
Begin LaTeX in minutes - PleaseHelpMe
https://github.com/VoLuong/Master-Latex-in-minutes
======
1wd
Just don't try anything that isn't in your typical math paper. There are
thousands of LaTeX packages, because they are all broken if you use them in a
slightly unexpected way, so (reminiscent of JavaScript) a new package is
created to "fix" it.

Tables? Here you go. Oh, you wanted nested tables? For that you need to switch
to an entirely different package. Oh, and that one doesn't support splitting
up tables over multiple pages. Maybe this new one can do it. But it doesn't
support that other package you use. Maybe try that one instead. Oh, in that
one you can't have ...

Or is that just me?

~~~
supergarfield
This is also very true in my experience, and seems to be in large part caused
by the absence of proper namespacing, scoping, and general rules about how
packages should be implemented to minimize bad interactions.

I feel like this is a significant shortcoming of Latex, and it really is a
mystery to me why no one has seriously tried to write an alternative
typesetting system. I know Latex is good enough for lots of applications, and
would require a lot of work to rewrite, but I can think of freely available
projects with less glaring shortcomings for which people have started
successful competitors (Firefox -> Chrome, KDE and GNOME, gcc -> llvm, etc.).

~~~
massysett
There are plenty of alternatives.

LaTeX is merely a TeX macro package. There are others, such as ConTeXt. Also,
if you hate the pick-a-package mentality, there are LaTeX packages that
attempt to do it all in one package--Memoir is one.

You can elect to opt out of fancy layers on top of TeX and go with Extended
Plain TeX or even just writing in plain TeX, which apparently Knuth did.

Don't like TeX at all? Try roff (or, more realistically these days, groff.)
There is a package of roff macros called Mom, which now comes with groff.

In my experience roff is a better UNIX citizen than Tex & Co. I can put roff
in a pipeline and it will do what I expect. TeX programs generally do not like
to be run in this fashion. Perhaps as a consequence, it seems roff is hard to
find outside of UNIX (roff is sort of a UNIX artifact) while TeX and friends
run on Windows. I have slapped together a few utilities (I call one
"latexstream") so that I can use LaTeX from a shell prompt without dealing
with a bunch of temporary files scattered everywhere.

My needs are somewhat simple: I have a system that prints recipes and grocery
lists. Nothing beats paper for a task like this. (I see some people using
iPads in the kitchen. Forget that. I'm not taking greasy fingers to an
expensive tablet.) Generally I am not happy using LaTeX for this. I actually
do not want to separate content and presentation. I don't like having to muck
around with packages to get what I want. And I don't like dealing with huge
TeX distributions when I just need a few things.

But every time I look into all the alternatives I outlined above, I wind up
sighing and sticking with LaTeX. None of these alternatives have the community
that LaTeX has. I can do relatively simple things in LaTeX (like columns done
in particular ways) that would require me to write a lot of code in plain TeX
or in roff. Yes, TeX distributions are large, but I am now figuring out how to
pare them down to just what I need. (Even though TeX Live suggests you install
the whole thing. That's gigabytes. I'm on a smallish SSD. No thanks.)

So folks definitely have come up with alternatives to LaTeX. But if most folks
are like me, I imagine they look at these alternatives and conclude that LaTeX
with a gazillion packages works well enough.

[edit] forgot yet another alternative: Apache FOP, which uses XML. Some
Docbook tool chains use it. IMO the output from those never look as good as
the tool chains that ultimately use TeX.

~~~
patrickdavey
I don't suppose you have your recipe system online anywhere? I've been
contemplating making one for a while (I really like the recipe cards on
cookingforengineers.com)

~~~
massysett
No, it is a nasty mess of shell scripts and Haskell, though mostly Haskell
now. (There used to be XML for recipes, what a mess.) It is useless to others
without documentation, which would take a long time to write. Maybe one day.
It makes grocery lists with items in categories, which saves me so much time
that I have been using it every week for years. But if someone made something
decent I would happily pay for it.

~~~
doodoogoo
Would you mind uploading it somewhere nonetheless? Just your design and flow
should be a good read (from source).

------
pwdisswordfish
Most materials about LaTeX I tend to find on the web seem to be of the
'programming by StackOverflow' variety, i.e. 'copy this snippet of code, tweak
it to your needs and compile'; they don't teach you about what the code
actually does, how it interacts with everything else, and there is no syntax
specification apart from series of digressions like 'oh, by the way, if you
wish to achieve effect X, you can use option Y'. Unfortunately, even official
documentation for LaTeX packages is often written that way (a major pleasant
exception is the documentation for TikZ). In the short term, it may seem fine,
but it inevitably comes back to bite the user later. The guide submitted here
doesn't seem particularly different.

For those wishing to learn some 'theoretical' TeX, I can recommend _TeX by
Topic_.[0] It mentions LaTeX macros only in passing, but even that amount was
quite helpful to me.

[0] [https://bitbucket.org/VictorEijkhout/tex-by-
topic](https://bitbucket.org/VictorEijkhout/tex-by-topic)

~~~
semi-extrinsic
I agree with the documentation issue. In addition to TikZ, the Memoir package
manual is a pleasant surprise. It's really thorough, and I definitely
recommend reading it if you are writing up your thesis in LaTeX.

~~~
2ion
Another well documented set of general-purpose classes are the KOMAscript
document classes, catering mostly to European document conventions [1].

[1] [https://www.ctan.org/pkg/koma-script](https://www.ctan.org/pkg/koma-
script)

------
pfooti
The usual plug for sharelatex here. Check out sharelatex.com, it is amazing.
Write LaTeX without having to install it, plus collaboration in the cloud.
(I'm not affiliated, just a fan).

And in general, LaTeX is a super worthwhile language to learn. It may be a bit
more complicated than markdown or its cousins, but it can do pretty much
everything.

I've barely scratched the surface of what it can do, but since I live at the
intersection of CS and Education research, it is great how BibTeX will swap
between APA and ACM styles easily, or how I can use a macro to create likert
scale questions, for example. It probably takes the right kind of mindset, but
I really liked the fact that my dissertation had a makefile (and was in source
control, way back in the CVS days).

~~~
laxatives
I think one of the best features of sharelatex is that you skip the insanely
bloated installation/package maintenance process. Some of those packages use
GB of fonts and I remember having a complete installation with over 30GB of
fonts. Not really an issue anymore, but 5-10 years ago, that was pretty
excessive.

~~~
Turing_Machine
While I've never looked into the guts of LaTeX package management, I've often
thought that it could really, really use a tool that looks for dependencies
and installs them (and _only_ them) in an automated way, like Bundler for
Ruby, npm, and similar systems.

Nope, tlmgr just isn't the same. :-)

------
ArmandGrillet
Spoiler alert: you will not master LaTeX (nor anything) in minutes. I have
written my master thesis on sharelatex.com, the first months have been painful
but at the end I had a great feeling of having achieved something. I still not
consider that I master LaTeX but at least I can now use it for any standard
documents and draw graphs and math formulas with ease.

I really suggest developers to use LaTeX to create their resume because it
looks really professional and personal (if you do not just use a standard
template). It takes some time but you will get exactly what you want and learn
many things along the way.

~~~
sotojuan
Even years after Norvig's essay people still attempt to master skills in days
or less!

~~~
yannis
Here is an alternative way to master LaTeX
[http://tex.stackexchange.com/a/5713/963](http://tex.stackexchange.com/a/5713/963).

------
yk
It lacks the most important LaTeX tip, don't fight the machine. LaTeX is
really good at getting documents that look 90% as good as an actual typesetter
could make them look, if one can live with somewhat conservative looking
documents. The last 10 percent, fixing margin width, changing paragraphs and
so on, are incredibly hard with LaTeX. (Of course LaTeX defaults are a lot
better than word, largely because LaTeX automatically uses consistent headers
instead of sometime 15 pt and sometimes 16 pt underlined.)

~~~
leephillips
I get your point, but you're really exaggerating the difficulty of changing
margins, paragraph spacing, and similar things. It's easy with straight LaTeX,
and even easier with the "geometry" package.

~~~
yk
Yes, to address to criticisms of your comments and siblings, in my experience
if you start changing fonts, then you need to change margins and paragraph
spacing, and down the rabbit hole you go. The thing is, a small change is not
very complicated, but the defaults are also really good. So if you just want
to get below a certain page limit, then it is easy to change the margin. If
you start to wanting to improve the overall look of the document, then it is
usually a much better idea to play with different packages were someone else
already did the hard work instead of trying to improve details by yourself.

------
renke1
I used LaTeX a lot in university, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Even
a minimal (and good looking) document requires a lot of (La)TeX knowledge.

You can of course use one of many existing templates, but you will quickly
feel lost when you have to customize things.

These days, just go with Markdown (or the like) and just include assets (say
graphs) as SVG and be done with it.

For scientific papers (especially with two columns layout) you probably have
to go with LaTeX though.

Edit: By the way, my take at minimal LaTeX templates:
[https://github.com/renke/latex-templates](https://github.com/renke/latex-
templates)

~~~
logicallee
>but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

surely you're not being literal, or you meant "wouldn't recommend it to just
anyone" \- for example for setting mathematical and physics formulas, wouldn't
you still recommend it?

~~~
renke1
Yes, of course, you are right. I forgot about formulas altogether! That's
where LaTeX really shines!

But even then you could probably integrate MathJax or KaTeX with Markdown.
That would give you the best of both worlds.

------
apathy
Overleaf.com is really nice too, if you work with others (e.g. on academic
papers). The most painless papers I've ever written were with other competent
people using LaTeX and overleaf. ShareLatex is good too, I'm not sure if you
can autosubmit to journals and preprint servers with it though. That last
feature is terrific for academics -- it's how publishing should work, but
usually doesn't.

I spent the same amount of time (72 hours) getting one hairy equation laid out
in Word that I spent compiling my entire dissertation in LaTeX. Naturally the
former was a request from my adviser, who did the latter back when she was a
student. Dammit.

If you have any serious math in your writing, nothing else comes close.
(Protip: Mathematica, the only non-free software package that ever earned its
keep for me, will directly export equation cells as LaTeX if you ask nicely. I
can't stand doing tedious symbolic manipulation without it.)

~~~
cyphar
Note that Overleaf.com is proprietary, while ShareLaTeX is completely free
software under the AGPL (and self-hostable).

~~~
apathy
Absolutely true, and although I did pay for Overleaf at first, I stopped
paying when I realized I didn't need the for-pay features anyhow. They made a
conscious decision to focus on internal development and I'm OK with that --
Google isn't open-source either (certainly not all of it, and when I was
there, very little of it), and I'm OK with that too.

[https://www.overleaf.com/help/17-is-overleaf-open-
source#.WB...](https://www.overleaf.com/help/17-is-overleaf-open-
source#.WBZSuhIrKkA)

An open-source business that doesn't survive ( _cough_ ReplicaDB _cough_ )
isn't necessarily better than a closed-but-extensible one that does. LaTeX
itself is, and anything you're working on within Overleaf can be exported as
text at any time, so I don't worry so much about lock-in.

The underlying toolchain (LaTeX and packages) is fully OSS, and isn't going
anywhere; I have supported the LyX project in the past, and indeed that's how
I laid out my dissertation, but in the end I find Overleaf more usable.

I still wish they'd support Markdown, though. Sometimes I just want to run off
a quick, properly typeset series of equations and lists/tables without all the
boilerplate. I suppose you could make the argument "well, if it was OSS, you
could just patch it yourself!", and you wouldn't be wrong. But we use the
autosubmit feature a lot, so on balance I've decided I can live with this
shortcoming.

~~~
cyphar
> They made a conscious decision to focus on internal development and I'm OK
> with that -- Google isn't open-source either (certainly not all of it, and
> when I was there, very little of it), and I'm OK with that too.

Focusing on internal development is not a justification for making software
proprietary. A software license has nothing to do with development style --
you could do code dumps like Oracle while also licensing the code under a free
software license.

> An open-source business that doesn't survive (cough ReplicaDB cough) isn't
> necessarily better than a closed-but-extensible one that does.

I disagree. All businesses will die eventually (or at least, almost all of
them will). The difference between a proprietary business and a free software
business is that only one of them actually makes a lasting contribution to
society in terms of software (hint: it's not the proprietary one).

> The underlying toolchain (LaTeX and packages) is fully OSS, and isn't going
> anywhere;

True, and even more of a reason to prefer free software solutions (a
proprietary version of LaTeX and packages wouldn't have survived for as long
as LaTeX has).

But, each to their own.

------
mtrn
I've written my first LaTeX documents with LyX [1], a wonderful application,
if you're just getting started.

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

~~~
auxym
For me LyX hits a sweetspot: it does 95% of what I need to do in Latex without
ever having to type a backslash (or having to lookup whatever amsmath command
is used for setting a matrix). But when I do need to drop down to latex to do
something unsupported, I don't need to fight lyx.

I wrote my paper and master's thesis with a workflow involving LyX, LaTeX and
python (scipy, numpy, mpl, doit for building the whole thing). The doit script
ran the analysis pipeline, exported the figures, exported a .tex using the LyX
CLI and ran all the latex/bibtex stuff to generate a PDF and and zip with all
the necessary stuff for submission.

My colleagues looked at me weirdly (mech. engineering department), but I think
it was worth it. Probably not time efficient, but at least for the peace of
mind.

------
thomasahle
From various tutorials I feel my knowledge of latex is very top down, and not
very deep. I just recently realized that {} are not needed for singletons, so
I may for instance write \frac12 for 1/2.

Can anybody recommend a more bottom up guide? Something more similar to
learning a programming language, where you start with the basic syntax and
build on features iteratively?

Is Knuth's book the best way to go? Or is that like learning C, when you
wanted to learn C++?

~~~
mci
> I just recently realized that {} are not needed for singletons

Trick question: What will you get by TeX-ing this document?

    
    
      $\acute a\acute{a}\acute{{a}}$\'a\'{a}\'{{a}}\end

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
Frustrated.

------
aduitsis
For any poor soul that has to write LaTeX for whatever reason but doesn't want
to bother installing anything, I cannot recommend
[https://www.sharelatex.com/](https://www.sharelatex.com/) enough.

~~~
Cyph0n
I'm currently using Overleaf[1]. It has collaboration (no live tracking) in
the free tier, support for BibTeX with auto-import from Zotero, auto-complete
and syntax highlighting, and works completely in the browser.

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

~~~
cyphar
Note that ShareLaTeX is entirely free software (under AGPL) and self-hostable.
Overleaf is not.

~~~
chronic6l
Furthermore, Overleaf has a history of occasionally losing people's data.
That's bad for college and university folks.

~~~
jdleesmiller
(Overleaf co-founder here.) As far as I know, we've never lost any user data.
We take that very seriously. If you believe you have lost data on Overleaf,
please contact our support team via www.overleaf.com/contact and we'll
investigate.

------
CalChris
This is a good beginner doc.

I'd never used LaTeX until about a year ago when I needed it to write a paper.
The first thing I wondered was how to install it. Surely in 2015 installation
would be a snap. It'd be in the App Store. Or Homebrew.

 _Do not install LaTeX._ Use it in the cloud. I use www.overleaf.com which is
awesome. Similarly, I use www.draw.io to create PDFs for my drawings.

    
    
      \usepackage{microtype}
      \usepackage[hang,font=bf]{caption}
      \usepackage{natbib}
      \usepackage[unicode=true]{hyperref}
      \usepackage[noabbrev,capitalise,nameinlink]{cleveref}
      \usepackage{amsmath}
      \usepackage{csquotes}
      \usepackage{minted}
      \usepackage{inconsolata}
      \usemintedstyle{bw}
      \usepackage{float}
      \usepackage{siunitx}
      \usepackage{booktabs}
      \usepackage{url}
      \usepackage{graphicx}
      \usepackage{textcomp}
      \usepackage{fixltx2e}
    

The one thing I'd add to this tutorial is citations and bibliographies.

~~~
tagrun
What?

 _Do install LaTeX._ I don't know (and frankly don't care) how hard it is
under Windows, Mac or Android, but it has been readily available from the
package managers with GNU/* and most BSDs for decades, easy to install and
use. There are plenty of editors like gummi, kile, texmacs or lyx.

Seriously. You're asking people to give up their freedoms for what? To avoid
typing a single line "sudo apt-get install gummi texlive-latex-base"?

I personally _do_ stay away from "cloud"y things (or whatever buzzword you
prefer for SaaSS in the stylish Apple-land), and recommend people that I care
about around me to do so: [https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-
server-really-s...](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-
really-serve.en.html)

~~~
kevindong
I personally use www.sharelatex.com (which is open sourced under the AGPL
license).

Downloading LaTeX locally on macOS (or rather, Mac OS X as it was called at
the time) is not very difficult. As I recall, it's basically just: download
this .pkg file, run it, and you're set. That being said, I did _not_ enjoy
having LaTeX installed locally. It wasn't harmful, it just wasn't at all
beneficial compared to using an online LaTeX service.

The install size is easily tens of thousands of files (totalling a couple
GBs), most of which are only a couple hundred KBs each. The vast majority of
those files went unused. It clogged up my file system, gave me a marginal
amount of benefits, and figuring out how to change the config files to do one
_tiny_ thing was horrifically difficult.

As a result, I migrated to using ShareLaTeX. It was just simpler than having
to manage the install myself. The value proposition of a (hosted instance of)
ShareLaTeX is that I can use LaTeX from any computer (connected to the
Internet) to access any of my automatically synchronized files and have an
automatically updated install of LaTeX. I personally found that value
proposition worthwhile.

~~~
tagrun
This is a false anecdotal dichotomy: either install latex on your computer at
the cost of "clogging up your filesystem" (whatever that means), or give up
your freedoms.

textlive-most (which is a meta package which includes almost everything an
ordinary user need) uses 1.2GBs on Arch Linux, so for sure it's not "couple of
GBs". And even if it takes a couple of GBs: I'm using ~60GBs in my root
filesystem, and never experienced any "clogging" (granted, GNU/Linux doesn't
use Windows Registry).

If installing programs "clogs up your file system" in Apple's proprietary fork
of BSD (don't know/care how they call/stylize it these days), another viable
option, before throwing away your freedoms, is to consider switching to a
different filesystem or operating system which doesn't "clog up" when you
install new programs (and which isn't riddled with backdoors and doesn't spy
on you, like Apple products do: [https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/malware-
apple.en.html](https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/malware-apple.en.html)
[https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/proprietary-
surveillance.en....](https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/proprietary-
surveillance.en.html) ). Now I'm not sure whether this is an issue with HFS+
or a more general one within Darwin, but what is the point of having harddisks
with large capacities (measured in TB these days) if you can't actually use
it?

> ShareLaTeX is that I can use LaTeX from any computer (connected to the
> Internet) to access any of my automatically synchronized files and have an
> automatically updated install of LaTeX. I personally found that value
> proposition worthwhile.

I'm not seeing any convincing arguments or any "worthwhile propositions" here.
With GNU/* and *BSD, that burden is on the package maintainers. System updates
do include latex updates too (I know that it isn't the case with proprietary
system you're using, but that's an argument for switching to a free/libre OS,
not throwing away your freedoms). And I am able to synchronize my files
(including .tex files) files across devices over the internet using syncthing,
while still not yielding my rights and data to others, and there are plenty of
FOSS alternatives to syncthing too.

And even if your original dichotomy was a real dichotomy, I would encourage
people to protect their freedoms, not to throw it away for convenience.

~~~
kevindong
> "clogging up your filesystem"

In this context, I mean that in two ways (but mainly #2):

1) macOS has a feature (Spotlight) where I can search all of the files on my
entire computer with a simple keyboard shortcut. >99% of the time, the result
pops up within a second. I use that feature literally dozens of times each
day. With LaTeX installed, I got a lot of results that are not relevant to
what I want. In hindsight, I should've just disabled the indexing of the files
in my install directory.

2) My computer (at the time) had a 64 GB hard drive. As a result, I was
straining against the limits of that pretty hard. Uninstalling MacTeX (I
believe that was the distribution I used) freed up at least 2 GB. I'm not sure
why there's a discrepancy between your quoted figure of 1.2 GB and my
experience.

\---

In addition, ShareLatex's UI was far superior to anything available for OS X
(at least, at the time).

My primary interest is in making myself as productive as possible. If using
non-libre software gives me significant gains in productivity while not being
unreasonable with their licensing terms/costs, then I will use it. That's the
same reason I am using macOS. By using this proprietary piece of software, I
do not have to tinkle with the inevitable strange bugs that pop up with the
various libre options and therefore I am allowing myself to be the most
productive I can possibly be. Every time I have tried using a libre OS, I have
experienced some kind of bug that's simply impossible to diagnose and solve.

In sum: the value proposition of non-libre software is increased productivity.
I highly value productivity. So, I am willing to make the tradeoff. I
recognize and accept that if everyone does this, the world is worse off. But,
I am selfish and therefore am willing to make the tradeoff (to some extent; my
willingness to tradeoff is not infinite).

Sidenote: I could (technically) not throw away my freedoms by hosting my own
instance of ShareLatex (as it is, now, licensed under the AGPL), but that's
highly inconvenient and I have no interest in being a system admin. Again,
this goes back to the idea of increased productivity by using "proprietary"
services.

~~~
tagrun
Wow.

So, behind all your marketing buzzwords, you're trying to portray GNU/Linux
software as buggy in contrast to superior Mac/Windows, which has,
interestingly, long been a FUD and a lie propagated by Microsoft. This
suddenly takes me back to halloween documents and "real cost of 'free'"
because you're saying exactly the same thing, only in 2016 (on halloween
eve!).

Like many others, I've been using GNU/Linux since ~1997, and been totally
happy overall, and I can vouch it's nothing like you're trying to portray.

You may, of course, value your freedoms less than the conveniences you find in
Apple or SaaSS programs. You prefer trading your privacy and freedoms for bits
of conveniences, and that's the way you chose to live. I did hear you the
first time. No need to reiterate, as this is not about your personal feelings
or the "values" you found here and there (and no offense, but frankly I don't
care about your personal feelings or anecdotes).

I'm trying to make a point that goes beyond your "productivity": this line of
though shouldn't be advertised as a good thing due to the fact that it
eventually hurts us as a society at large (see the references in my previous
posts).

------
andrew3726
"Brief Intro to Latex for programmers/developers" vs "Master LATEX in
minutes", quite a difference! But looks nevertheless like a good introduction
to LaTeX. Just why the all the emoji...

~~~
50CNT
I've personally have had a lot of fun abusing emoji/dingbats in curses TUIs.

    
    
        VOL〈▰▰▰▰▰▰▱▱▱▱〉

------
good_gnu
Tip for people who want to compile LaTeX from the command line: latexmk is
basically a build tool for latex, which can also do things like incremental
compilation and listen for changes. It's part of MacTex and can also be
installed with the package manager of your choice if you use texlive.

Another tip: If you usually write markdown, pandoc can turn Markdown
interspersed with LaTeX code into pdfs.

------
daemonk
I personally really like using latex. But the main problem for me is that
latex is not really designed for collaborative editing, especially with people
who don't know latex. are there any track changes feature plugin/app that's
available and relatively simple for people who mainly use MS word.

~~~
JorgeGT
Well, the fact that it is a plaintext-based format makes it work extremely
well with git. So for collaboration you can have a repo (even hosted in
github) and your co-authors can propose merges, etc. It is extremely nice to
be able to see the log of commits and who changed exactly what at any point in
time, something I think it's difficult in complex formats like Word. Or you
can use sharelatex.com as others have commented.

~~~
daemonk
This all sounds great. I'll definitely look into it for myself. However,
coming from academic biology (I am a bioinformatician) where most of my
collaborators won't even know what git is, this is just not a realistic
solution. If Sharelatex (I actually wrote my phd thesis on sharelatex) or
Overleaf (I used for my last publication) have a nice built-in GUI that does
all of this auto-magically, I think a lot of people from the biological fields
will probably start using it.

~~~
nanna
I work on a popular academic philosophy magazine which is now transitioning
from a centralised inDesign model to a distributed LaTeX model. The idea is
that aside from the egrarious costs involved with inDesign (licencing, buying
great big computers to run it), the main issue is that it centralises our
production around a few people who have both inDesign and typography skills.
LaTeX, on the other hand, allows us to abstract away the typography skills
with a class file, and have everyone learn some essential syntaxs such as
\footnote{}, \includegraphics{}, \begin{quote}, etc. We'll use git or, if
people really can't get their heads around a nice git gui, dropbox, to
collaborate. I really can't understand why this isn't a more popular approach,
especially for academics.

------
paradite
The author mentioned ShareLaTeX but not the other popular cloud service
overleaf.

I actually would have done the same given my experience with both. Recently I
tried out overleaf in order to allow others to collaborate on a paper.
However, what was compiling perfectly fine on my local machine just refused to
compile on overleaf, keep throwing me error related to $ symbol even though I
did not use $ symbol at all (I used my own bst and cls). After googling for 30
minutes without finding a fix, I gave up and turned to the alternative,
ShareLaTeX. It compiled perfectly with no errors on the first try.

~~~
jdleesmiller
(Co-founder of Overleaf here.) Sorry to hear you had a bad experience --- we
run a standard install of TeX Live, so that's surprising. If you try Overleaf
again, feel free to send your project's link to our support team via
www.overleaf.com/contact, and they can help you fix any issues.

~~~
paradite
Good to hear that. I've sent it via www.overleaf.com/contact and I hope this
would help your team figure out why.

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mydpy
LaTeX is much deeper than this "mastery" document conveys. Although, LaTeX is
significantly easier to pick up if you learn to program first. I appreciate
the author sharing this here though :)

------
santaclaus
I still wake up from nightmares about pages upon pages of overfull hboxs...

------
myf01d
Pro tip: you can't.

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user5994461
Stupid question: Outside of the maths heavy documents, could markdown or
restructuredtext be a substitute to Latex nowadays? It is a lot easier to
learn and use.

~~~
seanlane
I use Pandoc [1] to write in Markdown and then have it converted into LaTeX.
There's been some bumps, but it seems to let me have (most of) the best of
both worlds.

This post was the inspiration for using it: [http://kesdev.com/you-got-latex-
in-my-markdown/](http://kesdev.com/you-got-latex-in-my-markdown/)

[1] [http://pandoc.org/](http://pandoc.org/)

------
amelius
Sometimes I wonder: why can't LaTeX be just as simple as HTML, or perhaps even
simpler? Except perhaps for pagination and available default fonts, HTML
practically fulfills all my formatting needs. (Note: HTML includes MathML, a
mathematical formula markup language). And for automatically numbering tables
and figures, one can easily write a script that is completely independent from
the underlying formatting language.

~~~
yannis
Try writing a 300 page book in HTML, create citations and bibliographies,
table of contents etc. Then convert it to a pdf, say using Pandoc and then you
will have a better understanding where TeX/LaTeX fits in. Write also some
complicated formulae using MathML. Save the document and render it again in 30
years!

TeX was designed to typeset a document always the same way on any machine that
could run it. You can typeset any of Knuth's papers from the 80s and they can
still compile today. Maths as Barbara is fond of saying has a long shelf life.

~~~
amelius
I'm not saying that HTML is totally suitable, but a slight modification of it
could be, and it would be a lot simpler to use than TeX. And who says that it
could not be rendered in the same way in 30 years?

By the way, the one thing that disappoints me most about LaTeX is that you
often cannot nest one environment in another without running into issues. In
HTML the "composability" is much better.

~~~
taeric
Have you ever looked at "bare" latex? It really isn't any more complicated
than html. Especially early html.

But you are being somewhat naïve on the render in thirty years point. Html
from two years so probably renders differently today. Never mind how different
it is on machine that is rendering it.

So, could someone have made a simple one? Maybe. Evidence looks unlikely.
Plenty have tried.

~~~
amelius
Well, I'm not so sure if LaTeX renders the same in 30 years, given all the
packages and their dependencies, that might also change. In fact, I'm not sure
the document will even still compile by then.

~~~
taeric
If be surprised if latex didn't compile. Maybe people today make packages that
break, buy I doubt it. The reason there are so many packages is because
changes should only fix bugs. Not change current working behaviour. So bugs
are typically defined as clear crashes.

------
ajarmst
While I applaud the effort, this sort of thing suffers from the same problem
any "quick introduction" to something rich and complex has: it's easy to see
the complexity and discern the unfamiliarity, but requires effort to discern
the value. No one has ever been convinced of the value of TeX/LaTeX, Vim,
Emacs, Awk, Lex, Lisp, etc. by a fifteen minute intro. They're convinced by
pushing themselves (or being forced) to use the tool for a substantial period
of time (usually weeks) over several significant projects until they
discovered the familiarity, power and utility that it affords people who are
sufficiently familiar with the tool. In a machine shop, a lathe isn't an
obvious choice for a project until you already know how to use a lathe.

------
0xmohit
Just wondering if people here use ConTeXt [0] as well?

I've personally found it somewhat easier to manage floats in ConTeXt as
compared to TeX/PDFTex.

[0]
[http://wiki.contextgarden.net/What_is_ConTeXt](http://wiki.contextgarden.net/What_is_ConTeXt)

------
mixedmath
A better title would be "How to produce a simple LaTeX document in minutes".
Or perhaps even "Another brief LaTeX tutorial".

When I first began to use LaTeX long ago, a friend of mine gave me a preamble
and essentially told me to not touch it until I knew better. This was very
helpful to me, and I immediately began to use LaTeX in a mindset that
separated content from presentation. Later, I did know better, but I'd already
gotten the gist of what's going on.

Years later, when I introduce LaTeX to others (which I have frequently done),
I follow the same starting path.

------
curiousgal
Surprised no one mentioned TeXworks[0] as an alternative for easy
installation.

0.[https://www.tug.org/texworks/](https://www.tug.org/texworks/)

------
umbs
I used Latex extensively in Univ for thesis and publishing papers. Since then,
I forgot that knowledge and am having hard time picking it up.

However, I briefly used www.sharelatex.com, is a web GUI (or WYSIWYG) type
approach to Latex. It's a good project and makes using Latex slightly easier,
but user must still know various packages, how to layout images etc.
Nonetheless, sharelatex is a good effort and hope it benefits others.

------
thanatropism
At my school overleaf.com is the standard. Some professors are git-savvy, but
most use overleaf to keep tabs and comment on dissertations.

------
graycat
I just use TeX, never LaTeX. With TeX, the documentation is shorter and, IMHO,
better written. That is, get to concentrate on just Knuth's _The TeXBook_ \--
nicely done technical writing.

With LaTeX, I suspect that really should also know the underlying TeX, but
with some understanding of TeX can do just fine without LaTeX and all its
extra considerations.

------
mercora
I am not really into LaTeX but i write all my letters with it and like doing
so very much. I get nice looking clean documents that have a very professional
appeal and are much more convenient to create than in any full fledged editor.

I just use templates and fill in the blanks. I once showed my not so computer
affine sister how to do it and she likes it too.

~~~
contingencies
LyX is good for that.

------
andrepd
An important correction: don't use TexMaker, it's no longer actively
developed. Use TexStudio
([http://www.texstudio.org/](http://www.texstudio.org/)), the
fork/continuation of that project. Much more polished, performant, and many
more convenient features.

------
JeremyS
Filename for screenshots should be changed ;)

------
nyankosensei
Has anyone tried the Lout typesetting program? I worked with it several years
ago and was very impressed. Mark Summerfield uses it for his programming
books:

[https://www.qtrac.eu/lout.html](https://www.qtrac.eu/lout.html)

------
arca_vorago
For those of you who like latex output but find learning it daunting, give
emacs org mode a try, as it can export to latex easily, and you can always
break into actual latex inside org if you are doing something more
complicated.

------
boramalper
If you are looking for a more coherent and better source, Wikibooks has an
amazing Latex guide:

[https://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX](https://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX)

------
biswaroop
A latex tip: hover over equations in Wikipedia to get the syntax.

------
ankitbko
I love the licence he has included. Rarely see it used anywhere.

