
How can I explain the meaning of LaTeX to my grandma? - yamaneko
http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/94889/how-can-i-explain-the-meaning-of-latex-to-my-grandma
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scrumper
LaTeX produces really beautiful results. The output is so authoritative that
it can sometimes transcend the content: I once wrote a product development
proposal early in my career. I did it in Word using the company standard
document template, and it looked alright. It sat on various bosses desks for a
week or so, then got NFA'ed. So I re-did it in LaTeX and submitted it again
under a slightly different title. Result? Approved within a day. Something
about seeing projected revenue figures in an 'academic' format gave enough
weight to my utterly fabricated numbers to get the thing signed off. It's
insta-cred, at least in a non-academic setting.

However, moving from Word to LaTeX is a bit like leaving one bad relationship
for another. Word beats your documents up constantly: splitting paragraphs,
applying random styles, auto-numbering lists like a toddler with a calculator,
positioning figures anywhere but where you want them, and so on forever.
Getting even slightly complex results out of it is a constant struggle. LaTeX
doesn't do any of that: your document will be represented perfectly every
time; every semantically significant structural element will just work as it
should; and you never have to think about presentation at all. It's
intoxicating, working with such an elegant tool. But fail to treat it right,
get even one tiny backslash in the wrong place, and you get _nothing_ useful,
just a screenful of errors.

If this were a movie, LaTeX would be played by Penelope Cruz: she'd take eight
hours to do her make up before a dinner date, bewitch all the other diners
with her beauty, and then dump her drink on the hero and storm out of the
restaurant when he accidentally makes eye contact with the waitress. Word
would be Cathy Bates, beating the shit out of some poor writer with a hammer.

~~~
moe
_and you never have to think about presentation at all_

Sadly your colorful description is not entirely accurate.

With LaTeX you're in hell immediately when you need to divert just the tiniest
bit from what your \package of choice provides. Want a logo in that
letterhead? Address format looks wonky? Need a nice looking table? An image in
a table even? PDF output looks strangely different from dvi?

Well, any such seemingly trivial detail will be good for countless hours of
scuba-diving around the ancient shipwreck of a language that is LaTeX. The
little available documentation is usually only served in _PDF format_ , sparse
and contradicting. None of the packages interact with one another but most of
them conflict in funny ways.

And no least the syntax and semantics of the language itself are closer to
ancient greek than a modern markup- or scripting-language.

Yes, the LaTeX-output is pretty. But LaTeX must die. Take the algorithms and
integrate them into software from _this_ century please.

~~~
gnosis
_"any such seemingly trivial detail will be good for countless hours of scuba-
diving around the ancient shipwreck of a language that is LaTeX"_

Or you could just ask how to do it on #latex on freenode. For something really
obscure, you might not get an answer immediately. But many times the channel
can be quite helpful. Of course, there are forums, newsgroups, and mailing
lists too.

That said, my experience has been that if you're doing something non-standard,
it can take work to get a document to look just the way you want it. But once
you do, typesetting other, similar documents becomes a breeze. And the results
are fantastic.

As for "something from this century", I'd like to hear what you have in mind.

~~~
moe
_I'd like to hear what you have in mind._

Personally I've always been fond of asciidoc[1].

It even has a LaTeX-backend but I imagine the impedance mismatch must be
problematic (I have not tried it).

However, realistically the problem will probably just solve itself in the
midterm. Paper is rapidly going out of fashion after all, and so will
anachronisms like universities requiring their students to submit content in
arcane file formats.

[1] <http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/>

------
tunesmith
I love LaTeX. I still don't quite know how to pronounce it, but it's perfect
for someone like me. I like to focus on what I'm saying more than what it
looks like.

I get the exact same satisfaction out of using Lilypond for music notation
instead of Sibelius, Finale, etc.

What's really great is that if I ever need to write myself a short paper that
includes math equations, graphics, and staff paper snippets, I can do it all
in the same IDE, all using text, and check it into git and run diffs off of
it.

I'd like to eventually figure out a way to have this IDE be able to blog some
of these papers. Probably some weird combination of eclipse, pandoc, and ruhoh
might get it done.

~~~
jlgreco
I've always pronounced it "Lah-tech", though some people insist it is "Lay-
tech".

~~~
scrumper
I thought it was "Lah tech" too: It's named for its creator, Leslie Lamport.
"Lay tech" wouldn't fit that.

~~~
jimhefferon
The creator says you can pronounce it any of the canonical ways; he's good
with them all.

 _One of the hardest things about LaTeX is deciding how to pronounce it.This
is also one of the few things I'm not going to tell you about LaTeX, since
pronunciation is best determined by usage, not fiat. TeX is usually pronounced
teck, making lah-teck, and lay-teck the logical choices; but language is not
always logical, so lay-tecks is also possible._

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Weird, how does "x" not make a "ks" (or "eks") sound, both pronunciations
there appear to end in a hard "k" sound; did they misspell LaTeK?

Do people here pronounce sex as "sek"?

/incomprehension

~~~
gjm11
The "X" is, despite appearance, not an X but a capital Greek letter chi,
pronounced like the "ch" in "loch". As Knuth puts it, when you pronounce it
correctly your monitor may become slightly moist.

Lamport isn't as fussy about such things as Knuth, and the "X" in "LaTeX" is
commonly pronounced more like a "k".

~~~
pbhjpbhj
But no-one suggested "lay-tech" or whatever.

Interesting that they gave it a nonsense string of characters(mixed alphabets)
as a place-holder rather than choosing a word. Wonder if this is what inspired
the performer [the artist formerly known as] Prince.

To me it's like Knuth thought - I know what's missing from my type-setting
program .. some crappy nonsense marketingese, I'll give it a Greek name
because well, to belittle people, then I'll render the characters offset so
it's not even Greek, but we won't use an English transliteration because
that's not awkward enough.

Bah.

> _Lamport isn't as fussy about such things as Knuth, and the "X" in "LaTeX"
> is commonly pronounced more like a "k"._ //

See that sentence is entirely wrong, based on Wikipedia (!). It should instead
say the \chi symbol in the \latex logo is commonly given an utterance akin to
"k". Something like that.

Perhaps we should just optimise, give the system an English name rather than
referring to it as \logo. Right it's called Laytext.

I mean clothing manufacturer Kappa don't get everyone fawning over them
rendering their name with an actual kappa.

Don't know why but this annoys me intensely, can you tell.

/rant \bye

------
bitwize
I could probably explain it to my mom. She used to work at a newspaper, and
had some sort of arcane typesetting system that involved formatting codes --
much like LaTeX.

Thing is, I think she'd much rather put up with the minor inconveniences of
Word than ever look at another formatting code again. And so would just about
everyone else. That's why Word won.

------
JohnHammersley
A site dedicated to "How can I explain the meaning of XYZ to my grandma?"
would make a great wiki!

Re LaTeX: The new crop of online LaTeX editors are making it easier to use,
taking away the installation/setup barriers amongst other things. I helped to
develop <https://www.writelatex.com> to try to find a way to bring the
language online to an Etherpad-like frontend.

I still never had this good an answer for what LaTeX is though - wish I'd
thought to ask...

~~~
Stefan_K
Online cloud based editors are a great step forward. They bring LaTeX to
tablets and smartphones, and to people who now don't need to overcome the
barrier of a LaTeX installation, and maintaining it.

With an online editor, I can send my mom a web link and a LaTeX document which
she can easily compile on her iPad! She even can do text corrections for me,
even if she doesn't know those preamble things.

------
Sharlin
As the current top answer implies, it's really rather easy to explain LaTeX to
anyone who a) has some concept of a printing press and movable type and b)
understands that computers can be used to automate manual labor.

~~~
chernevik
These answers don't explain why LaTex is something different / better than
Microsoft Word or Publisher.

~~~
tikhonj
Of course, part of the question was how to explain it to somebody who does not
_know_ about Word or Publisher.

------
kylemaxwell
Side note: why do these questions always ask about their mothers or
grandmothers? Do they believe that women will naturally have a more difficult
time understanding than fathers and grandfathers?

~~~
chernevik
1\. Grandmothers are actuarially more likely to be around than grandfathers.

2\. Grandmothers are stereotyped as giving a damn about what their grandkids
are up to.

3\. Grandfathers are stereotyped as just nodding sagely as if they did
understand, even when they don't.

------
ramayac
"LaTeX is much like Marmite. Either you love or hate it.", haha, I begun my
thesis on LaTeX, and I would say it's an acquired taste ;) Great answers, I'll
give LaTeX a try one of this days.

~~~
thisone
I hated latex when I first started using it, but then, I fell in love.

It had me at bibliography.

~~~
sliverstorm
I find I love it for its upsides, but the upsides aren't actually worthwhile
for documents of the scope I tend to be writing.

Probably my favorite thing? It's a formatted document that actually interacts
nicely with VCS.

------
narcissus
Speaking of LaTeX, and going a bit off topic... I've always wanted to try it
but been frightened by the 'level of effort'.

I've seen LyX but never used it beyond 'trying'. Has anyone here tried it and
what are your thoughts on it?

~~~
Wilduck
LaTeX as a whole is intimidating, but the core that you need to know to get
started is actually pretty simple. I could teach it to you in about an hour.

That being said, I've never seen a written introduction that I would consider
satisfactory. If you have a friend who knows LaTeX ask them to sit down with
you and show you how to write a paper that includes headings, subheadings,
figures, tables and some math equations. It might take an hour or two, but
you'll then know more than enough to write basic documents, and google for
anything else.

As for LyX, I've played with it, and I strongly prefer using LaTeX in emacs.
Mostly because I like that my source document and the typeset document are
separate.

~~~
narcissus
Interesting... I might take another go at it then. To be honest, the playing
around I did with LyX made me think that it would be fine for what I was
looking for, which was essentially "nicely formatted books", where "books" was
a definite over-exaggeration of what I can truly expect the outcome to be.

I can appreciate the separation that you are going for, but I also have to
wonder how much time you spend in LaTeX? If I were writing something that was
worthy of LaTeX, it would probably average to less than an hour a week. I'm
not sure if the effort is worth it for me. Again, to be completely honest.
Whereas if I was doing a lot of writing that I expect to be read, I could
imagine the investment being worth it.

I look at like the way I looked at HTML formatting: I knew how to do the
markup, but the WYSIWYG editors got me where I needed a lot faster. Having
said that, I now find myself handcoding divs and spans and then using more
CSS... so maybe that is the argument I need to read up on it!

Well, lots to think about anyway. Thanks!

------
donniezazen
Any of you here use LaTeX for creative writing? Or is it mostly used for
academic and profession writings?

~~~
usenet
I used it for creative writing. While I used LaTeX for the text, I heavily
used TikZ: the "mindmap" library for drawing mindmaps, the "chains" library
for story lines, the "trees" library for relations and connections of
fictional characters, matrices for easy positiong, arrows for connecting. And
a very good point was: I could use the same macros in the conceptional
drawings as in the text, regarding macros for names for example which still
could change, and so staying consistent.

------
jmix
LaTeX is the geek's connection to Gutenberg and his legacy. Surely your
grandma knows Gutenberg.

------
p3nt3ll3r
safe sex?

