaTeX package that takes the descriptive
approach to graphics: You describe what you want and get almost always a very
nice picture that fits perfectly with the rest of your LaTeX document:

<http://www.texample.net/tikz/examples/>

TikZ comes with an amazingly good manual:

[http://tug.ctan.org/tex-
archive/graphics/pgf/base/doc/generi...](http://tug.ctan.org/tex-
archive/graphics/pgf/base/doc/generic/pgf/pgfmanual.pdf)

~~~
merraksh
I knew about pgf, in fact I've made learning it my new year's resolution. It
is indeed amazing. I didn't know the texample.net website though, thanks.

------
frederickcook
I never learned about ligatures in school, and have only recently been
introduced to the idea of them. A couple weeks ago a buddy was putting
together a logo in photoshop and the 'fi' ran together. I had never seen that
before, and opted to keep them separate, because I felt it would be confusing
(or distracting) for people. I had no idea it was the correct way of
typesetting (though I still think it would be confusing).

As an aside, I learned Latex doing my thesis (though never noticed the
ligatures), and fell in love. I recently wrote a patent application in it, but
my attorney had never heard of it, so I (unfortunately) had to put it in Word
for her to collaborate. Much less elegant.

~~~
Silhouette
Unfortunately, a significant number of font designers and typesetters have
tried to be a bit too clever with "proper" typography in recent years, as
OpenType fonts and tools like LaTeX or InDesign have made it realistic to add
professional quality typographic touches in everyday DTP projects.

One common example is feeling that you "must" include certain ligatures in a
font. There is absolutely no reason to mandate this if the glyph shapes do not
require it, e.g., if setting the normal shape "f" then "i" with their natural
spacing does not cause an awkward overlap. Equally, if glyph combinations
other than the classic f-ligatures cause awkward clashes then corresponding
ligatures should be provided. So, if you saw a font where the "fi" ligature
ran together in a confusing way, it was almost certainly a poorly designed
font (or a feature of a well designed font, used poorly).

Another common idiocy in OpenType fonts is creating dedicated petite caps (the
same height as lowercase letters) and then calling them small caps. The point
of small caps is just to reduce the "heavy" appearance of a string of
capitals, to avoid disrupting the flow for the reader. Small caps are _not_
supposed to be so small that they are the same height as lowercase letters,
because then small caps like O, S and C become near-enough indistinguishable
from their lowercase counterparts, and if you have to do things like pluralise
an acronym, things get messy.

See also: "hanging" punctuation that puts the entire mark in the margin (the
point is to give a visually, rather than mathematically, even margin, and
hanging a few mm of glyph out there hardly does so), hanging bullets/list
markers right out in the margin (these are _supposed_ to cause a visual break
in the flow, that's why they're there!), using oldstyle figures where they
aren't necessary (OSF can be useful for avoiding chunkiness in the same way as
small caps, but suffer similar problems to petite caps where an old-style 0 or
1 can easily be misread if the context doesn't make it clear which is
intended), and so on.

Unfortunately, there's a whole new breed of typographical snob who once read a
book of rules about how typography "should" be done, and now apply those rules
unthinkingly, resulting in documents that are neither more beautiful nor more
functional that they would have been without the "clever" typography.

------
dutchflyboy
"There are several reasons why one should prefer LaTeX to a WYSIWYG word
processor like Microsoft Word: portability, lightness, security are just a few
of them"

I agree with most points but seriously, lightness? Have you ever downloaded
it? The program is about 750MB (Source: <http://www.tug.org/protext/>), and
that's for software without an elegant UI. To compare, the ENTIRE office
package is around the 500MB, that's Word+Excel+Outlook+OneNote+Groove.It does
produce very nice results, but it isn't light (in terms of space).

~~~
vog
This comparison is not fair.

You're free to download just the LaTeX core and the most important packages.
Add a decent Editor/IDE such as Kyle or TeXnicCenter, and you're still in the
range of 50-100 MB.

The 750 MB of the total LaTeX package should be compared to the size of Word
along with all macros and plugins that are available for Word.

------
Osmose
I use Pandoc to write most of my assignments in Markdown with a bit of LaTeX,
and then convert them to a PDF via LaTeX. It makes doing small papers really
quick and easy.

<http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/>

~~~
Quiark
Looks really interesting (and +1 for Haskell). I've used for this purpose
Deplate written in Ruby, which has a rich feature set, but is not quite
mature, so sometimes you have to go to the source code.

------
arebop
I would like to mention that the Memoir class (<http://www.ctan.org/tex-
archive/macros/latex/contrib/memoir/>) pulls together many useful LaTeX
packages and comes with a terrific manual.

When I discovered it, I had no knowledge of LaTeX beyond the Not So Short
guide ([http://www.ctan.org/tex-
archive/info/lshort/english/lshort.p...](http://www.ctan.org/tex-
archive/info/lshort/english/lshort.pdf)) and a couple of semesters using
article for homeworks. I found it very helpful for documents of more than a
couple of pages, and even when I want to be fairly particular about a single
page document such as my resume.

~~~
kalid
Agreed on the beauty of the Memoir class. I used it for my ebook and I enjoyed
the result
([http://betterexplained.com/ebook/MathBetterExplained.Preview...](http://betterexplained.com/ebook/MathBetterExplained.Preview.pdf)).
It's hard to find LaTeX examples/templates for non-technical papers, but
Memoir was it.

------
nearestneighbor
_LaTeX is a free typesetting system that allows you to focus on content_

and on markup.

------
JulianMorrison
Why does latex get so much love compared to context
(<http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Main_Page> ), when latex only has a handful of
academia-focused templates by default and the barrier to making your own is
really, really high?

(No, I will not use the gimmicky caps, they annoy me.)

~~~
viraptor
I looked at the beginner's manual and user manual on their wiki. The first
document looks terrible (I expected Comic Sans any moment, after seeing the
heading/special section frames), the second has broken layout on some pages.
Not inviting unfortunately :(

------
owinebarger
TeX has a lot of shortcomings as a language. When I was writing my
dissertation I would have been able to list plenty of them, but the most
obvious was the gratuitous use of dynamic scoping instead of lexical scoping.

It can be very tricky to selectively expand parts of a subexpression to create
a block and then return to the head and execute the block you've created.
Without lexical scoping it's difficult to safely create CPS macros.

------
almost
Yes, but what about if I want to insert a few figures? I don't want to have
them all bunched up one side of the page or to have a tiny bit of a paragraph
show up before one or etc etc. I just want to say "put this figure here and
this one here" but this is LaTeX so tough.

(I should add that I use and like LaTeX, it does let me produce beautiful
documents from Emacs. But let's not pretend it's the answer to everyone's
problems)

~~~
merraksh
_I don't want to have them all bunched up one side of the page_

Try

    
    
      \begin{center}
      \begin{figure}[ht]
      ...
      \end{figure}
      \end{center}
    

Also, LaTeX usually does a good job in placing figures (which, in
professionally typeset journals/books, appear at the top of a page), and
overriding it with [h!] sometimes makes a document look less readable.

~~~
merraksh
Oops, that's supposed to be inside out:

    
    
      \begin{figure}[ht]
      \begin{center}
      ...
      \end{center}
      \end{figure}
    

Not sure it works the way I first suggested. Apologies.

------
vog
Just a small correction to the article: LaTeX is not only free, it's also Free
Software!

~~~
omaranto
A small correction to your comment: your "correction" is actually an addition,
since you point out an omission not a mistake.

~~~
vog
I consider this a mistake because the author depicts the project under value.

Saying a project is free when it is in fact Free Software ... well, that's
like saying "they have more than 1.000 users" when there are in fact 50.000
users.

It isn't really wrong, but it's a mistake that should be corrected.

------
byrneseyeview
LaTeX, please!

~~~
mapleoin
Thanks, but it's too late, I can't edit it now.

~~~
merraksh
The first time I read this comment the title had a typo ("Beautfy" instead of
"Beauty") that has been corrected. By YC, I suppose.

~~~
merraksh
And now it's LaTex. Almost there...

------
cubix
It's great for collaborating with other authors since you can use the same
tools you use for software (svn, git, etc.).

------
by
"The algorithm uses language-specific patterns in order to decide the
preferred position for hyphenation. The engine then selects line breaks so as
to make paragraphs look as good as possible."

Proper typsetting will check for lakes and rivers. I do not see mention of
this so it probably is not "as good as possible".

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_(typography)>

~~~
Silhouette
There is no explicit check, but a natural consequence of the mathematical
optimisation problem that this algorithm solves is that rivers are unlikely.

~~~
by
I tried to read the paper, but it's behind a paywall so I am unable to confirm
whether it gives any possible mechanism for solving rivers. But it seems
highly unlikely because the alignment of word gaps from one line to the next,
the cause of rivers, is entirely unrelated to getting nice word spacing on the
lines themselves. The abstract makes no mention of trying to solve the problem
of rivers or lakes. How does the algorithm solve rivers?

~~~
Silhouette
As I mentioned before, there is nothing explicit about "solving" rivers in the
algorithm. The rarity of rivers is just a welcome side-effect of the
mathematical formulation.

The kind of river that is distracting is typically caused by an unfortunate
combination of two things: having wide spaces between words, and having them
aligned closely enough from one line to the next that the white space they
cause joins up visually.

TeX's hyphenation and justification algorithm is, in simple terms, trying to
optimise for even spacing throughout a paragraph, with a bias towards using
the natural spacing or as close to it as possible. Notably, it can do this by
increasing _or decreasing_ the space between words. In this environment, you
are much less likely to get wide spaces in the first place than if you have a
typical word processor algorithm that justifies line-by-line and only by
increasing space. If the spaces aren't as wide, then they are less distracting
in themselves, and there is less scope for them to overlap for several lines
to form the long rivers that are so distracting to the reader.

This doesn't mean that rivers are impossible using a TeX-style algorithm. It
is just less likely to happen, and probably less noticeable if it does, than
with a line-based H&J algorithm.

~~~
by
I see, thank you.

------
psranga
LaTex does many great things. It's sad that the overwhemling majority of the
world chooses to use inferior tools like Word, Google Docs etc. I threw in the
towel a long time ago, but still wish I didn't have to.

The worst part is that all the problems that people cite below in Word can be
solved relatively easily, but Microsoft doesn't fix them because their
customers are too undemanding.

------
rflrob
There are two-and-a-half shortcomings of the TeX ecology (but not the core TeX
software itself) today that I've seen:

The first is the fact that TeX is still relatively unknown, at least in non-
specialist circles, which makes it hard to share documents among people.
Related to this, I haven't seen any straightforward software to track changes
and generate readable diff's of shared documents (though I haven't tried
TeXDiff lately <http://robmar.net/TexDiff/>). I've seen a friend switch a
major paper from TeX to Word because his adviser (a Public Policy prof)
couldn't deal with the TeX versions of drafts.

Second, and this is purely a software thing, is that footnotes have the
potential to break up the flow of text too much. Ideally, there would be some
toggle-able option where footnotes could be collapsed during editing. Given
the nature of Emacs, I wouldn't be too surprised if there's a way to do this.
Am I missing something? Any possibility of doing it in TeXShop?

------
thingie
Hm, well, it is not really about [Xe][La]TeX, but various features of opentype
fonts. But that is OK, and those links in the section 8 to some free (for
commercial use, that is important) fonts are perhaps the best part of the
article, I didn't know them yet. :-)

------
scott_s
Latex is better than its competitors (Word, OpenOffice), but it has its
problems. Many of the environments are fragile and not composable. Last night,
I was trying to embed a list inside a table.

I had this, and the problem was that the longer item does not wordwrap:

    
    
      \begin{tabular}{|l|l|}
      \hline
      \textbf{Title A} & thing 1 \\
        & thing 2, but it's much longer than the other items \\
        & thing 3  \\
      \hline
      \textbf{Title B} & thing 1 \\
        & thing 2, but it's much longer than the other items \\
        & thing 3 \\
      \hline
      \textbf{Title C} & thing 1 \\
        & thing 2, but it's much longer than the other items \\
        & thing 3 \\
      \hline
      \end{tabular}
    

The items on the right are not a list. However, you can not embed an _itemize_
environment in a tabular environment. Further, this table does no word
wrapping. I wanted an itemized, bulleted list on the right, so 30 minutes of
Googling and experimenting later, I have a solution using the tabularx
package:

    
    
      \begin{tabularx}{0.9\linewidth}{|l|X|}
      \hline
      \textbf{Title A} & \begin{itemize}
        \item thing 1
        \item thing 2, but it's much longer than the other items
        \item thing 3
      \end{itemize} \\
      \hline
      \textbf{Title B} & \begin{itemize}
        \item thing 1
        \item thing 2, but it's much longer than the other items
        \item thing 3
      \end{itemize} \\
      \hline
      \textbf{Title C} & \begin{itemize}
        \item thing 1
        \item thing 2, but it's much longer than the other items
        \item thing 3
      \end{itemize} \\
      \hline
      \end{tabularx}
    

This does as advertised. I get a word wrapped, bulleted list on the right.
It's also fugly. The spacing of the list is atrocious. It's not fit for a
professional publication. Eventually, I end up rolling my own bulleted list:

    
    
      \begin{tabularx}{0.9\linewidth}{|l|X|}
      \hline
      \textbf{Title A} & 
        $\bullet$ thing 1 \newline
        $\bullet$ thing 2, but it's much longer than the other items \newline
        $\bullet$ thing 3  \newline
      \hline
      \textbf{Title B} & 
        $\bullet$ thing 1 \newline
        $\bullet$ thing 2, but it's much longer than the other items \newline
        $\bullet$ thing 3 \newline
      \hline
      \textbf{Title C} &
        $\bullet$ thing 1 \newline
        $\bullet$ thing 2, but it's much longer than the other itmes \newline
        $\bullet$ thing 3 \newline
      \hline
      \end{tabularx}
    

Finally, this looks okay. But the road it took to get here is ridiculous, and
the solution I came up with is silly. (Also note that I had to use \newline,
because the end paragraph maker, \\\, would screw up the table.)

In the end, I like Latex. It is, as I said, better than the alternatives. When
what you want to do fits exactly into what's provided, it's fine. But when you
hit edge cases, abstractions leak and you can sink hours into fixing things. I
would love there to be a version of Latex that was not fragile like this.

~~~
dmlorenzetti
This is a shot in the dark, but have you tried inserting a \parbox or minipage
environment into the table?

I solved this problem in the past, much more simply. I think I embedded a
\vbox in the table (back when I used TeX rather than LaTeX). Sorry I can't be
more specific-- I poked around on the hard drive of my current machine, and
didn't find it, so this must have been many years ago, on a project that
didn't merit copying over.

~~~
scott_s
Nope, but it very well could work. The solution I did come up, though, also
works. But this is all part of my larger point: Latex can be fragile, and
getting it to do what you want is often nonobvious.

------
tomerico
The real question is whether any of these features actually matters.

~~~
philk
LaTeX also makes it easy to write big documents. MS Word becomes painful to
work with when you get over fifty pages or so.

Also the final output is much, much prettier.

------
expeditious
I used to use LaTeX (with AUCTeX) for writing medium-sized documents. AUCTeX
is great, and made typing the required markup very easy.

For a while I tried reading all my docs in pdf instead of html. After that I
tried using the various latex-to-html tools, but wasn't really crazy about any
of them.

Somewhere along the way I must've gotten lazy or something, and now just use
Markdown which works nicely for me.

------
amichail
Check out the WYSIWYG TeXmacs: <http://www.texmacs.org>

It has its own real-time high quality typesetter.

~~~
mapleoin
I would, but it looks too 1999. And it also appears to not be maintained
anymore.

~~~
jff
It looks featureful and effective. Are you concerned about your "image" if
people see you using software that looks old? Do you constantly switch editors
because the one you like starts to look dated? I like the "1999" look, because
everything is small and simple, there's no glowing shiny ribbon thing oozing
across the top of my screen.

------
merraksh
There is a Wordpress plugin that accepts a LaTeX formula between "$latex" and
"$" and places a PNG image. Handy when you have webpages for math-related
teaching.

<http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-latex/>

------
bonaldi
I loved LaTeX for a long time, but InDesign has now trumped it for me: equally
good rendering and output, with usable GUI goodness. It even uses the same
hyphenation engine!

------
zokier
imho it's bit unfair to compare LaTeX to MS Word, as the other is typesetting
system, and the other is word processor. How does LaTeX output compare to
Adobe InDesigns or some other tool that actually cares about typograpy?

My main gripes about (La)TeX are that Unicode seems to be an afterthought, it
has its own peculiar font system and creating custom layouts/styles with it
seems to be harder than it should.

~~~
prodigal_erik
"Afterthought" is precisely true. Knuth made up his own character encoding
stuff which ought to be replaced now, but in 1982 I doubt he had any better
alternatives.

------
bch
This title should be changed to: "The Beauty of LaTeX". feh -- of couse
somebody suggested it already...

------
RK
I wish SVG would work seamlessly with LaTeX...

