Is LaTeX actually worth learning or am I about to fall for the meme...

Is LaTeX actually worth learning or am I about to fall for the meme? I'm familiar at other markups but I feel like It's kind of a waste of time to type out the tags just for a text document.

Other urls found in this thread:

notabug.org/dbane/lbl/src/last_c_version
oreilly.com/openbook/utp/
iwp9.org/#sub
troff.org/prog.html
journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0115069
skynet.ie/~poldy/macros.ms
danielallington.net/2016/09/the-latex-fetish/
twitter.com/SFWRedditVideos

Look at all the scientific papers around you. You now have the answer.

I would only use it if I had to write mathematical formula's.....which I don't.

Something like markdown is far more comfy for daily use.

I found it essential in my scientific work so far. Outside of research it's pretty worthless as a skill tho

I would say yes. I'm a mathfag though and use it all the time.

I also use it for word processing in general though.

If you don't want to share your work or if you don't work with mathematics formulas it's useless.

How many books are you planning to write? Just one (diploma work)? Dont even bother.

OP here, I don't really write many formulas these days but I think it could be good to make really really professional looking reports for clients (IT consulting).
Also, check those quads.

I'm an English teacher and I make all my handouts in it.
It's a pain in the ass, but it's still the best ticket in town.

If I'm making a similar type of document many times over I actually wind up making a DSL in Lisp that converts its input to LaTeX so I don't have to type as much boiler code. Like I have a DSL I use for making tests for my class, etc.

If you're the kind of person who are fine with defaults and sane choices, then Office applications are actually alright unless you're doing something techinical. But if you nitpick on every single detail, then yes, maybe LaTeX can do stuff easier. Then again, if you can have a template formatted to exactly how you want Word documents everytime, then editing that template is around the same effort as editing the same typesetting achieved with LaTeX. Again, assuming relatively simple documents.

>Something like markdown is far more comfy for daily use.
>not using Pandoc to convert markdown in to LaTeX

YES

It's also pretty easy to learn if you obtain a copy of demo source code. Simply go in and experiment and add or remove things.

If you have to write scientific papers or a thesis you usually have to use that shit. It's retarded and completely obsolete.

Can someone tell me why latex is 5gb?
Also can I use vim to type on latex? If so, how?

>not writing your stuff in Emacs org-mode and simply exporting it to Latex
I only write my reports like this now. You can leverage all the power of Latex with the simplicity of org-mode's syntax. 6
Not to mention getting all the power of org-mode as well. You can even embed raw Latex for whatever corner case for when org-mode doesn't do exactly what you want, and it will still be better than writing the entire document in raw Latex.

anyone that knows a good troff tutorial?

Unless you're some sort of scientist or researcher, probably not.

I use it alot for grad school (CS), it's especially great if you're doing work involving lots of math and equations.

Beyond that, for writing books and large technical documents it's probably good too (though I have no experience with this).

Just in terms of regular word processing though, there's easier things to use.

Fonts are big.
Yes, by typing text into a file.

I'm in my Fourth year of a bachelors degree and wish I had discovered it years ago. I use it for literally every report now, my thesis is damn beautiful (as trash as the content may be).

LaTeX for research and anywhere you need to write mathematics, Office suite for curriculum, Markdown for documentation, notes and basically anything else.
'sudo pip install grip' for quick rendering of .md files, Ctrl+p on browser to save as PDF.

I started with LaTeX because I couldn't get the formatting of my resume right in Word.
There was a bit of a learning curve, but you pick it up pretty quickly if you just start immediately writing something in it.

The structure of my resume is exactly the same as when I wrote it in Word, but now the formatting is exact - it looks neater, cleaner, and the typography is perfect... More importantly, it looks professional.

it is not just for "scientific work", if your paper/article is +10 pages and requires a lot of figures and formatting then use LaTeX, otherwise use MSWord.

this

I don't write much raw LaTeX anymore because I fell for the XML meme, but in combination with pandoc it's still often a much more convenient "rendering engine" than XSL-FO.

I would honestly recommend LaTeX for any written work that will be viewed by another human being.

Realistically, for simple papers, you'll write very little markup. The amount of time you'll spend trying to make your paper look good in MSWord could be spent writing maybe 10 lines of markup for your paper.
This is especially true for letters.

Came here to ask this.

yep

It wont take more than a day of study to learn enough to get started. The rest you pick up as you go.

As far as worth go, unless you're autistic or in academia there's no point and you're better off spending that day watching Chinese cartoons or something.

I wrote a Masters thesis in troff. I'd recommend the following:

Use groff. Use the ms macros. I also used pic, tbl, eqn and refer (I didn't need grap, but would have used its "prag" clone if I did). I also used notabug.org/dbane/lbl/src/last_c_version for cross-references.

Read those chapters of UNIX Text Processing ( oreilly.com/openbook/utp/ ) that you need, but don't use the macros described in it. Instead, as mentioned above, use ms extended with the "Plan 9" conference macros ( iwp9.org/#sub ). The slight changes needed to get these to work in groff are a useful test to see if you know enough (I can send them if you like).

You should be able generate the final output using something like "lbl foo.ms bar.ms | pdfroff -k -pteR -dpaper=a4 -P-pa4". I used a short Makefile to handle all this, as well as the chapter ordering.

If you've any more questions, just ask.

In my experience, yes, it is worth learning. Even if you don't write a lot of scientific stuff, you can make some pretty sick looking documents without even bothering about the formatting, as it will all be managed automatically once you set a template. You will be able to focus more on the actual content and pay more attention to structure.

(checked)
yeah it's really great, you have a simple sourcefile that's just plain text.

Shit won't start to jump around because you click some stupid button and the style you make will be very consistent. I first started to actually use it when I took my masters degree a few years ago. I actually wrote my thesis in fucking word....
That was a bitch in comparison and it also doesn't produce good documents like LaTeX actually do

I use Texmaker preddy sweet

wrote my bachelor thesis in word

LaTeX takes about 20 minutes to learn the majority of even if you're slow. If you end up not liking it, you've not lost very much time.

I used to write my documents in HTML just to troll LaTeX fags though. Shit is not very helpful compared to just writing plaintext unless you're a math major.

Thank you I really appreciate it, yes I have a few more questions: are all the troff preprocessor listed in the to do here[1] disponibile somewhere on the internet? And do you use m4 macros together with the groff one?

[1] troff.org/prog.html

Tbl, pic & eqn come as part of groff (as is refer, which I'd also recommend). I never needed chem, and these days instead of dformat I might try to use plantuml.

I wouldn't recommend using m4. I'm not sure why you would. The troff language has its own macro feature, this is what ms is built on. And even then, I'd try to avoid writing new macros beyond ms & iwp9 for as long as possible.

Just one caveat. It probably doesn't apply, but for East Asian languages I think you would be better off with LaTeX. Otherwise, for languages with an alphabet troff is a great choice.

Thank you again can you send the modified macros of the plan9 conference? Just in case I can't figure out how to make them work

Less efficient but it looks better than Word. Also Bibtex is nice.

It also can be nice as part of a pipeline for reproducible data analysis with R/knitR.

You write your LaTeX document, including in-line R commands and block R sections. You run it through knitR, which produces a new LaTeX document with properly typeset R blocks and all the corresponding output

journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0115069
>The choice of an efficient document preparation system is an important decision for any academic researcher. To assist the research community, we report a software usability study in which 40 researchers across different disciplines prepared scholarly texts with either Microsoft Word or LaTeX. The probe texts included simple continuous text, text with tables and subheadings, and complex text with several mathematical equations. We show that LaTeX users were slower than Word users, wrote less text in the same amount of time, and produced more typesetting, orthographical, grammatical, and formatting errors. On most measures, expert LaTeX users performed even worse than novice Word users. LaTeX users, however, more often report enjoying using their respective software. We conclude that even experienced LaTeX users may suffer a loss in productivity when LaTeX is used, relative to other document preparation systems. Individuals, institutions, and journals should carefully consider the ramifications of this finding when choosing document preparation strategies, or requiring them of authors.

Just use overleaf and don't waste your disk space

Sure, no problem. I failed at attaching the file, so uploaded it to skynet.ie/~poldy/macros.ms instead.

These macros really add very little to ms, just figure & table headings and "code example" blocks. You still have to rely on ms for most things.

Now that I look over it again, I also added the header macro for lbl (described in the lbl docs).

I am writing my PhD thesis in it. Fuck word - too many horror stories. I use overleaf.com which is excellent for what it is. It is also forcing me to use OSS more, which is always a good thing. Overleaf has at least partial vim emulation. At the end of the day it allows me to create beautiful documents even when nobody cares (pic somewhat related).

Praise kek.

Only fags in universities use it, everyone else moved on 25 years ago when office was released.

fpbp

danielallington.net/2016/09/the-latex-fetish/

Great for maths and science. Nice for writing a CV too but hardly necessary.

I really like markdown but there's no simple way of viewing it. Is there anything like it (markdown viewer or another language) for the desktop? I've been using jupyter but it's overkill in most cases.

octodown

Its a pain in the ass but produces the best results. Use it if necessary.

R is pleb-tier

>study sponsored by microsoft

Yes, it is defenetly worth it. I personally use org-mode for quick notes but I combine it with latex for papers.

>It's retarded and completely obsolete.
Not true. There is no better solution, except if you are a plain TeX/Troff fan.

Sadly I noticed many bugs, not to mention that it is much less powerful than latex. If you want ot have the same power you have to combine it with latex.

>Office suite for curriculum, Markdown for documentation, notes and basically anything else.
Cancer

except no
>Funding: The study was financially supported by the University of Gießen. The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
>Competing interests: The text processing software Microsoft Word is licensed and traded by the Microsoft Corporation. The authors do not have any connection to this company, and the Microsoft Corporation had no role in the study design, data collection, data analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Only useless shit is written in word.

learn org-mode faggot

most of the biology journals ive seen prefer Word submissions

if you submit in latex they dont even want the tex file, they want you to submit in pdf

>can't run pdflatex
>being this retarded

what are you talking about? ofc i know how to do that

Mathfag here. I don't know how widespread it is outside of math-related fields, but it literally takes like 2 hours to learn so you might as well do it.

I don't read biology journals, daga, every single CS-related paper that I have seen is written in latex.

It is the ONLY same method to create scientific documents involving formulas.

It is also quite easy to use if you just want pure text.

Checked.
It's definitely worth learning. I go to a smartass school and all the TAs are fatheads that like giving higher scores to other fatheads. Taking advantage of this and do your shit in LaTeX is basically just a way to get better scores for free. I work on several assignments with my friends and they always turn in handwritten work, and I do LaTeX PDFs. For the same answers and methods, I get higher scores.
If nothing else, it looks pretty and is a nice reference for future use.

Of course you can use vim.
Latex is a markup language you create a raw text file which then gets compiled into a PDF.

i love vim for programming but i hate it for anything you'd normally use latex for.

the way it handles scrolling long, wrapped lines is balls but there's no way to fix it, it's just an inherent limitation of the software

I wrote my M.Sc in Word and that's the one thing that pissed me off.

Granted, it was possible to get it to look good but the endless WYSIWYG shit that tweaks image locations just because you changed one line here or there was beyond annoying. I could not use LaTeX due to policy, but would have.

Nowadays (at work) I write everything in different kinds of markups though. Word is only good for fire and forget -style shit. For anything professional you need either markup (documentation) or LaTeX (academia).

i just use LyX desu

>but the endless WYSIWYG shit that tweaks image locations just because you changed one line here or there was beyond annoying
after using latex and word for a long time, what i've come to believe is that the problem isn't really that word is WYSIWYG, it's that it blurs too much the distinction between content and typesetting.

if you use a word document with the same two-pass system that makes latex so effective, you get nearly the same user experience. write your content, ignore everything about headers, section numbers, figure numbers, references, image locations, et cetera. then, once you're satisfied with the content, go back and fix the visuals.

word makes it way too tempting to finish a sentence and say "well, that looks bad, i'll just take a second and change this over here". if you resist that urge, a lot of word's faults disappear