When will the 'LaTeX is easy' meme die?

The attitude that 'LaTeX is easy' is perpetrated loudly by people that haven't had to use LaTeX very much. It is only tentatively saved by the comprehensive (sometimes, if you're lucky, even readable) documentation of all its quirks. Left to over 30 years of growth outside of its intended use case, LaTeX proper does nothing you would need it to, and the packages that you use with it are horribly fragmented. Maybe Latex is good at the things it sets out to implement, but those things aren't what I or anyone else uses it for (creating publication-quality documents). So in considering latex we are forced to also consider the environment of libraries in which it exists.

LaTeX brings all the problems you had in the Windows 2000 era of programming into document creation.
> misleading compiler messages
> dependency hell
> choosing a compiler
> bad environment
> inconsistent syntax
> GOTOs
> knowing whether or not you have run the compiler enough times to produce a document (!!!)
> semantic code is impossible

Every time I want to do anything other than add words to my document, I have to think about whether I want to use Latex's meager facilities, facilities that I had to code, or facilities that someone else invented, then worry about all the quirks in them. If I want to add a table to my document, I need to decide whether it should be:
> tabular
> tabular*
> tabularx
> longtable
> align
> array
> eqnarray
> matrix
Someone told me that one of these is very bad and should be avoided unless absolutely necessary, although he didn't tell me why, and I don't remember which one.

It baffles me that thinking about these things is prerequisite to writing a document.

I am not going to stop using Latex, but no one will ever get me to say that it's easy.

Other urls found in this thread:

mappingignorance.org/2015/04/06/word-or-latex-typesetting-which-one-is-more-productive-finally-scientifically-assessed/
journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0115069#sec008
docs.racket-lang.org/scribble/index.html
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

> choosing a compiler
does anyone use anything beside MikTeX?
> bad environment
you shut your whore mouth
> inconsistent syntax
really? I haven't noticed it in my years of using it
> GOTOs
ur doing it wrong

I only use tabular (inside a table environment making it a float)
aligh and eqnarray are for equations...and they are ever so slightly different
I used some longtable package, but ikr when.
The rest sound like junk unless you convince me otherwise

Floats are gross, but by their nature they kinda have to be.

Honestly, if you really run into all these problems frequently, you seem to have some misconceptions on how to use latex.

> does anyone use anything beside MikTeX?
Yes, there is also TeXlive and others, but that's not what I'm complaining about.
Should I use pdflatex, pdftex, xelatex, xetex, or lualatex then dvi2pdf or ....???
My code previously compiled using pdflatex, but now I need some of the features that only the xetex family has. but it wont compile under xe* compilers. Why not? I don't know.

> bad environment
Recently in my lab we had a problem where one guys pdflatex would compile the paper to 11 pages, and the other guy's would compile it to 10 pages. There was a 10 page submission limit. We had to go use Dan's computer every time we wanted to compile the document. It was an environment issue. We never figured this one out.

> inconsistent syntax
Here's a fun challenge for you, try referencing the same footnote multiple times throughout a document. References are universally done using \label and \ref, except with footnotes, where some arcane thing with how the counter is implemented in LaTeX. Known issue, marked as won't fix by developers. To perform this you have to create your own global counter variable, and recode all the footnote management yourself.

> GOTOs
There is a difference between function calls and expanding syntax. can you tell which is which, and when it matters?

>gross, but by their nature they kinda have to be
nothing has to be this gross

>If I want to add a table to my document, I need to decide whether it should be:
welcome to computer how can i help u computer

tabularx is tabular, but with the addition of an X column type for when you don't know how wide that column's contents are going to be. (e.g. text, images).

Honestly, if you really run into these problems frequently you just don't know how to use LaTeX or rather have some fundamental misconceptions.

>Should I use pdflatex, pdftex, xelatex, xetex, or lualatex then dvi2pdf
Really? I mean, that's what I mean, I used LaTeX for two years or something when I first thought about that. I just used defaults and everything worked very effortlessly. You can't say "LaTeX is hard" just because the obscure stuff you are doing is difficult. And even then, I really never had any issues whatsoever in case I wanted some OTF support and switched over to XeLaTeX (even though it's severely more fiddly).

>Recently in my lab we had a problem where one guys pdflatex would compile the paper to 11 pages, and the other guy's would compile it to 10 pages. There was a 10 page submission limit. We had to go use Dan's computer every time we wanted to compile the document. It was an environment issue. We never figured this one out.
Never heard of anything like it. Besides, it's pretty simple to tweak a few options to cut the page count

>Here's a fun challenge for you, try referencing the same footnote multiple times throughout a document. References are universally done using \label and \ref, except with footnotes, where some arcane thing with how the counter is implemented in LaTeX.
Never ran into that, but it probably sucks. There's probably some package for that though.

> i've never experienced any of your problems
> therefore your claim that latex is not challenging is false
nice solipsism there friendo

have fun doing work for the rest of your life which is so mentally unstimulating that the documents you need to create never exceed the typographic complexity of a birthday card

Nice bait.

... b-but LaTeX is easy,
unless you are retard

>quirks
>Someone told me that one of these is very bad and should be avoided unless absolutely necessary, although he didn't tell me why, and I don't remember which one.

It sounds to me like you don't understand how this language works.
>1) TeX is a macro language with only a couple hundred primitives.
>2) LaTeX is a huge library of macros that are made up of TeX primitives and other LaTeX macros.
>3) TeX was designed so that no matter what a document would always render the same way. As such there is a good amount of legacy cruft that will never be removed, by design. This way if you compile a really old document then it should compile the same now as it did then (except in rare exceptions).
>4) Many people use other LaTeX packages on top of LaTeX. These packages add new macros and at times redefine LaTeX macros.
>5) These "layers" of seemingly redundant macros as well as the redefined macros are the reason for your troubles.

(cont.)

It is perhaps easier to understand these concepts by example. So consider the display math macros.
First you have the TeX primitive
>$$math$$
This is as simple as it gets but is also likely to have an inconsistent appearance (with regards to whitespace) when used in a LaTeX document.
Then you have the LaTeX macro
>\[math\]
When this macro is compiled it turns into
>(some stuff)$$(some stuff)math(some stuff)$$(some stuff)
It is literally a wrapper for the TeX primitive that is meant to play nicer in other environments.
BUT if you load the AMS math package then it creates a new macro called
>\mathdisplay math \endmathdisplay
Like \[math\] these wrap $$, but you've probably never seen or used these. However you've probably used
>\begin{equation*} math \end{equation*}
which are each wrappers for \mathdisplay and \endmathdisplay.
Finally, AMS math will actually redefine \[math\] so that it wraps the equation environment.

Also, if youre wondering about
>\displaymath math \enddisplaymath
these actually compile directly into \[math\] (you can think of them as synonyms). So, the way that \[math\] looks may be affected by whether or not AMS math is loaded.

This is just one macro but it is the case for all of LaTeX. So, some key takeaways are.
>1) The order that you list packages matters.
>2) Some packages will not play nice with each other while others will play perfectly with each other.
>3) Some packages have *improved* drop in replacements that you should pretty much always use in modern documents.
>4) Avoid using TeX primitives and try to use more high level macros.
>5) Try to use macros that come from the same package since they are more likely to look nice together. Avoid mixing and matching needlessly.
>6) Don't load packages that you're not using. They could be redefining macros without you realizing it and causing said quirks.

QFT, this is how open software in general works but some non-cs majors go a long time without realizing it. There is a lot of complexity if you look at every single fucking option available to you, but guess what, you don't NEED every single fucking option available to you.

the meme has died a while ago for scientists who actually care about science. Word vs latex article and paper respectively:
mappingignorance.org/2015/04/06/word-or-latex-typesetting-which-one-is-more-productive-finally-scientifically-assessed/


journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0115069#sec008

I'm also not the biggest fan. With a potentially better language, you could produce text (code) automatically more easily.
Also, yes, the thing with e.g. having to compile twice to make changes in the table of content visible is barbaric.

Though like with many things, it's hard to get rid of a standard like that.

thank god it's not a standard then.
>word ftw

TeX is the name for both the language and the original compiler for said language. The original TeX compiler compiled out to postscript and was a product of another time.

These compilers are all more or less re-implementations of the original TeX compiler with some extra features. The LaTeX "variants" of these compilers are the same as the TeX variants except that they automatically load the LaTeX package and make things play nicer (i.e. use pdflatex instead of pdftex unless you have a really good reason for it).

>pdfLaTeX is the oldest and most supported but it also lacks many features.
>XeLaTeX is much newer. It has UTF-8 support (you can write your source documents directly in UTF-8 and it will just work) and much better font support (you can use fonts with lots of new ridiculous features).
>LuaLaTeX is also much newer. It is written in Lua and has many features similar to XeLaTeX.
Generally when you use a package it will say whether it supports pdfLaTeX or XeLaTeX (I don't really know much about Lua so google that one). Occasionally there will be packages that you don't need in XeLaTeX (because it provides the features out of the box) or there will be packages that you will need to switch to a XeLaTeX counterpart (this is the case for font stuff for instance). If you're working with a team then just pick one (as a team) and stick with it, otherwise you will have weird inconsistencies like you mentioned.

The current version of LaTeX is LaTeX2e. People have been working on a new version, LaTeX3, since the 80s but development stalled for like a decade and you shouldn't count on it ever coming out. As such there is also this other thing which can be thought of as a re-imagining of TeX/LaTeX and it's called ConTeXt. I don't know much about it except that it has a bunch of shiny new features.

(cont.)

Microsoft shill spotted

>Recently in my lab we had a problem where one guys pdflatex would compile the paper to 11 pages, and the other guy's would compile it to 10 pages. There was a 10 page submission limit. We had to go use Dan's computer every time we wanted to compile the document. It was an environment issue. We never figured this one out.
This is very strange as TeX is specifically designed to never behave like that. I have two guesses.
1) One (or more) of your lab members had a different version of some package and it was gumming up the works.
2) Recently-ish the new LaTeX3 devs implemented a bunch of bugfixes into LaTeX2e that they had uncovered while building LaTeX3. My understanding is that they were all extremely rare but it's possible that you somehow hit one.

>There is a difference between function calls and expanding syntax. can you tell which is which, and when it matters?
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by expanding syntax but LaTeX doesn't really have function calls. Instead when the compiler processes a macro it actually replaces it by the definition of the macro (unless it is a primitive). Then it processes the new text for other macros to replace. It does this until the document is nothing but TeX primitives which can then be rendered as a PDF or whatever. I think this is perhaps what you meant by expanding syntax.

>Quantitatively, we can point out another work which asked the Editors of several Scientific Journals for the prevalence of each format in received manuscripts. They found that LaTeX rules in the areas of Mathematics (97%), Statistics (89%) and Physics (74%), then followed by the group of Computer Science (46%) and Astronomy-Astrophysics (35%), with the rest of areas totally dominated by Microsoft Word.

So all the non-sciences should use word...pretty sure they do that already

I hate microsoft.
I just hate the forced latex meme even more.

writing a paper is not something you do every day, and maybe time effiency doesn't matter as much as layout, so latex can (and is) most often used for hard sciences.
Writing reports on the other hand comes up much more often and I would recommend using MS word.

I prefer Word over LaTeX. Much faster writing, more font options, formatting equations is nice and easy.

I use latex a lot, but I'm not one of those "tex people," i.e. one of those guys who can customize the shit out of it and knows how it all works (why do they care??).

I just keep it vanilla. After a short while you've learned to do 99% of all the formatting you need to do.

I've used Word a lot too, mostly when working with others on writing grants. It has just as many problems. You end up with a document with 50 different fonts and sizes, because everyone starts formatting the crap out of his section. And references (e.g. EndNote) are truly horrible. And equations are much more difficult than in tex.

LaTeX, like every tool, is easy to use once you know how to. t. Person who TeXs physics lecture for professors live during the lecture (for money, i'm not an autist).

this

I can't see why anyone would use LaTeX anymore. Nowadays, there are several (non-Microsoft) alternatives which are faster, more productive and wysiwyg. Hell, they even have an equation assistant. I've tried to write some protocols and lecture scripts in LaTeX but I needed about five times longer than just writing everything down in OpenOffice and then exporting it as a pdf.
Why would anyone use it? Srs question

>misleading compiler messages
i've always found them to be fairly straightforward
>choosing a compiler
what? there's like three and it's piss easy. you run latex, xelatex, lualatex, etc. stick with latex and use something else if you know there's a feature you need
>knowing whether or not you have run the compiler enough times to produce a document (!!!)
the compiler output tells you if you needed to rerun it.

latex is fucking tedious

i have to put \\ \\ after every paragraph to make a nice space between pragraphs and no indentation

Put two returns to start a new paragraph...just like you'd do in word

I haven't seen an equation assistant that is as easy to use as equations in latex. The higher the equations/text ratio, the more latex seems appealing.

But isn't the next paragraph indented, then? I understood his post as not wanting indentation. Also, no space inbetween.
Anyway, there is probably some option to turn indentation for new paragraphs off globally.

you have to be trolling, because there's no way you found out about manual linebreaks with \\ and didn't find that you can just use the "\setlength{\parskip}{1em}" command to adjust the paragraph spacing

and in case you actually want no indentation, is right, you can globally adjust indentation with \setlength{\parindent}{4em}

eww
I think the command is \noindent before the paragraph.

but then you'd have to put it in front of every paragraph

that's stupid as fuck

by default, new paragraphs are indented in LaTeX. You can always change the configuration globally like the other user mentioned, do it per paragraph (if you only need to break the rule for a paragraph or two), or you can use a different document class that doesn't have indentation as a default feature.

It can be really fast once you're used to it.

(Not that guy)
windows' is fine.
alt+= gives equation block
type in everything with latex syntax and you get the same result.

Sorry I'm really tired. Your way is better.

Why do it the hard way. I just use MathML.

I've never beheld such a cool story

Whatever I do, I get "overfull hbox badness"

>when will the 'LaTeX is easy' meme die?
When nerds die. And that's like waiting for gays to stop being born. People can learn though - /g/ has long stopped pushing vim/mpv/etc on people (mpv just has its own thread).

loled hard, I remember my first time seeing raw mathML code.

When you do that you're actually semantically telling LaTeX that you're not creating a new paragraph. This is bad. In doing so you're mindfucking LaTeX' page break handling and other shit.

LaTeX uses a point system to decide when to do a page break. Page breaks inside paragraphs have a huge number of badness points and page breaks between two paragraphs have very little badness points. Pictures, equations, and other elements also affect the score of a particular page break.

Essentially what you're risking is that in trying to minimize badness, LaTeX will give you a page break in a stupid place because it doesn't want to break your mega paragraph apart.

Instead what you should do is just tell LaTeX not to indent paragraphs for that document. As an added bonus you'll notice that white space is handled better (white space between paragraphs is different than just two blank lines).

In general LaTeX is designed so that some base configuration (via class file) can be given that tells it how the elements of your page should be formatted at a semantic level. The actual formatting is done by the designer for the class file with some tweaks by the user. Don't use LaTeX as if it were raw TeX.

>Mathematics (97%), Statistics (89%) and Physics (74%), ... Computer Science (46%) and Astronomy-Astrophysics (35%)

How? Or is this including the cranks who waste journals' time?

I can't imagine a single paper published in a mathematics journal that wasn't submitted as a TeX preprint.

What's wrong with mpv? Never had issues with it. Not the best media player, but it serves its purpose.

Why would you even need this shitty program? It's tedious, slow and a giant clusterfuck. It more feels like netscape in 1999 than a modern editing tool. As for equations there is a simple trick to avoid stupid coding. Enter the equation into wolfram alpha and copy the neatly displayed equation as an image file into your document. You can't tell the difference in the final print. I know most of you are no engineers, but follow this advice and your life will be easyer.

>Sour grapes

>LaTeX is a program
>simple trick
>save images from wolframalpha and insert than into your document manually
>easyer
You're right. We are not engineers. Only an engineer would come up with something so retarded as a solution.

Oh I am sorry Sir Mathematician that we lowly engineers tend to use the BEST AND MOST EFFICIENT solution and not something that is "most beautiful" by autistic standards. This latex stuff is a real world application and you must not waste 20 hours with formatting a equation when you can do it in 20 seconds with my method. But well, I guess you have that luxury when being on government payroll.

don't feed the troll

>Enter the equation into wolfram alpha and copy the neatly displayed equation as an image file into your document.
>You can't tell the difference in the final print.
>I know most of you are no engineers
High quality bait right here.

8/10, almost submitted a reply

op, and everyone else in this thread, please use this site:

sharelatex.com

It's an online latex environment that works on your browser without having to download everything. I was a complete retard at latex until I stumbled upon this site.


Oh, and it's free and has tons of great templates to start from

pic related of how the interface actually looks. To the left is where I typethe code, to the right is the .pdf generator.

I prefer overleaf myself, but these sites are pretty good for beginners. Especially useful if you work in a group where a few people don't know LaTeX.

However, if I work with people with more experience in LaTeX, local compilation + git works a lot better. These online tools tend to have poor compile times and version control makes cooperation a lot easier imo, while the interface doesn't differ a lot if you use TeX-studio or -maker.

You get that when an element is too wide for it's container.

Typically this happens if you have equations that are really long or putting too much content into an environment that isn't designed to hold that much. If your document looks fine then don't worry about it, you can safely ignore the messages. More than anything this is a warning meant to alert you to the fact that you could potentially have some material seeping into the margins/being cut off or just being positioned in an awkward looking way. If you had a 300 page document and you decided to mess with formatting settings for some environment/your class file then you would think it is a very useful warning as well.

It can sometimes be caused by two environments that are incompatible or loaded in the wrong order. It can also sometimes be caused by a user misusing an environment/macro in a way it wasn't designed to be used. If you get these messages often and you have no idea what is causing them then it may be a good idea to investigate.

I use the margin environment (from komascript) and often get this warning but I always know what's causing it and It doesn't actually make my documents render all fucked up, so I don't worry about it.

Latex is easy, you're just to stupid to read simple syntax.

Latex really isn't that hard. It's a really old codebase that's accumulated a ton of cruft and bad design and should probably be replaced by something better. But there isn't a ton of activation energy to make it actually happen, it works well enough for most purposes and people that it will probably last another decade.

You could have learned most of [math]\latex[/math] by the time you had written out your stupid fucking post.

this is true

That is completely irrelevant to the point

LaTeX is only good for typesetting mathematical formulas. everything else it does is pretty shit tb.h.

>when the layout looks nothing like I intended and can't fix it for the life of me
REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

>2016
>not using scribble

fucking plebs
docs.racket-lang.org/scribble/index.html

>2016
>using latex
>not using word formula editor

>latex
>not even smart enough to wrap equations
garbage imho