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.
LaTeX is soo great! You don’t have to worry about formatting ever again.
Puts image I’m talking about 8 pages away from the section that talks about the image
Writes not only over the margin, but over the goddamn page boundary because adding a page was not fashionable that day
Moves a table left by 1 cm on every other compilation, moves it back in the other compilations (happened to a colleague)
So instead of worrying about formatting you worry about learning the incantations that force LaTeX at gunpoint not to fuck up the formatting.
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
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?
Compiler:
Could not find "tikz.sty"
Me: So you want me to install the package called “tikz”?
Compiler:
no, there's no package called tikz. I need the file called "tikz.sty"
Me: Okay then, so which package provides the “tikz.sty” file?
Compiler:
fuck if I know, go google it or something ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Switched to typst a few months ago, enjoying it much more than LaTeX so far. Really excited to see how it will grow in the future
Yeees, I forgot all about the non-existent module system.
– Professor: Here’s the template for your thesis.
– There are, like, 50 lines of macro imports here. Which modules does this need?
– Fuck if I know. You want my installation? It’s only 50GB.
If you’re trying to do something on LaTeX and you find yourself wrestling with the software or writing TeX commands. Take a step back and reconsider. The reason the software is fighting you is because you are trying to make it do something it is not meant for or you’re actively asking it to do the opposite of what you stated earlier you wanted to achieve. Thus creating a contradiction of intent.
Obvious examples are using the article template to write a book, or using the book template to write a letter. It is akin to using Excel as a game engine, possible, but not easily. You’re trying to use a hammer to unscrew a bolt. Of course the tool is gonna fight you.
Take a step back and reconsider. The reason the software is fighting you is because you are trying to make it do something it is not meant for or you’re actively asking it to do the opposite of what you stated earlier you wanted to achieve.
Wise words, and true most of the time.
But goddammit is it so hard not to write over the page border? This isn’t something I should have to specifically define as bad.
You don’t generally have to. There’s a package or environment somewhere that lifted that restriction or force it by trying to do something else. LaTeX is 100% deterministic. Someone, you perhaps unknowingly, told it to put that text there while trying to achieve something else.
Remember that LaTeX is about setting rules then letting it arrange the text in a way that follows those rules. If you try to meddle into the typography by hand, forcing specifics that break the rules, you will break its behavior. If it is putting text over the margin, it is because it determined that is the only way to fulfill the totality of your instructions.
I feel personally attacked. Brb, making presentation slides in beamer and compiling 1000 times to get the figure to the exact right pixel.
I definitely won’t make any changes to the figure later that will make me have to adjust the position again. Why yes, this is better than PowerPoint, why do you ask?
If you’re trying to do pixel adjustments of figure position and changing it breaks something, you missed the point of the software package and/or are doing something horribly wrong and unsupported.
Sheesh, now I feel actually attacked a little. I was being mostly hyperbolic, but you can do really useful things with complex figures in presentations. For example: revealing elements sequentially to build up to the final figure or altering opacity of different elements to bring the audience’s attention to specific parts of the figure.
This sequencing can sometimes very subtly alter the size of the figure as you change elements, so the default positioning will slightly change from one slide to the next. Most people won’t care or notice when a figure slightly drifts by a pixel or two during these sequences, but it bothers me tremendously so I add adjustments to keep every variation of the figure aligned on the slides.
For the image one there is an option to control if the image is immediate, or when if finds space to insert. Trouble is I have to look these up all the time…so what starts as an attempt at creating a cleanly formatted document often takes more time than messing around with a shitty editor like Word
BTW I wrote my thesis in LibreOffice. That’s its own can of worms, but at least I knew how to wrestle it into submission – other than LaTeX. Set the font to Latin Modern Roman and no-one will know the difference.
LaTeX writes the same fonts better, at least compared to MS Office. I notice it when a papers been written in word with the Journal template with the same fonts and style. LaTeX kerns and splits new lines nicer.
I am curious just how many people would notice that (or the usage of the microtype package vs without).
I know of one professor in my college who dabbled in typography and was usually spot on when it came to something like this but I’ve never heard the others talk about it.
Reminds me of c++ linker errors
Surely, you really mean C++ compiler errors for anything involving temples, yes? 5000 pages of errors because you misplaced a sign somewhere.
Which apparently needs an account just to use it and a subscription to use it well. Don’t think something like that can be a lord and saviour over LaTeX.
This is what I though as well when I first looked at their website. But nope, the compiler and LSP are available as fully offline programs under the apache license. But I understand how you’d get confused, their website is strikingly polished for an open-source non-commercial project!
The only thing you’re missing out on if you use the offline version is having the rendered preview update in real time as you type, but you can sort of emulate that feature using their neovim plugin and a really fast PDF viewer like zathura.
The last point: I use MuPDF + entr as zarhura crush as a mf, not usable at all. Some others use typst-preview which can be used in the browser and as a VS Code extension. But I use Neovim btw and the web version lack a few key features. Anyway, I use mupdf+entr+nvim for many months now and it’s more than enough for me.
The web version, for me, is just to share my local project with someone, that’s it.
That’s just to use the online editor. It’s open source, and there’s a CLI you can run locally.
Well, overleaf.com is for LaTeX, but typst.app is for Typst, a superior alternative witch is in beta. So for some people it won’t be enough (yet), but for me it’s awesome.
I have completely abandoned latex for typst at this point.
I’m still waiting for Quarto and the R ecosystem to better support Typst.
https://quarto.org is an open-source scientific and technical publishing system. You write markdown text and it converts it to HTML website, PDF article/book, word document and many other formats.
