Context: LaTeX is a typesetting system. When compiling a document, a lot of really in-depth debugging information is printed, which can be borderline incomprehensible to anyone but LaTeX experts. It can also be a visual hindrance when looking for important information like errors.
Its always bothered me that a language meant to get rid of formatting there seems to be a lot of fucking formatting. There’s no way to change the way things look outside of explicit formatting (like themes). It’s basically all formatting.
And it’s a fucking mess. How in the fuck do I make titles? What about subtitles? Why is there no paragraph spacing? What’s the point of \title if it’s completely indistinguishable from other text?
I want a markdown editor that supports math LaTeX and a ton of plugins. Markdown is dead simple for a reason.
Your editor shoul show you \title as another colour
And subtitle would be \large after title line
It is all formatting rules. But eliminates formatting the body text.
At least you know output will be same, not like MS Word
Oh thank goodness, body text is notoriously the hardest thing to format in a document
If you had seen some of the Word documents I have, you would not joke about that. People can really f-up text bodies.
Example: one guy wanted to keep two paragraphs together. He did not know about the necessary formatting option, but he knew that chapter titles did what he wanted. So he made the first paragraph a title and just reset font, size, etc to resemble a normal text. F-ed up quite some things…
I see a lot of strange takes around here, and honestly cannot understand where you are coming from. Like really: I’ve written several 100+ page documents with everything from basic tables, figures and equations, to various custom-formatted environments and programmatically generated sections, and I’ve never encountered even a third of these formatting issues people are talking about.
You literally just \documentclass[whatever]{my doc type}, \usepackage{stuff} and fire away. To be honest, I’ve seen some absolutely horrifying preambles and unnecessary style sheets, and feel the need to ask: How are you people making latex so hard?
