

Ask YC: Anyone use LaTeX? - bcater
http://scripts.mit.edu/~bcater/webtex/webtex.php
I use LaTeX a lot, but I couldn't find an online version, so I wrote this one. It's very rough in terms of styling, but basic functionality is there. What else would you like to see it do?
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nailer
I have used TeX before, but now use OpenDocument in its stead. I know TeX is
well loved, and I admire Knuth too, but I think a lot of its benefits have
been surpassed by other formats.

Note I do not create mathematical documents, but technical ones. OpenDocument
uses MathML for this, but I personally have little experience with it.

Here's why I use OpenDocument:

\- Content and presentation are still separated

\- I can generate and manipulate OpenDocument just as easily as TeX

\- Massive documents are handled just as well in my experience

\- XML is easier to transform into other XML dialects.

\- OpenDocument is easier to transform into popular proprietary document
formats, ie, MS Office. At some point, you need to communicate with non-
technical people.

\- Metafont produces very poor screen output due its love of bitmap fonts. Yes
this can be worked around by TeX users, but there is no reason to expect them
to do that.

Knuth doesn't understand usability concepts and wouldn't consider this a bug.
I have higher standards (as would most computer users).

Yes, I said that. Remember TeX's goal:

"allow anybody to produce high-quality books using a reasonable amount of
effort, and to provide a system that would give the exact same results on all
computers, now and in the future."

Anybody. There is no reason to require people to understand a markup language
in order to create a presentation-separated document. Nor is there any special
requirement to work around an ancient poor-quality custom font scheme that
should have been dumped years ago.

I know this is a topic close to people's hearts, but read the goal above: TeX
has quite clearly failed to meet it.

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npk
If fully implemented, this could be incredibly useful for me. Initial
comments:

x The ability to merge in a tex file. That is, allow me to download the tex
file from your server, and then send you a new version, obviously you'll track
changes.

x EDIT: Bibliographies. Having a single point to place bibtex style
bibliographies, and manage them. That would be amazing.

x I don't like that the user login persists at the top of the screen. The UI
needs a lot of work, i imagine you're working on that.

x if tex compilation fails, highlight it in red. If it succeeds highlight in
green.

x On the file list, next to the .tex file, show the most current pdf file. Ahh
apparently you do, you call that view. I don't like that word. I think you
should show a.tex a.pdf. View makes me think that you view the tex file.

x Can we upload images? If you're clever, you might be able to figure out a
way for figures to be grabed from a url within latex.

x Add some simple templates. When a new file is created, it should have a
skeleton that produces a pdf file. If you're on a mac, take a look at texshop.

x Add the ability to jump to the error in the .tex file, this is hard to do
apparently, but texshop figured it out.

good work.

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aheilbut
I second the suggestion about integrating bibliographies - one approach would
be to pull in data from bibliographies managed with <http://www.citeulike.org>

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pg
Every book I've written (including Hackers & Painters) was done with LaTex.

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naish
I think it is _the_ option for writing with any degree of complexity:
articles, theses, books, etc. Word processing (and Word in particular) pales
in comparison. Having all of the bookkeeping and style taken care of for
indices, lists, contents, cross references, citations, etc. makes it very nice
to work with. I convert everyone I can...

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npk
texMacs is great, but is a non-option for many scientists. A large fraction of
us are switching to OSX. texMacs runs slowly on osx, but worst, it looks ugly
running on a mac.

I use texshop, it's not a texmacs replacement in terms of features, yet, i
like it better on my mac.

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amichail
Can't you convince a few key conferences/journals to accept TeXmacs
submissions? For just how much longer do they expect to use TeX anyway?

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mhartl
I've used LaTeX for basically everything: reports, letters, papers, course
handouts, Ph.D. thesis, book. Typesetting is superior to word processing in so
many ways, but unfortunately LaTeX seems to be going out of fashion. Except
for physics and math journals, even technical publishers seem to prefer Word
(!) to LaTeX nowadays.

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naish
_Except for physics and math journals, even technical publishers seem to
prefer Word (!) to LaTeX nowadays._

This is a sad state of affairs indeed. Almost reason enough for me to look for
alternate venues for publication.

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motoko
Yes, but it's mostly an esoteric tool to impress people with how smart you
are. It's useful for mathematical typesetting. These two statements are not
mutually exclusive ;)

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trevelyan
I use it in an commercial environment to automatically produce well-designed
PDF documents in multiple languages, I recommend the texlive distribution for
those getting their feet wet. Hopefully you won't have to use non-default
fonts.

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SwellJoe
My book was written using Docbook SGML with a LaTeX based processing chain and
custom style sheets. The publisher ended up importing from the HTML version
(the least pleasant of all of the output formats) into Word documents with
their custom tags, so it kind of lost some of the magic.

Eventually I ported it to Docbook XML and moving to RenderX XEP for
processing, in order to get better (by some definition of better--mainly just
better maintained stylesheets, and the tools seemed to handle the length of my
book better) PDF output.

Now it's in a wiki at <http://doxfer.com/Webmin> and I probably won't be back
to LaTeX for that particular project.

I do keep coming back to it, though, out of curiosity, every time I read
Knuth.

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earthboundkid
Have you tried Prince or was it too expensive to bother with?

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SwellJoe
Prince is not all that much more than XEP, I don't think. But, XEP was the
first commercial product I tried (after giving up on FOP, since it could only
process about 80 pages before crapping out)...it worked great, I paid them
$300 or $400 (I don't recall exactly), and got back to work.

I have never tried Prince. I probably won't do another book in Docbook, though
I don't know what I'll replace it with, since I generally hate WYSIWYG word
processors. I'll probably end up writing in markdown in vim. ;-)

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abstractbill
I wrote my PhD thesis in it, but these days I write most documents in html and
css to be honest.

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earthboundkid
If you use "Prince" (princexml.com), you can turn HTML + CSS into a decent
looking PDF. I've been writing my papers for the last year in plain text
Markdown, then piping it through a script to make PDFs. It works pretty well
for me.

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RWilson
I wrote my CS thesis in college in LaTeX. I used TeXShop in OSX and it was
great. Tried various word processors first (MS Word, Open Office, ThinkFree
Office, Neo Office) and with all of them I spent 90% of the time just trying
to format block quote code segments, leaving me with little time for actual
content. Formatting the code snippets in LaTeX was a breeze. The only think
that got a little annoying was tables that spanned over multiple pages, but
that's a reasonable price.

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dfranke
Yes. I use it for everything. It's been five years since I used a word
processor.

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electric
Wrote my theses in LaTex. It's excellent for large documents.

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gms
Used to all the time in school, now only occasionally.

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buss
I have to use LaTeX for my number theory & elliptic curve cryptography class.
I'll be sure to use this on the next team-project.

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bcater
I've made a lot of changes, and things are looking, feeling, and performing
better than ever! Let me know what you think.

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toisanji
I use it for writing some papers, otherwise I just use asciidoc.

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zandorg
Lap dancers?

