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scottfolsom
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30 May 2014, 2:17 pm

I got into LaTeX a few weeks ago on a whim, and as far as typesetting goes, this is by far the most awesome thing I've ever done. Everything just looks so clean, and I love how it runs even on my old, clunky iBook G4!

I was just wondering if anyone else on WP had any experience with LaTeX, because, aside from my very understanding significant other, I can't find anyone who wants to talk about it, and the various forums that exist about TeX intimidate me a bit.



Differentialform
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30 May 2014, 5:32 pm

I use LaTeX for scientific publications and exercise sheets. I have also used LyX which is an easy to use LaTeX front-end.



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31 May 2014, 11:29 am

scottfolsom wrote:
I got into LaTeX a few weeks ago on a whim, and as far as typesetting goes, this is by far the most awesome thing I've ever done. Everything just looks so clean, and I love how it runs even on my old, clunky iBook G4!

I was just wondering if anyone else on WP had any experience with LaTeX, because, aside from my very understanding significant other, I can't find anyone who wants to talk about it, and the various forums that exist about TeX intimidate me a bit.


I use Latex for all my document writing. Mostly, because I'm a PhD physics student and I mostly work in physics as an academic. Latex is the best typesetting program that can be used to write mathematical equations and is better than any word processor.



SoftwareEngineer
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31 May 2014, 10:57 pm

When I was in grad school, I used Microsoft Word with it's built-in equation editor. Back then, it was hot stuff. I looked at LaTeX and it seems really nice.



Eccles_the_Mighty
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01 Jun 2014, 4:27 am

I spent twenty years working in the printing industry, originally the typesetters used Densi or Cora but eventually everything switched to Postscript and WYSIWYG screens. LaTeX makes me feel right at home.


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Jono
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01 Jun 2014, 4:57 pm

SoftwareEngineer wrote:
When I was in grad school, I used Microsoft Word with it's built-in equation editor. Back then, it was hot stuff. I looked at LaTeX and it seems really nice.


Latex is much older than Microsoft Word. It was created in the '70's.



scottfolsom
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01 Jun 2014, 6:22 pm

I guess I diverge from the intended userbase a bit; I'm more into the humanities. What really draws me to LaTeX, though, is the low resource demand. TeXshop loads about ten times faster than Word on my aging laptop, and it gives me far superior results when I actually want something to look nice. I also prefer being able to build a citation database and cite from that, rather than remember how to handwrite APA/MLA cites.



steve30
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05 Jun 2014, 4:41 pm

Its typesetting is lovely. Especially for equations.

I enjoyed using it when I was studying engineering at college, but sometimes it took a bit too much effort, as when I got the code wrong, I would spend ages trying to fix it, and when I didn't know how to do something, it would take me ages to find out, so I often did resort to OpenOffice.org or Microsoft Word.



DRzero
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12 Jun 2014, 8:12 pm

I have to admit I don't like using LaTeX, but I have to.

Please remember that TeX was invented a very long time ago by computing legend Donald Knuth. LaTeX is a version of TeX that was developed much later by Leslie Lamport. Most TeX users use LaTeX, perhaps because many math journals specifically require it.

The best book I've seen for LaTeX is "More Math into LaTeX", by Gratzer. Despite its title, it requires no background.

There's a "detexify" tool on the Web. You draw the symbol in a box, and the applet give you the TeX/LaTeX command. It's fun and surprisingly useful. As a newbie to WP, I might not be allowed to give a link, but you can Google "detexify" and find it.

The TeX Stack Exchange is an excellent resource for questions about TeX & LaTeX. The people there know their stuff and they are polite. Ironically, one cannot use TeX in posting questions or answers, as one can in Math Stack Exchange.

There are free IDE's (if that's the right word) if you don't like the command line. I like TexNicCenter . Last time I installed it, I had a little trouble finding a version that didn't have a lot of garbage bundled with it, so be careful.

Comparing LaTeX to Microsoft Word is like comparing a screwdriver to a jackhammer. If I want to write a very short document with a couple equations in it, Word is infinitely easier (for me). If I want to write a serious paper with lots of equations, or with unusual symbols, or that needs to be editable after Word has undergone several questionable revisions by the Evil Empire (actually, MS almost resembles the spunky underdog these days and Google the Evil Empire), then TeX or LaTeX is probably necessary.


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mrrhq
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14 Jun 2014, 9:08 pm

Latex is a document and markup language, right?
Now just imagine this... what if they replaced the entire language of the Internet with LaTeX instead of HyperText. Since Latex is mostly about content and not presentation, they could totally use it! Invent a protocol like lttp://mydocument dot com (sorry, it won't let me post even fake links yet, stupid forum system.) and the source code would just be a TeX or LaTeX document.

Brilliant.

But I think CSS is the language that needs to be rehauled overall. Hur.

I think if I knew both LaTeX and TeX better, I'd totally use them and fall in love with them like my 90's girls, but I stick with my LibreOffice and Abiword documents like some odd, weird guy, ya know?

The reason why I hate HTML is because it reminds me a lot of XML, and both of them are s**t languages with, you know, open tags and close tags, ugh, that sort of garbage. Whereas languages like Python/Django, Ruby/RoR and JSON are beautiful, readable works of art.



DRzero
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12 Jul 2014, 1:04 pm

A coworker who is much better at TeX than I am showed me a LaTeX editor called TeXmaker. It looks very impressive. It's free and available at least for Windows & Linux. It has all kinds of bells & whistles, which I don't always care for in software but I think LaTeX is so difficult that people need all the help and shortcuts they can get.


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Constantin
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07 Oct 2014, 6:44 pm

scottfolsom wrote:
[A]side from my very understanding significant other, I can't find anyone who wants to talk about it, and the various forums that exist about TeX intimidate me a bit.


I can completely understand the wish to talk about LaTeX (and the thing about driving ones significant other crazy with it)!

LaTeX allows you to create output of such a high degree of perfection that one can get seriously enthusiastic about it, which isn't always easy to understand for people less concerned with perfection. What makes TeX such a powerful language is that it is so multilayered; you don't master it by learning what you think is all there is to know, at any given point in time. While starting with a LaTeX document and the basic LaTeX syntax are very simple, there are few limits to how complicated and non-standardised it can get.

I have been using LaTeX for all my document processing for about two years now, but being at business school there are no other enthusiasts. :(



slave
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08 Oct 2014, 3:06 am

Unfortunately, I have a latex allergy.....oh wait!! !! :wink: :wink: :lol:



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09 Oct 2014, 7:26 am

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09 Oct 2014, 5:19 pm

I use LaTeX for all documents for two main reasons,

1) The superior output obviously
2) The compatibility with unix tools - Regardless of which computer I use, all I need is a decent text editor ( eg VIM ). Even on a slow netbook, I dont have the overhead of a work processor. For work related documents, as its all stored in text format I can svn/RCS them to track changes.

Its so much easier with plain text than binary data files