
The Beauty of LaTeX (2011) - pmoriarty
http://www.nitens.org/taraborelli/latex
======
boshie
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](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](https://www.sharelatex.com))

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riobard
(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?

~~~
Argorak
[http://patoline.org/](http://patoline.org/) tries to be better and it seems
like the authors have a good grasp of typesetting.

~~~
Turing_Machine
Is this project still alive? The main page is copyright 2012 and both the
mailing list and the bug tracker appear to be down.

The tarball is still there, though.

~~~
JadeNB
> Is this project still alive?

pmeunier
([https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pmeunier](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pmeunier)),
one of the authors, discusses this a bit at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8026930](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8026930)
(though without, I think, committing to any definitive answer).

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quink
Year is wrong, BTW.

I remember reading this a few years before 2011.

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

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

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

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Argorak
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.

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

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

~~~
kaoD
Searched for "ConTeXt", didn't get any meaningful results and gave up. Not my
brightest moment, to be honest.

~~~
Argorak
You have to add some context :D. Yes, ConTeXt is so old that "Google" (or any
kind of search engine) wasn't a thing back then, leading to that unfortunate
situation.

The Wiki is really good and links to a lot of resources, the TeX stackoverflow
also provides lots of help.

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amelius
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).

~~~
Derbasti
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.

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honorious
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.

~~~
wodenokoto
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.

~~~
jules
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.

~~~
wodenokoto
No, Lyx is not WYSIWYG, but WYSIWYM. E.g, it doesn't show you how your
document will look, but it shows you how it is structured.

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bbcbasic
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'!!!

~~~
arooaroo
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/](http://www.andy-roberts.net/writing/latex/)

[disclosure: I'm the author]

~~~
cLeEOGPw
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.

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rspeer
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/](http://xetex.sourceforge.net/)

~~~
qznc
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}

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ginko
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_
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-...](http://ilovetypography.com/2014/10/25/why-a-better-opentype-
user-interface-matters/)

------
fafner
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.

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baddox
> 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!

~~~
pXMzR2A
> 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.

~~~
Sharlin
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.

~~~
chronial
Did you have a look at word's math support in recent years?

~~~
analog31
I find using the equation editor in Word to be physically debilitating. Pretty
much any software involving tiny graphics and fine mouse work triggers severe
eyestrain headaches and neck fatigue.

There's a document here, describing keyboard entry:

[http://www.chem.mtu.edu/~tbco/cm416/EquationEditor_main.pdf](http://www.chem.mtu.edu/~tbco/cm416/EquationEditor_main.pdf)

It's basically a markup language of sorts, and I'd use it if I were presently
writing a lot of text with equations.

For better or worse, working in industry, my reports are free of equations!
I've formed the hypothesis, that when managers and non-technical people see an
equation, they assume the report is "incomplete," i.e., the equation needs to
be turned into an actual result.

I've been to academic talks where, instead of typeset equations, the author
just copies the source code from their MatLab file to a PowerPoint slide.

~~~
ygra
In university I used Word 2007 to type math lectures in real-time. I never had
to resort to the mouse at all for equations. You seem to be thinking of the
stripped-down MathType equation editor that was bundled with Office for a
while (before it had native math support). The PDF you linked is for Office
2007 onwards and shows that the markup language you mention is mostly like TeX
with a few simplifications, e.g. smart handling of things like x^12 which is
then actually x¹² instead of x¹2. Basically it uses parentheses where TeX uses
braces and needs a lot fewer of them because of more natural tokenizing.

~~~
analog31
I think you're right. I plan on trying it, next time I need to enter equations
into Word. For me, the key to ergonomic use of the computer is being able to
look away from the screen. For instance, I can type text forever without
constant focused eye contact with the screen, which greatly reduces the
eyestrain issue.

And I suppose a useful thing is that if you do misspell one of the keywords,
it just sits there until you correct it, as a reminder of what you were trying
to write.

------
emersonrsantos
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
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.

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paulgerhardt
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?

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acrostic
Lout
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lout_%28software%29](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.

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_acme
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?

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dendory
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](http://dendory.net/?w=544fb21d)

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

~~~
Argorak
For print-quality stuff?

~~~
mkozlows
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.

~~~
illicium
And at the same time, HTML/CSS typography is in the stone age compared to
LaTeX. No microtype without manually tweaked <span> soup, awful justified
layout, CSS regions and columns are a work in progress, and all of this is
unusable for print because there is no concept of pagination.

~~~
mkozlows
Good justification/hyphenation requires Javascript, yes. That's still an
existing weakness. But there is absolutely pagination control.

HTML + CSS isn't perfect, of course, but the difference between HTML and
professional typesetting is much, much smaller than the difference between
Word and professional typesetting.

~~~
qznc
> there is absolutely pagination control

Put something at the bottom of the current page, like a footnote.

