Please dont take this seriously guys its just a dumb meme I haven’t written a single line of code in half of these languages
Accurate. LaTeX is great, it makes you feel like you have superpowers compared to “office suite”-style software. But every once in a while you just run into some bullshit that feels like it’s stuck in 1985 and it completely breaks your flow. I remember wanting to make a longtable where text in the “date” column would be rotated by 90 degrees to leave more horizontal room for the other columns. It took me two rotateboxes, a phantom, a vspace, a hspace and 40 minutes of my life to get the alignment right. Would probably have taken a duckduckgo search and three clicks in Libreoffice.
btw what do you think about typst?
i only used it for simple stuff so far but it seems pretty fun and easy to use
Never heard of it before, but might give it a try at some point. From the website, it seems like something halfway in between LaTeX and Markdown? Sounds exactly like what I need at times, tbh.
My two cents, after years of Markdown (and md to PDF solutions) and LaTeX and a full two years of trying to commit to bashing my head against Word for work purposes, I’m really enjoying Typst. It didn’t take long to convert my themes, having docs I can import which are basically just variables to share across documents in a folder has been really helpful. Haven’t gone too deep into it but I’m excited to give it a deeper test run over the next little bit.
I still have no idea how to exit the build process. It tells I need to type H or \end but it also just lies. I find the easiest way is to invoke Ctrl-Z and then kill the background process, and the younglings children
Funnily enough I had a similar problem but I wanted text instead of a date. In the end I used a solution similar to yours and adjusted each cell entry manually for hours. Feels like there should be a lot simpler solution for this problem in LaTeX. Glad I don’t need to use it anymore…
u/vox@sopuli.xyz suggested Typst as an alternative to TeX. I gave it a try, and I’m loving it so far. It even has built-in support for the rotated text thing https://typst.app/docs/reference/model/table . I’ve only used it for notes/homework so far, but I’m looking forward to seeing how it fares for more serious typesetting tasks.