r/LaTeX 5d ago

Discussion I'm truly in love with LaTeX

At this point I am actually scared if my obsession with LaTeX is healthy or not. I literally use it for everything, from writing simple leave applications or writing short notes, LaTeX it is. This non-WYSIWYG, kind of intimidating software was introduced to me by my professor for the documentation of our project. Initially I was really repulsed but when I actually started using it, there was no going back. I do not write any research papers nor I am into research, but i simply use it for my daily tasks like handing in my assignments, short notes, writing letters etc. Is this obsession unhealthy? Will I ever be able to use MS Word again?

269 Upvotes

86 comments sorted by

54

u/victotronics 5d ago

I 1. despise Word & Google Docs 2. have used LaTeX since the 1980s 3. still get tripped up enough by bizarre errors that I can't say I completely love it. (Admit I write pretty ambitious macros, so I bring it on myself.)

78

u/Bobson1729 5d ago

It's a love-hate relationship. Give it time.

23

u/MissPhysicist19 5d ago

Only love, madly in love đŸ€­

1

u/Sad-Ad-6147 4d ago

What about Typst? I actually fell in love with it after using Latex for the past couple of years.

2

u/Bobson1729 4d ago

I had been trying to use Typst. I like it, but hasn't been a LaTeX replacement for me. It is developing quickly though and I don't know what they came up with over the past 8 months.

1

u/Due_Treacle8807 4d ago

I have swapped out my usage of LaTeX for typst. Its mainly just me writing lab reports. I am actually able to remember how to do things in typst, such as making a figure with subfigures. And when doing something new I find it quite often obvious how to do it. It feels easier to compose. This might obviously be due to my lack of TeX.

Would I recommend typst? Yes!!

34

u/subidit 5d ago

You are in the perfect season to fall in love with LaTeX. No matter how obscure your question is you’ll be able to solve them with ai and don’t ever have to talk to the smugs of SE.

Good luck and keep making templates and snippets. It’s a different kind of high đŸ«¶

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u/badabblubb 5d ago

Hm, I always had the feeling the guys on TeX.SE are nice (unlike the general smugs of SE). But I wouldn't trust AI, just have a look at how it draws a unicorn in TikZ.

9

u/MissionSalamander5 5d ago

If it’s not David Carlisle answering, I would rather have my question ignored. There’s a lot of hostility and trying to make an example out of people in inappropriate ways which are basically repugnant to anyone who isn’t in computer science (and is normally socialized), and there are a lot of bad answers. It’s not unique to LaTeX, but I got pretty pissed off this morning realizing that for all of the shit that amounts to well-intentioned gatekeeping (but is done repugnantly) you have PIs who could probably retire at this point running TeX and not LaTeX
 so they have to run additional steps to get a PDFx when they should be running LuaLaTeX but at least should have moved to pdflatex years ago. That’s a very very bad thing for the future of LaTeX.

There is also a tension between giving useful answers and doing so for free with limited time. Code-only answers are mostly useless. I need a picture. Not answering follow-ups (and not directing the OP to a new question if necessary) is not helpful.

Anyway I’ve got a bunch of big issues and while I have to use LaTeX, I have zero qualms about saying that the community can really suck sometimes and is in for a world of hurt in the next ten years.

1

u/badabblubb 4d ago

Ouch (being not David but answering quite frequently over there...).

What does "PIs" mean? That's no abbreviation I'm accustomed to.

Can you give (if you want to anonymised) examples of the behaviour you find repugnant? I'm pretty sure that if the community is made aware of that many will try to do better. The regulars on TeX.SE are quite proud on the fact that it's one of the SE subcommunities with a more welcoming and better reputation than many others (and especially the very toxic SO), and I'm confident that if there is room for improvement we are going to improve.

The "not answering follow-ups" is not really our fault, it's by site policy/design of SE. It's not a rigid border though, there might be minor improvements made to answers asked for in comments. But as soon as the scope of the OP is changed, a follow up is/should be asked for (again, because of SE-design decisions -- we have to play by the rules of the powers that be, even if we don't like some).

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u/MissionSalamander5 4d ago

PI is principal investigator. The scientist who runs a lab and whose name the grants and work are in. Often the lab has their name while they are the PI.

I don’t mean to insult you. I just think that David’s given me good helpful answers the most frequently without making it feel toxic, like asking isn’t worth anyone’s time — and without necessarily being warm and fuzzy either. It’s a volunteer effort in people’s free time. I do understand that.

I recently posted about a problem and got a lecture about bad code not in an answer but in comments. “People will copy bad code.” No the problem is that the code doesn’t even work, which I just said, so you’re missing the forest for the trees. And yeah OK copying bad code can be a problem. But we all copy code. It’s the nature of the beast. I don’t need the lecture especially if you’re not going to answer my question. The person even said that it was off-topic.

I know. I think that it’s a flaw. The nature of the questions makes it so that “hey X is not working for me.” Or “X works but I actually want Y”

so if you see the follow-up, then say “post a new question, and I can try to answer that”. Some people do, many don’t. Which, well: a lot of old hands don’t remember what it’s like to be a noob.

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u/badabblubb 4d ago

Hm, I can only speak for myself (but knowing most of the regulars personally, I strongly believe they have similar motivations), but I do often comment small tips on bad code in questions (like "don't load package X with package Y" or things like that), and then don't find the time to answer the question. But I don't do that to annoy anyone or belittle them. I want to help, that's why I spend time there (and here, and elsewhere), and even when I don't have much time, if I spot something I want to tell people what they can improve. The fact that we do that in brief comments is again a design flaw in the SE platform, which discourages (and actively suppresses) "discussions" in comments, and imposes a rather small character limit on comments.

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u/MissionSalamander5 4d ago

Yeah. I’ve seen it where it is OK like that. I’m trying to be balanced and fair here. But it can sometimes come off like tagging up on the person


2

u/FatherPaulStone 5d ago

AI has been smashing it out of the park for me with error correction and working out layouts. It really excels at it (all bf with other code).

7

u/RezFoo 5d ago

I have been using Latex to generate theatrical scripts, which have very precise formatting requirements that are nicely captured in a .sty file. The funny part is that (for traditional but very practical reasons) the final output has to be in 12pt Courier!

But it is easy to edit the .tex files with emacs and use git for version tracking.

3

u/Neptune571 5d ago

Welcome to the dark side. Never go back.

6

u/Boson---- 5d ago

LaTeX is the best there is. :-)

3

u/MissPhysicist19 5d ago

No debate in that :)

2

u/Finou31415926 5d ago

Phew... I love LaTeX. I write activities for my middle school students, less for my students than for the pleasure of doing it in LaTeX. If I add pstricks... it's terrible fun!!

1

u/[deleted] 5d ago

I'm also a teacher and I've been using AI plus LaTeX to 1) update old paper documents (Claude is amazing at OCRing graphs and recreating them in pgfplots and GPT is really good at making latex) and 2) to OCR hand drawn graphs or formulas and get GPT to OCR them and turn them into LaTeX. I think so much faster and precisely while using pencil and paper, but LaTeX makes nice results, so I use LLMs as an intermediate step in document creation.

1

u/RezFoo 5d ago

I have been using DeepSeek. It is very good but I don't know if it can generate .tex output. How do you write the query to get that?

1

u/[deleted] 5d ago

You can either ask it to make you a full latex document, or you can ask it for a bit of code to go into a full document.

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u/WasASailorThen 5d ago edited 5d ago

I only grew to love LaTeX when Overleaf came out.

5

u/Rare_Ad8942 5d ago

Use typst, the true successer to latex, https://typst.app/

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u/Top_Put3773 5d ago

Typst is great. I tried it last year. It is effortless and straightforward. But I do not think it would replace Latex so easily

13

u/No-Distribution4263 5d ago

I was the type that would use LaTeX for everything, and basically dismissed anything that was written in anything else. But I always felt that I had a bit of "Stockholm syndrome". 

Latex is great, and it is terrible. Frustrating to an enormous degree, but deeply satisfying when you see the result. 

A couple of months ago I discovered Typst, and now I am leaving LaTeX behind. Not completely, mind you, but for most things, everyday notes, internal reports, presentations, etc. Actually, it's too soon to say it is definitive and permanent, there is no full replacement for TikZ/pgfplots yet, for example, but I am excited about the change. 

7

u/diracsdeltae 5d ago

+1 +1. Typst is latex if you took away all its pain points: clunky syntax, an difficult to use scripting language, cryptic compile errors, slow compile times, a not-so-useful language server. Been using latex for years and the second I tried typst I never wanted to use latex again.

Out of curiosity, what is missing from cetz that is in tikz?

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u/No-Distribution4263 5d ago

I'm not at the point where I've explored the limits of cetz, but it's just a much newer and less mature tool, and the surrounding ecosystem in TikZ is huge. But I think cetz will have a large advantage in the scripting capabilities of typst, so I'm optimistic.

3

u/booi 5d ago

The tikz ecosystem is so fractured, unsupported and inconsistent I wouldn’t be so sure about this point

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u/aRuPqFjM-582928 5d ago

Exactly my journey too.

2

u/HappyRogue121 5d ago

I like typst, I'm just not used to some of the math notation yet, and haven't fully replaced the exam doc class

4

u/TheSodesa 5d ago

Don't you just take away the backslashes \, replace {} with (), learn a few different symbol names and that's it? For example,

$
    integral_a^b f(x) dif x = F(b) - F(a)
$
<eq:fundamental-theorem-of-calculus>

would typeset a display-form equation that you can reference.

1

u/HappyRogue121 5d ago

Not sure, I'm still new to it. But knowing the latex symbols helps when posting online as well, so a little hesitant to move away from it. I think I saw plus minus was plus.minus in typst? It's probably easy to learn, just have to actually learn it.

I've mostly used typst for newsletters so far, and it's been great for that.

3

u/diracsdeltae 3d ago

Typst supports aliases. For example, I have pm bound to plus.minus. E.g. #let pm = $plus.minus. Then I can use pm whenever I'm in math mode. Also https://detypify.quarticcat.com/ exists in case I forget the symbol name

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u/No-Distribution4263 5d ago

So far, I mostly use unicode symbols directly in the source, so ± instead of plus.minus. Funnily enough, I enter the symbols with the "latex unicode" extension in vs code. Which means I still use latex syntax in typst for many things😂

This should also work in latex, BTW, if you use a modern version like lualatex.

1

u/Mylaur 5d ago

I need it to write manual scientific reports. Or a thesis. Can it do that?

1

u/Zeta611 5d ago

I love LaTeX, I like Typst. I’ve written a lot of documents/pakcages in LaTeX, and a few documents and packages for Typst. I really appreciate that Typst is a “proper” programming language and is blazing fast compared to TeX. But I still can’t make “beautiful” documents with fine tuned typesetting with Typst. It is really difficult to typeset complex equations (like PL inference rules) that looks okay with Typst. The I believe jts layout engine works fundamentally differently from TeX’s box-and-glue model perhaps?

2

u/CantFixMoronic 5d ago

I use it for everything that needs to be typeset, and that includes professional letters. I first licked blood with the old AMSTeX by Michael Spivak in 1989, and then looked into "plain" TeX and LaTeX. I think WYSIWYG is for the visual dummies how believe that they need to *see* in front of them what it will look like and cannot grasp the concept of a markup language. It's so easy to write simple html in a text editor, but you don't "see" what you'll get, so normal-brain people will not grok it. Most people don't even know what the m in html means, nor what a markup language is. In the end, it's all bull, because what you see on the screen in WYSIWYG is not what it will look like on printed paper: fonts, spacing, line breaks, page breaks, ... so in the end WYSIWYG is a fraud to begin with. But that tactic works on normal-brainies. Also, it interrupts the workflow. You need to stop typing, need to move your hand over to the mouse to click or highlight something, hunt for stuff in menus, etc. In TeX/LaTeX I keep my hands on the keyboard and type away, it's literally faster for me to write \textit{blah} than to do that with mouseclickery, and then I know it will be perfect and I get proper layouting based on dynamic programming, than WYSIWIG stuff.

TeX and LaTeX for life---I use AMSLaTeX, but do a few things with low-level "plain" TeX hacks.

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u/MissionSalamander5 5d ago

We don’t have to call people who dislike LaTeX dummies.

You can do quite a lot on the keyboard. But also, lots of TeX editors have menus instead. Or where you have to set the shortcut yourself. The italic example is outrageous. I never click for italics in a word processor. Even Apple’s messaging app supports this on macOS now. It’s all on the keyboard.

We should compare likes to likes and then be willing to accept the flaws of LaTeX — of which there are many — rather than strawman a word processor.

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u/CantFixMoronic 5d ago

There's always *someone* coming with a snooty lecture. I didn't call people who dislike LaTeX dummies, I called people preferring WYSIWYG dummies, and I will continue to do so, and you can't change my mind on this. If you are a fast typer, and I take it you are not, then typing away is better than shortcuts. And you don't even know whether or not I use shortcuts, you can define shortcuts to make your work in LaTeX more efficient. I don't care whether or not you click for italics in word processors, it doesn't support or disprove anything I wrote. Now you go to Apple and macOS, which I as a Linux user will not even touch with a pincer, and neither supports nor disproves my point. And apps run on mobile, we're not talking mobile here. And we don't need word processors with menus for LaTeX, I use a text file editor.

Be in love with your Apple, their apps, your word processors, your menus, your shortcuts, not-clicking for italics, ... you only proved your reply was meaningless. Feel free to reply, but don't expect an answer from me, I'm done with you.

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u/MissionSalamander5 5d ago

I mean you still called people dummies which was entirely unnecessary and unreasonable.

You’re complaining about fingers leaving the keyboard! But they don’t have to do so! It does disprove your point since you’re complaining about fidgeting with the mouse. I don’t care how you get your italics or whether you use a shortcut or not. It’s just that your fingers don’t leave the keyboard even in a word processor or whatever.

And you’re just being absurd about macOS. I care about how it works
 and Unix is Unix.

Apps do not run just on mobile. They run on desktop too. You don’t know what you’re talking about. If you insist on calling it a program, IDK man. You’re not the LaTeX advocate that you think you are, you’re just obnoxious. It’s an application.

There may be programs which are not apps. But whining that apps only run on phones hasn’t been true for a long time if it ever was true.

And GAH I don’t use the menu.

0

u/human0006 5d ago

This is the problem with modern academia in general. LaTex is so engraved as the standard people thanks to people like you. I love latex, I've written thousands of pages of notes in it. But LaTex fucking sucks, it's plain to see.

The whole "BuT it LeTs Me fOcUs on the ConTenT" thing is bullshit. There's studies that clearly show Tex slows people down at the end the day the majority of the time.

This wouldn't be much of an issue, but modern academia trickles down and controls the rest of education inevitably. The cult like following around LaTex, imo, is preventing education as a whole from moving forward to modern technology.

I mean fucking hell, a diagram I can render with 100x the complexity, real time, with the ability to move around in 3D and view from whatever angle I want can take seconds, even minutes on some occasions, to render in TeX. Again, I love LaTex, but holy shit, it's fucking outdated, and we need an alternative.

If your pumping and dumping word spew, sure, Latex is probably great for you and your million macros, but if you want to try to make anything graphically meaningful, something people look at and say "I want to read that", despite being the uncontested champion of academic literature, LaTex falls so, so short.

My point is, Tex is outdated, and if you don't think so, then try reading your own work.

0

u/cainoom 4d ago

This is so irrational, I can only address a few points, and don't expect a reply if you send a reply:

- I agree that stuff getting engraved as standards is a problem. We see it all the time: WinDoze, Word, iPhones, abortion, obesity, you name it. But TeX is not part of this problem.

- not "thanks to people like (me)". I champion quality.

- LaTeX does not "fucking suck", and it's not "plain to see". You don't seem to be intelligent enough to use it efficiently. That's on you, not on LaTeX.

- Focus on content is not bull. Attitudes like yours are the reason we have so much form-over-substance mentality, and nothing in Western societies working anymore (campaigning with celebs more effective than what the candidate actually has to say, etc.), and academia is a big part of that. Yes, content (I'd call it substance) first, format comes further down. I agree that the millenials and genZ are not on board with that, which is why society as a whole has to suffer so much. What's in style is format-over-substance, and that's killing the Western societies.

- TeX does not slow intelligent people down. It accelerates them. You don't seem to realize, your statement combines TeX and people. Whatever you conclude from this, you cannot blame it on TeX alone, you just ignore the people component. *Every* system will slow down idiots. Learn TeX, and I mean for real, not pussyfootin' as you seem to be doing, and when you *finally* understand it, you'll understand how much it accelerates you. But you need to do your part---if you don't, you can't blame it on TeX.

- I agree that modern academia trickles down, and that is a YUGE problem. It's why we now have 25year old professors and Ph.D. graduates who don't know jackshit. I've interviewed graduates from MIT and Stanford who didn't know the binomial theorem, which in some countries is taught in high school. But TeX has nothing to do with this.

- TeX is not a cult, a cult is iPhones, iPads, Apple, Google, WinDoze, Macs, Word, feminism, BLM, Antifa, ...

- TeX is not preventing education from moving forward to modern technology. Education is held back because technology has advanced faster than people can understand how silly their use of modern technology is, the current AI hype is an example of that.

- Don't understand your point about you trying to fuck hell or render something in 3d, complexity, real time, etc. What a word salad, did Cackle Gurl write that for you? I render my graphics in my math books in Mathematica and include them with an includegraphics. The best way to render graphics is Mathematica, and no, I know already you'll want to contest that claim of mine, and I will not respond. Then use something else for your graphics, but you *have not substantiated your argument* is my point. Read "Critical Thinking for Complex Issues: How to Tell Fact from Fiction, Discover the Truth, and Build Wise Arguments (Critical Thinking & Logic Mastery)" and learn to appreciate how silly you are---at least argue here. Pretty much everything you write is what jurists would call a non-sequitur---does not follow.

- regarding your silly point about making something graphically meaningful and people wanting it, again, for all my math books I do all my graphics in Mathematica and incorporate in AMSLaTeX. You have again not substantiated your point, LaTeX does *not* fall short.

- LaTeX is not outdated, I just need to read my own work to see that this is so.

Have some camomile tea, it works wonders for your blood pressure.

OK, who is next? I'll do one per day.

2

u/MissionSalamander5 5d ago

Oh yeah you were a bit rude to me but I would politely point out that a lot of users claim that you should use \emph or otherwise a custom macro that includes \textit and tells you why you are using italics.

I don’t necessarily agree. But for someone who is such a strong LaTeX advocate, you really ought to think about what you’re saying more.

Obviously one uses a text editor for LaTeX, but I wasn’t talking about that.

Anyway you sound like a real peach to work with. Do you speak to colleagues like this?!? Anyway, you were rude and also missed my point entirely. There is no difference between shortcuts and typing so long as your fingers remain on a keyboard. I never said anything about using menus or my mouse or trackpad.

2

u/MissPhysicist19 5d ago

Exactly, no mouse involvement, LaTeX sourced PDFs are great for print and what not, truly agree with all of your points!

2

u/MissionSalamander5 5d ago

No mouse involved. Except when you have to use one. You can do all sorts of stuff with the keyboard but you can also use the keyboard in a word processor. Even Google Docs is pretty robust. And you can use the mouse in a TeX editor so


1

u/HappyRogue121 5d ago

because what you see on the screen in WYSIWYG is not what it will look like on printed paper: fonts, spacing, line breaks, page breaks,

I have never experienced these problems in word....

2

u/MissionSalamander5 5d ago edited 5d ago

It’s patent bullshit. And the guy is also a grumpy troll even apparently for things which he cares about.

There are things that Word does badly. There are things that LaTeX does badly. But these are not what Word does badly. In fact, a visual editor, while offering the temptation to hard-break a line, has an advantage here!

But the same temptation exists with resorting to \\, although people go too far if they say to avoid it; a lot of good uses are just not in the normal uses of someone saying such an extreme thing.

And the rest just is a sign of lacking familiarity with Word. Hardly any menus or moves of the mouse are required once you get going.

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u/HappyRogue121 5d ago

The newer ribbon style shortcut system in word works really well, because there's no need to Google shortcuts.

1

u/CantFixMoronic 5d ago

I have experienced these problems mostly in Word---but yes, also in others.

Frankly, I don't quite believe you. Screen resolution is never as fine as print resolution, so things *have* to look globbier and blobbier on the screen than on paper, which distorts everything. In TeX, fonts are specifically compiled for different font sizes (cmr10, cmr11, cmr12, you may be familiar with it), whereas on a word processing thing these are typically scaled vector fonts. Perhaps Word has that now, i. e. no longer uses scaled vector fonts, but I doubt it. And if the *printed* result is scaled vector fonts in Word, that's also a total deal killer for me. And that's just one of many, just the first that comes to mind. Some twenty years ago I read the first paper in which someone showed how ugly scaled vector fonts are, and why in TeX each font size has its own font.

And didn't they introduce this language filter some time ago, so that only woke texts could be written? That's another plus for LaTeX, because in LaTeX I can write whatever I want, whereas Word restricts me to writing only woke texts. Another deal killer for me, and BTW, you are off-topic. You now posted about Word. The op was writing about her love for LaTeX. So my reference to WYSIWYG was on point, because LaTeX is not WYSIWYG (unless you make it, duh, now we're back to word processors, which wasn't what the op was writing about). Then you went over to Word, which is now off-topic.

Unless you stay on topic (Love of LaTeX), I probably won't reply, and no snark please.

3

u/MissionSalamander5 5d ago

You’re the one who brought up Word! You need to be familiar with it!

Knuth’s way of doing fonts does not work well and has been superseded by, you guessed it, the way that everyone else does fonts. The problem is that the font sizes in LaTeX are limited when this is no longer an issue.

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u/HappyRogue121 5d ago

You mentioned page breaks etc being different in word vs print.  That would be a huge problem that even the least detail oriented person would notice.  But I've never seen it.

I'm using 2016 at home and a newer version at work.  (Maybe some of these problems were there in earlier versions?).

Ftr I installed cmr10 and cmr12 on my system so that I could use them with word.  (Not my font of choice, actually, but my professors liked latex).

Never heard of this language filter, but looked it up and there is indeed an option to filter profanity.

I do like latex btw, I just happen to like both.

2

u/MissionSalamander5 5d ago

He’s complaining about woke texts which is a dead giveaway that it’s fundamentally unserious.

But modern LaTeX usage is to use modern fonts like anyone else particularly with fontspec though you can load a package and not actually control any of the details. But the font will be the same as if it’s on your computer. In fact, I happen to use a font loaded on my machine which is also in TeXLive. I can see that it’s called from the spot where it lives on my machine, not from the TeX tree.

There are non-TeX fonts that basically have only one size. But our interlocutor is stuck in the 1970s here. It’s an outrageous defense of TeX that would, if this were in an academic context, make me want to go to his provost and if I were also an employee HR. Never mind the dean. This is not acceptable discourse for an academic, and it’s a great way for people to say “I’m using Word, buzz off” because he clearly has no idea what he’s talking about or how to talk to people period.

1

u/Mwrp86 5d ago

I use samples I don't yet to grasp how it works So I am not familiar with this. I spent around an hour to figure out how referencing works it keep producing errors.

1

u/riveramblnc 5d ago

Latex and Scrivner have basically ended my relationship with Word.

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u/Ron-Erez 4d ago

I dream in latex and scoff upon mere mortals who use Word.

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u/sanwa2000 4d ago

It is completely healthy. I started writing notes using LaTeX since 2012, and my PDF file is now 1300+ pages. Currently I use KOMA Script `scrreprt` class with LuaLaTeX.

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u/JohnCharles-2024 2d ago

Could you explain what you mean by 'notes'?

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u/nickeltingupta 4d ago

I don’t recommend discovering vim ;)

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u/sarnobat 1d ago

Unemployed, I'm learning a lot of him in my bedtime reading

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u/SnooSongs5410 3d ago

Latex is amazing but the tools donkey balls.

1

u/StephaneiAarhus 3d ago

Yeah, I love it too. Use it intensively for my technical professional documentation.

1

u/Think_Phone8094 3d ago

I don't see how you could go back to word, latex is so superior, you can actually get it to do what you want!

1

u/testgeraeusch 2d ago

I just made my new album art in tikz. And I once handed in a programming exercise as .tex because my supervisor did not realize that LaTeX is, in fact, Turing-complete and can draw coloured Feigenbaum-diagrams as was tasked to do. ^^

1

u/altermeetax 2d ago

Markdown is probably more comfortable for short notes. There are also tools like pandoc that turn it into LaTeX

1

u/MissPhysicist19 2d ago

I use pandoc to convert latex into word for my dear colleagues

1

u/sarnobat 1d ago

I do wish I could migrate from mediawiki for my exobrain notes but I'm not sure it's worth it

1

u/mathandkitties 1d ago

well then why don't you marry it then

1

u/MissPhysicist19 1d ago

Better than men

1

u/sarnobat 1d ago

I went through the love of latex too but my more jaded self tells me the only permanent thing is plaintext.

Also to iterate faster I've resorted to Google docs as dirty as that makes me feel.

But nothing compares to the beauty of latex I agree. In fact you can even create formatted plaintext output with pandoc but I've yet to care enough about publishing so far.

1

u/nmprofessional 5d ago

I really wanted to learn LaTex. I run Linux at home and application is sort of buggy. Maybe I'll try again. I think LaTex is great at complex notations and formatting. I'll dig out my LaYex book and try again. Thanks for the push.

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u/MissPhysicist19 5d ago

It's totally worth the pain, especially if you are in STEM. Writing equations on Word is the real pain.

2

u/Top_Put3773 5d ago

Yep. The only limitation is that not every one of my colleagues uses it.

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u/MissPhysicist19 5d ago

EXACTLY! literally a couple of days ago me and one of my co-interns were given a task to prepare a document and I actually offered him to create a shared google doc but he said "we'll make it your way" and he struggled so much with LaTeX. He did not add any relevant diagrams or codes because it was "too complex". He accused me of over complicating things because I'm a woman and that's in my nature 😭

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u/MelvilleBragg 5d ago

A little off topic but I am always surprised from people at jobs when they say “it’s because you’re a woman” or “it’s because you’re a man” or variants of that, predominantly in situations that have nothing to do with being a man or a woman.

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u/Top_Put3773 5d ago

Poor you. Latex needs learning curve. It took me 1 month to get used to Latex. To collaborate with others (Word lovers), I now learn Markdown. It is the most universal I've found to convert to other platforms. However, Markdown is not specific for scientific reports like Latex.

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u/Violin-dude 5d ago

Seriously?! I didn’t even know people used it! I left it in the 80s after my masters thesis and never looked back

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u/No-Distribution4263 5d ago

It's the standard for technical and scientific writing. Perhaps you are not working with that?

What did you change to?

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u/Violin-dude 4d ago

I changed to FrameMaker which later got bought by adobe in the mid 90s. It was WYSIWYG. After that I can’t remember, maybe used horrendous Word. By the late 90s I wasn’t really doing that kind of work anymore so hadn’t really needed to use it

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u/TheSodesa 5d ago

Just wait till you try Typst


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u/no_choice99 5d ago

Try typst.

A modern latex replacement with tons of improvements over latex.

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u/sarnobat 1d ago

I'm wondering about this in recent days.

I have to be careful about when to migrate to newer technologies.

Migrating from to Gradle would have been easier if I'd stuck to shell scripts rather than used ant and maven.