Anyone who has used Microsoft Word for a reasonable amount of time will recognise my very own Andy’s Laws on Word:
- Likelihood of a crash is directly proportional to the importance of a document.
- Likelihood of a crash is inversely proportional to the time left before its deadline.
- Likelihood of a crash is directly proportional to the duration since you last saved.
- Likelihood of you throwing your computer out of the window is directly proportional to the number of times Clippy pops up.
- That’s enough laws for now…
In all seriousness, I’ve written many words in large documents using Microsoft Word. Nowadays, I can use OpenOffice because it’s come a long way and really is a decent product (the current v2 beta is very good). However, ever since my never-ending woes with Word during my degree, when I started my PhD, I decided to go and try out Latex. Actually, that’s not quite true, I wanted to submit a paper to a journal and it only accepted Latex documents. The deadline was the same day as I found out about the call for papers. I jumped straight into the deep-end with both feet. Needless to say, I had a hard time of it and wasn’t Latex’s best fan that day. (Lesson: don’t try to learn something new in a rush!)
Undeterred, I stuck with Latex and realised that it wasn’t so hard after all. There was a learning curve, but for the typical documents that I often wrote, there was very little to learn. I’m very glad I persevered because I wouldn’t want to use any thing else for my papers/reports any more. I’m not the only one who’s glad to move away from the WYSIWYG world. This article will not be a tutorial for how to use Latex, instead an overview of its benefits and why I think it trumps what word processors have to offer.
What is Latex?
In 1978, Donald Knuth – arguably one of the most famous and well respected computer scientists – embarked on a project to create a typesetting system, called Tex (pronounced ‘tech’), after being disappointed with the quality of his acclaimed The Art of Programming series. Around 10 years later, he froze the language after originally anticipating spending a single year! Tex gave extremely fine-grained control of document layout. However, the vast flexibility meant it was complex, so by the mid-80s Leslie Lamport created a set of macros that abstracted away many of the complexities. This allowed for a simpler approach for creating documents, where content and style were separate. This extension became Latex (pronounced ‘lay-tech’).
Latex is essentially a markup language. Content is written in plain text and can be annotated with various ‘commands’ that describe how certain elements should be displayed. The Latex interpreter reads in a Latex marked-up file, renders the content into a document and dumps it a new file. Therefore, it’s not an interactive system that is the de-facto method for document creation nowadays.
Separation of content and style
Not the most obvious advantage, possibly because a lot of Word users don’t understand why this so beneficial. When producing your Latex document, you are concentrating on the content itself. You introduce structure explicitly by telling Latex when a new section begins, for example, but you don’t then faff around trying to decide how the section headers should look. That’s done later.
This is opposed to the average Word user, who will immediately highlight a given section header and apply formatting to it: maybe a larger font, maybe underline, etc. The point is that this will then have to be applied to every header manually. Latex is better as it uses a document style. This defines how different elements within your document should look (like Cascading Style Sheets defining styles in HTML pages). If you fancy a change, you only change the style definitions once, then the presentation of the document will be updated automatically. This also ensures a consistent looking document (you wouldn’t believe how many stylistically inconsistent Word docs I’ve read!)
Word does in fact have a similar Styles feature. However, because it’s optional, people don’t often know it exists. Latex forces you to declare the document semantics (this is a Good Thing!), which is why you can rely on it to produce a consistent looking document.
Portability
Latex portability comes in multiple ways:
- An actual Latex file is merely a text file, which is just about the most portable format in computing.
- The Latex system that processes the text file and produces the finished document has been implemented on just about every mainstream platform you care to mention.
- The default output file format for Latex is DVI (which stands for device independent). This was around well before PDF was dreamed up and the high quality files can be viewed via software viewers or printed out. DVI is an open standard, so once again, readers are extremely portable and exist on most operating systems. Admittedly, DVI is hardly ubiquitous and nowadays it’s often bypassed in favour for PDF (or it’s very simple to convert to other formats like PS or HTML)
Flexibility
You can get Latex to do just about anything you can think of! Over the years, an overwhelming selection of packages to extend its potential and macros that can simplify complex tasks have come into being, most of which are freely available on CTAN. For example, Latex’s main users are within academia and research institutions and they benefit hugely thanks to the Bibtex package that provides bibliography management – I pity my Word-using colleagues who suffer by actually manually word-processing their bibliographies (unless they’ve shelled out for a program like Endnote). There are other crazy packages that you can install which allow you to typeset music scores, chessboards and cross-words! CTAN is the main repository of these resources. Most are well documented and as you can imagine, with Latex being around for so long, the number of extensions is vast. The chances are, if you’re struggling to do a task, someone will have undoubtedly written a package to solve it easily!
Control
Even with simple documents, you can quickly become frustrated by Word’s rather unintelligent interference. The hours that are wasted trying to position that image which you know will fit at the bottom of the page, but Word refuses to put it there! How many can relate to this experience? You have your 30 page document with text, tables and images. You just spent the evening getting it formatted nicely – all your figures in the right place and then you notice that one of your paragraphs isn’t clear enough. You add one sentence, which then pushes an image on to the next page, leaving a massive gap at the bottom of that page where your image once was. This then daisy-chains down, knocking other tables and images out of place all the way to the end of your document! It’s a real laugh. Fortunately, Latex is much more clever in this respect and positions your images and tables with a lot of common sense. So, if you want your image to appear at the bottom of a given page, it’ll stay there!
Whilst Latex makes decent typesetting decisions for you, if you want to, you can have total control over the presentation of your document.
Quality
It’s difficult to disagree that the output from Latex is far superior to what Word can produce. This is emphasised greatest when it comes to documents with high mathematical content, which is a major strength for Latex. It also has much better kerning, hyphenation and justification algorithms that simply make the output far more professional than what any word processor. Its algorithms for laying out text are more sophisticated and extremely fine-grained. For example, the accuracy is so high because it uses a measurement known as a scaled point which translates as 100th of the wavelength of natural light!
Latex works with the concept of niceness (well, I suppose technically it’s badness – which it works to minimise). Latex has a large set of metrics that it evaluates against when generating your document. It experiments with various permutations of parameters and determines the one which gives the “nicest” output. It can take the time to do this because it isn’t interactive. Word processors don’t have the computational resources available (yet) to carry out the equivalent calculations and still remain interactive. Also, many people forget that typesetting is actually a professional skill – people train for years to learn how to layout publications. Yet, as soon as you open a word processor, you go about committing typesetting sins all the way. Typesetters know for example that its easier to read sentences that are approximately 66 characters wide. Have a look in your books and count the letters! Also, why do newspapers and magazines have narrow columns? But, the default layout of a word processor gives an average of 100 words per line. I suppose many people don’t mind, but you would notice if you read a lot of large documents.
A quick example. I took a document that I had used previously to demonstrate document structure in Latex. I used the same text and loaded it into Word and applied the equivalent styles. I’ve used default settings throughout. Word didn’t have a style for abstracts, so I put the title in bold. View the Latex output to the Word output. The styles that Word uses aren’t great. You could manipulate the default styles in Word to make it look more reasonable, but I’ve never been bothered because even if I could get it to match Latex stylistically, I still have to use Word, which I’d rather avoid!
Latex has been used regularly typeset entire books. Word processors simply aren’t good enough for that job – they are used by the authors to write the content and these files are then imported into professional typesetting software. Ok, that’s not strictly true – you could typeset a book in Word, just like you could drive a car with your feet – it’s not a good idea though!
Output
As mentioned, the default output is a DVI file. DVI was a clever little standard but unfortunately didn’t take-off. It takes little effort to convert your document into a Postscript or PDF file (in fact, you can just use the ‘pdflatex’ command instead of normal ‘latex’ if you only ever want to create PDFs). There’s no need to buy additional software such as Adobe Acrobat like you need to do to convert a Word document into PDF. (At least OpenOffice has its ‘Export to PDF’ functionality!)
Scalability
In my personal experience, using Word for documents with more than 20 pages has not been a pleasant experience. Obviously, that could be my own bad luck, but that is also the impression I’ve got from other users too.
With Latex, I’ve never found such problems. Additionally, you are free to split up large documents into smaller chunks and then let Latex combine them altogether later (like one chapter per file). It can also create tables of content, indexes and bibliographies easily, even on multi-file projects.
Stability
One of the reasons why perhaps so many people struggle with Word when creating large documents, is because it is prone to crashes. ‘Document recovery’ is now a high ranking feature of Word. I’m sure people would prefer if MS would just make their software more stable! (NB stability issues are not necessarily generalisable, so I’m speaking from personal experience, and of my friends and colleagues – I do not know of a single user who hasn’t lost work to Word, but that’s not to say that such people don’t exist.)
Because Latex is so mature – and developed by extremely clever programmers – bugs are negligible. And even if it were buggy, then there is no risk of you ever losing your original source text. Where as with Word, almost any tool within its integrated environment is capable of corrupting your file if it causes a crash.
Oh, you don’t need to worry about macro viruses either!
Cost
Well, this is one area where Latex wins hands down, since it is free! As with most open source software, the phrase “you get what you pay for” doesn’t hold true. You get an extremely mature system, that is still years ahead of its competition.
What about spell checking?
It’s a good point. This is not a deficiency of Latex, because it just processes the words you give it. However, within your text-editor, you do not get fancy lines highlighting your spelling errors or bad grammar as you type, like you get with Word, yet it’s a feature users have come to expect when writing documents.
For starters, I do not really care for a grammar checker and anyone who actually relies on it when using Word would be better off buying a book (or looking at writing style guides) than taking the useless advice it provides.
Secondly, the ‘auto-correct’ feature – whilst looking like a good idea – is not beneficial in the long run. Sure, it corrects the common typos that we all make. However, the problem in my opinion is that it means we don’t learn from our mistakes, e.g., you will continue to type ‘teh’ instead of ‘the’ because Word will sort it out for you. Having said that, if that’s your thing, then you can easily configure any decent text editor to perform the same task. (You could, if you really wanted to, use your favourite word processor as your text editor – but then you back to square one on the stability issue.)
And so on to spelling. The great thing here is that you have a choice! Aspell and Ispell are the most popular spell checkers I know of (both open source). These will check any text file you care to feed it and you can easily configure a decent editor to integrate its functionality from within the editor itself. How to get your text editor to utilise these programs is obviously dependent on your editor of choice. Some, like Kate, interface external spell-checking programs without any effort. I personally use (g)vim which can be configured to use spell-checkers like Ispell.
C’mon, be fair!
Ok, I am obviously biased here. However, I am someone who uses both systems. It’s perhaps not really fair to compare Latex and Word, because they are different types of system, which are suited to different jobs. However, for as long as people are using Word within academia and research institutions, I feel I should enlighten them and let them know what they are missing out on.
Sure, Word can be extended using its in-built scripting language. It also has document management features to help with large documents. As already mentioned, it has styles that can ensure manageable and consistent presentation. Yet very few people seem to take advantage of them. This is especially worsened by UI improvements that mean Word will hide features that you do not use, which makes it more difficult to remember what Word can actually do.
Word may have the advantage of a GUI which is good for beginners. It reduces the cognitive load as it’s a case of recognition verses recall. If people really want a GUI, then there are ones that act as a front-end to Latex. It’s not a WYSIWYG editor, because what you see on screen is not what you will get when you print it out. Instead, you have What-You-See-Is-What-You-Mean editors that still hold to the ideals of Latex by keeping content and style separate. However, they are environments that allow a more visual approach to your content, which is handy for producing complex equations, for example, but will pass your content to Latex for producing the final document. Lyx is the best example and was originally developed by Matthias Ettrich (yep, that’s right, the same guy who founded the KDE project). You can also get Latex editors, which are like normal text-editors, in that you see all the raw Latex commands, but they come with additional features that help with creating that file, like table wizards, symbol databases, etc.
The learning curve
The reason why everyone isn’t using Latex is because you can’t just load up and go, like you can with a word processor. I consider Latex analogous to HTML with CSS. You need to put some markup around your text before your browser knows what to do with it – and the same is true with Latex. Of course, nowadays, any one can knock up a webpage thanks to, er, Word, and various other visual HTML editors and as a result, they generally look crap. So, you need to invest a bit of time in learning some basic commands, but you’ll soon realise that it’s very simple afterwards. Here’s a Latex “Hello World!” as an example:
% hello.tex - Hello world Latex example
\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
Hello World!
\end{document}
This that generates the following output. It wasn’t that difficult, was it? To continue learning the basics, here are the best places to go:
- The Not So Short Introduction to Latex [pdf]
- Getting to Grips with Latex
- Text Processing Using Latex
So who is Latex good for?
Quite simply, anyone who is writing non-trivial documents and is tired of being let down by the performance of the current crop of word processors. If you are in academia, you really ought to be using it! Anybody writing anything maths related will not find a richer and better quality system. For example, even WikiPedia use Latex for rendering any formulas that appear on their site.
Latex isn’t for people who are too lazy or dislike change! I personally found the investment paid off because Latex allows me to produce my documents at a greater pace. I know that the enterprise will not be interested as Word is so ingrained, even though their business reports would look so much nicer. Their loss! For everyone else, it’s time to give it a fair try, just so that you compare and contrast, then decide which does the job best for your needs.
About the author:
Andrew Roberts is a computer science graduate from the University of Leeds, UK. He remained at Leeds to study further towards a PhD in Natural Language Processing. He has been using Latex for three years and is the author of the Getting to Grips with Latex series.
If you would like to see your thoughts or experiences with technology published, please consider writing an article for OSNews.
Well, I had heard of Latex, but hadn’t had a chance to try it out.
The Mathematics department produces all it’s documents in PDF, and many of my friends send me stuff in .ps, and I’m fairly sure it was done in LaTex (or one of it’s variants), and they always looked cool and professional =)
Maybe I should try it out…the latex-project.org site has some really good resources. There’s a tex livecd here:
http://www.tug.org/texlive/
Does anybody know if there’s a livecd version? (or is this a bad question?)
cya,
Victor
Just do M-x flyspell-mode
and it works…
There has been speculation at GameFAQs that LaTeX could be used to develop the graphical front ends for text-heavy games. Ie. the modern ports of nethack to Windows and the newly released Intel Mac OS X could benefit from the layout and formatting benefits offered by LaTeX. Combined with OpenGL accelerated rendering, the speculators state that this could be the comination necessary overcome the lack of innovation in modern day games.
That’s great. I’ve not really tried Emacs although I’m well aware that it can do almost everything.
The chief remaining killer “app” for me under WinXP is printing.
My HP LJ1320nw does nice booklets and such under WinXP.
Under Gentoo, with CUPS, I can print, and the duplexer shows up as an option under CUPS admin, but AbiWord doesn’t actually use it (disclaimer: haven’t seriously troubleshot yet).
If I can fully utilize the printer via LaTex -> PS, that would be one less reason to ever boot XP…
LyX – http://www.lyx.org provides a nice WYSIWYM interface built on top of among others latex.
Try it. You won’t ever write a word document again 🙂
No need to plug Lyx since that was already done in the article itself (with a screenshot).
I remember taking the course on systems/network performance. The first assignment was to write lots of formulas and to include some charts/graphics. This is where I had a hell of the time using Microsoft tools.
1. Setting up the math formulas can be pain in a neck. Suppose you need a greek letter. You have to find the menu option, select that greek letter. How about making sure the font is appropriate, the size is correct? Difficult!
2. Including the graphics: what if the graphic doesn’t fit at the remaining space of the page? So it will be moved somewhere. But how can you control it? Difficult again.
So I had a hell of the time, and fortunately instructor told us to try LaTeX. I’ve tried and got hooked immediately, and been using it ever since. The beauty of LaTeX is that it is a mark-up language. You just put all the staff into the ascii file, and compile it, as described in the article, to get DVI.
So, for instance, to put nicely spaced formula for, say, the law of sines I write
[
sin (alpha + eta) = sinalphacoseta + cosalphasineta
]
Here the pair [ and ] delimits the ‘math mode’. Math mode uses different spacing. Next note that alpha and eta will be typeset as a greek letters alpha and beta. Finally, note that I don’t write ‘sin’ and ‘cos’ but rather ‘sin’ and ‘cos’. LaTeX will use different fonts for ‘sin’ and ‘cos’ and put some small amount of space between, say, ‘sin’ and ‘alpha’. The formula is centered in the middle of the line, and there is some space left at the top and bottom. The end result is nice and readable formula.
A second example is incluing the graphic. In LaTeX you need to save your graphic as EPS (extended postscript) file, and then include it into the text, with the syntax — somethin like this: (not precise, I don’t remember exactly right now):
egin{figure}[htbp]
includegraphics{parameters like file name, and resizing}
itle
end{figure}
Parameters [htbp] means ‘here, top, bottom, page’. LaTeX try to include graphics ‘here’ (that is, where it is defined), next at the top of page, next at the bottom, and finally move to next page. LaTeX has very sophisticated algorithm to figure out the most appropriate location of the graphics, and also provides some knobs to tweak that algorithm to your liking. Since this is EPS format, you can provide resizing parameters on a fly, like make the end result 1.5 larger than the original EPS file.
So the bottom line: if you write some documents which involve lots of formulas and lots of graphics/charts you have to include, give LaTeX a try.
Latex is just the typesetting engine – it creates the document, what you then do with that is upto you. It can be outputted to PS. Since you have CUPS set up, you can send the PS to the printer on the command line:
lpr -Pmyprinter -o sides=two-sided-long-edge filename.ps
where ‘myprinter’ is the name of the printer as setup by CUPS.
I can’t begin to tell you how much I detest word. It’s totally insufficient for real documents. I just got done working on a 100 page proposal in Word and it was a major pain in the ass. The paper was an entry into an AIAA (American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics) competition, so it had the works — footnotes/endnotes, table of contents, tables of figures and tables, pictures, flowcharts, diagrams, very specific formatting requirements, etc, as well as seven people working on it at the same time.
Word fought us tooth-and-nail the whole way. From its broken layout and pagination model, to its tendency to allow a single keystroke totally screw up formatting, to its weird bugs (newer versions leave cursor garbage trails on the screen), everything annoyed us. It was even ridiculously slow, taking nearly a minute to load the 15MB document and taking ten seconds to save changes (a PITA for those like me who hit CTRL-S compulsively after every change). And this was on a 2.6GHz P4! It crashed a couple of times on me, and I’d estimate at least two dozen times between all seven of us, and that was just in the last month of the project.
Here’s a list of the most egregious brain-damage:
– Chapter titles would refuse to show up in the table of contents for no reason, but deleting it and inserting a new one would magically fix it.
– It kept bolding one of the entries in the table of contents, even though we kept unbolding it. It’d just be bold again when we updated the table!
– It kept changing our heading font to Arial, even though the body text was in Times New Roman. Our supervisor hates mixing fonts in the same document, so we had to constantly watch out for that.
– It’s table of contents/tables/figures updating algorithm is quite broken. If you ask select-all then hit F9 (which theoretically updates all the fields in the document), it’ll update the table first, but the figure numbering afterwards. This means that if you insert a figure in the middle of the document (which changes the figure numbers for everything afterwards), it’ll put all the old figure numbers in the table, and then renumber all the figures, leaving the table with the wrong numbers.
– When inserting references, it keeps defaulting back to “figure number + title” mode, which is stupid in a technical document where figures have long, descriptive titles. It refuses to remember that you wanted just “figure number” in the reference the previous time.
– Last but not least, here’s my favorite Word bug: when you have a multiline entry (eg: in a bibliography), word refuses to allow you to indent the second or third line in the entry if you don’t indent the first. However, if you hit “enter” at the beginning of the second line, it won’t insert a page break, but does set some sort of internal flag so you can now indent that line and the ones after it. Everyone I’ve talked to knows this little trick, but nobody knows why it works.
Writing a 100 page document with seven people is hard enough. However, the difficultly of working on a large document in word goes up exponentially with document length. It’s just too easy to mess something up, and its a real pain going over the paper repeatedly to make sure a later change hasn’t fubared an earlier part of the document. At the end, the results aren’t even worth it. Word’s output is fugly. The justification algorithm blows chunks, it doesn’t do asthetic layout of figures/tables, and it can’t export to PDF for hassle-free printing. Oh, did I mention its justification algorithm blows chunks? Whoever wrote that algorithm is a failure at life and I hope he dies.
TeX doesn’t give me this sort of trouble. it doesn’t make me use a cumbersome “equation editor” when I’ve got 10 pages of complex equations to enter. It handles figure/table placement/numbering for me, updating everything properly behind the scenes. It allows me to concentrate on the content, without worring if inserting this figure will revert all my title fonts to Arial. Best of all, its output looks professional. Figures are placed nicely at the beginning or end of the page, or on their own figure page. They’re always perfectly centered, because you don’t have to place them by hand. Equations look amazing, and with amstex, can be very complex. The justification algorithm rocks, and outputs nice PDFs with sharp paragraph edges. Trust me, its immediately noticible when you get a paper or resume typeset in TeX, vs one printed in Word. The former has an air of dignity that the latter just lacks.
A nice thing about Latex is that because it uses plain text files, you can have them managed by a code versioning system. This way a group of people can work on the same document concurently, without worring much about conflicts etc.
For those reading Greg’s comment, be aware that the OSNews comments engine has clearly decided to omit the backslashes that Latex uses to denote markup commands
Latex is just brilliant – the output quality is just sooo sweet, no viable (cheap/free) alternative really exists.
I use latex for all my scientific writing. My favorite editor is Kile: http://kile.sourceforge.net . An altenative for non-KDE users is emacs with AUCTex.
What’s a good source of templates for Lyx e.g.resume?
“Whoever wrote that algorithm is a failure at life and I hope he dies.”
Hey Rayiner, I didn’t expect such an incredibly arrogant comment from you.
It should be noted that there is a learning curve with TeX. It took me a whole day on a weekend to learn it to the point where I knew enough to typeset all my documents with it. On the first few documents I wrote, I essentially broke even compared to Word, because I had to spend time looking things up. After that, I was much faster using LaTeX than using Word. I’d invested maybe 20 hours learning it, but I easily made that up within just a semester’s worth of lab reports. After the initial time investment is recouped, the time savings is just gravy — its time you can spend making the content better, or even finishing earlier and going to sleep at a reasonable time for a change!
I’m starting to use it a bit for Math Typesetting. One reason I bought a Mac is that there is are several neat, freeware math symbol typesetters (and you don’t need to know Tex), it will just export the code for you. I’m hesitant to typset an entire document as I’m not publishing anything and it looks too time consuming.
I haven’t really sought Lyx templates myself. The Lyx wiki has some pointers, including docs on how to create your own:
http://wiki.lyx.org/Layouts/Layouts
Otherwise, Google will help you
Let me try the doubleslashes. So here we go again. The same example of the formula:
[
\sin (\alpha + \beta) = \sin\alpha\cos\beta + \cos\alpha\sin\beta
]
It was a joke. I don’t actually wish death upon anyone. However, I’ve just spent a month (including 48-hours straight between Friday morning and Sunday morning) writing this beautiful paper, and this guy’s algorithm uglified it pretty bad until we used Adobe Distiller to get it into PDF format. So while I don’t want him to die, he’s brought so much ugly typesetting into this world, if he gets fired and ends up working at McDonalds, I’d not shed a single tear.
Except you forgot the backslashes that open and close the math mode environment! I’ll again for you,
\[
\sin (\alpha + \beta) = \sin\alpha\cos\beta + \cos\alpha\sin\beta
\]
Ofcourse Kile is great. But it doesn’t only run under KDE, I have it running here just as easily under Gnome and I suppose it runs under other windows managers also.
I don’t know a single source of templates, but Googling usually turns up what I need. For resumes specifically, I use this one on my own resume: http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~csuros/latex.html
You’ll need the ‘resume.cls’ file that comes with it. If you’re using a CLI latex tool, you can just put it in the same directory as the source file and it’ll find it. Speaking of CLI latex tools, I personally prefer pdftex (command: pdfelatex), because its control over stuff like margin kerning, plus its ease of use.
You should try to use kprinter as the printing command from inside abiword. Advanced features can be enabeled in the “filters” tab of a printer configuration.
I used AUCTex simply because it’s a cross-platform solution. AUXTex runs under EMACS and EMACS runs whenever it wants. So I can move between Win XP and UNIX environment with no apparent change of the editing environment.
INcidently, under Windows I’ve tried different LaTeX editors, but nothing can beat AUCTex in terms of parsing the source and highlighting the staff. And that pretty much is the major way to write a clean LaTeX code before you run it to convert to DVI.
Incidently – there is yet another related component available under GNU framework, the one which allows to preview the typesetting results So you don’t have to compile complete document. Just highlight the part you’re interested in, and it shows how it will look like. In a future issue of AUXTex, this component will be integrated into AUCTex (now it’s a separate program). Should be very nice then — but I like AUCTEx even the way it is now.
Finally, I don’t really care about LyX because it sort of goes against the spirit of LaTeX, that is, *not* being the WYSIWYG. My personal opinion, of course.
LaTeX rocks. I use it for everything I write: Scripts for university, letters, presentation (with LaTeX Beamer Class) etc.
If you’re looking for a nice Makefile and a simple template using KomaScript, Chicle [ http://beeblebrox.net/projects/chicle/ ] might be a solution.
Here is an example of a complex (french) mathematical documents written in TeX, with graphs, pictures, dingbats, fonts, colors, and jokes…
http://www.lakedaemon.org/Get_PDF.php?file=Res_Mathematica.pdf
Written with TeX with the “pstricks package”, the 200 pages of this french document take about 4s to compile (on my Athlon XP2200+) but you have to compile it twice (double pass compilation) to get the automatic labels right.
In Words..if you change something (in say a 50 pages documents), it sometimes takes a few minutes to get all the calculations done…and the result isn’t very oftent satisfying.
Besides, in TeX, I can easily write around 3 or 4 pages full of mathematical formulas in an hour (try to beat that in word)…
TeX (the language on wich LaTeX was built) is actually faster and easier to understand and to customize (with macros) than LaTeX…
I learned it while I was in college. I can type considerably faster than I can write, so I was looking for a way to type notes in my math-heavy classes. The beauty of it came when we had an exam, and the professor would allow us to bring in ONE page of notes for the exam. Normally, you’d see all kinds of handwritten pages, full of equations and formulae. In my case, I’d copy and paste all the pertinent stuff from my homework assignments, put it into a two- or three-column mode and kick the fontsize WAY down. The result? I had good eyesight, so I didn’t need a magnifying glass to read 7- and 8-point type. I was able to bring a LOT of information in on that one little page. Having access to a decent laser printer in the computer lab helped, as well.
It got to the point that I could sit there, with vim running in text mode on my old HP OmniBook (only 48MB RAM, after the upgrade; any questions why it was in text mode?), plugging formulae into my notes almost as fast as the professors could write them on the board. Trig, algebra, calculus, summations, products, you name it, LaTeX handled it with ease. And, when it came time to turn in homework, you couldn’t complain about the general illegibility of my handwriting.
Yes, there is a learning curve. Once you get past the initial parts of it, though, it rocks.
Yeah, there’s hope, good articles _do_ pop up from time to time.
Latex is the way to go my friends, no matter what OS you use. My favourite latex-helping ide is kile (rockingly good), but technixcenter+miktex is also great for windows clickers. But that doesn’t matter, even if doing it with vim, it’s the best you can do.
Hell, I get sudden deadly headaches when I just think about e.g. the equation editor of Word these days.
My motivation for turning to latex was also paper writing for conferences and journals, most of which – thankfully – provide latex templates/styles to use (it wasn’t always so). You don’t have to worry about formatting, figures that don’t keep their siz and place, reference lists that don’t refresh as they should, crashes all over the place, etc. It Just Works, in thebest sence of the words.
“I’ve not really tried Emacs although I’m well aware that it can do almost everything.”
Even comes with a built in shrink. What more could anyone ask?
I have to agree with the author. In college/university, esp. in the Math/Engineering departments LaTeX is a lifesaver.
I made the mistake of using Word for my 80+ page undergrad thesis. Big mistake. Every little change kills the whole table of contents. Also, it has an invisible figure/table counting problem that will make the number skip every time after the F9 update is used! I had to manually go into the reference codes and force renumbering (doing that to 35 figures is a major pain).
Not to mention that Equation editor outputs are of different size depending on the size of the formula. This is very frown upon on almost all journals and conferences.
Never again will I write any scientific docs in Word.
Another nice thing about LaTeX is that because it is just text files, it is easy to write scripts that convert log files into pretty-printed pdf.
Pros use Quark XPress
In case anyone here is in university and taking a coop program… Here’s a latex document class for work term reports. I havent had a chance to actually write a full report in latex yet (because I usually leave them to the last night, and then I have no time to learn latex) but it looks really good.
http://www.law.yi.org/~sfllaw/programs/uw-ece-workreport/
Anybody know of a good one?
> I can’t begin to tell you how much I detest word. It’s totally insufficient for real documents. I just got done working on a 100 page proposal in Word and it was a major pain in the ass.
man, a nice dinner and an expensive ring gives much less work for a proposal than a 100 page document …and i think it work out better too.
I hear TexShop is good:
http://www.uoregon.edu/~koch/texshop/texshop.html
I prefer Docbook or Openoffice (strange choice). The latters´s formula editor uses TeX notation, which is brilliant for Copy & Pasting dozens of formulas. Openoffice lets you work in a very TeX-ish way, using centralized style definitions etc.
Moreover I don´t like TeX´s implicitness of a DOM: XML is much better to work with programaticly. Of course that means you need decent tool support (That shortens the typing of Tags – but e.g. Stylus Studio will do that).
Unfortunetly TeX works better than OS XSL-FO (afaik).
Mmmmh, try Textures on the Macs….
I think it can compile TeX while you are typing and display the result in real time…..so, it is as close to wysiwyg as you could make TeX (I might be wrong).
You still have to learn TeX (or LaTeX) though
Personnaly, I use MiKTeX distribution on windows with the TeXshell free editor (nice, simple, customizable, powerfull and improves my productivity)…
http://www.projectory.de/texshell/index.html
Remember : Keep It Simple Sweety
Just my $0.02. I can almost guarentee that anything done in a math dept. will be done with LaTex – only a madperson would fight with Word Equation Editor! I used LaTex to write my PhD thesis and what a godsend! References, Figures, equations, all easily referenced, put exactly where I wanted them..ahh bliss. Contrast this with those who choose Word and manually reference Figures (meaning when they added a new one, they had to go back and update all the numbers) and ever try to get a Figure in Word to sit exactly where you want it? The only sad thing is, most non-math centred journals do not support LaTex for final submission (PDF can be used during the initial review stage) – meaning I have to fight with Word every damn time I write a manuscript!
I personnaly don’t like LaTex that much, it’s good for writing simples papers or thesis but it’s absolutely ugly to customize properly. You have to add a lot of packages which just appear to have their own syntax and incompatibilities.
Word can be quite good if you really know how to use it (styles, rules …), of course, the equation editor is still ugly. I which I could just type in latex formula and it would convert it into an ole object (like equation magic lite but less buggy…).
I think LaTex is good if you stay on the already well defined paths but it’s kinda ugly to customize without going through a lot of rules to learn.
I would like a nice language like tbook (xml dtd much simpler than docbook) and to be able to customize it with a simple css and export to pdf with apache’s fop (and not going through latex hacks like tbook is currently doing). Like it’s done for the web but with printers in mind.
what about some other options? someone already mentioned Quark XPress. I remeber using it for lfyers and one page zines, but it was a LONG time ago…
@Jackson Brown: Pros in what field? In the prepress field they use Quark XPress (or InDesign or FrameMaker or whatever), but that’s something of a diferent field. Quark XPress is a design program, not a tool for writing technical documents. As a result of its academic origins, TeX has a body of surrounding tools that nothing else can really touch. There is a reason Matlab and Mathematica export to TeX and not Quark XPress or FrameMaker format.
anyone here uses the leo editor for literate programing?
Word can be quite good if you really know how to use it (styles, rules …)
I disagree. We used styles and rules, its just that those features simply don’t scale well to large documents in Word.
Anyway, I don’t really get the comment about customization. It sounds like you’re looking for a DTP program like InDesign rather than a typesetter like TeX.
I know music & graphics were mentioned, but would I need to download a template for something simple like a novel or short story (creative writing, IOW) or is it just a matter of learning to use the tool? Word processors like Word or OO writer drive me batty cause you invariably get caught up formatting your work instead of freeflow writing it. I just didn’t know there might be another tool to help in that regard.
Another nice one is this one right here… I’ve enjoyed using it to type up math notes before.
http://www.texmacs.org/
TeX is fine for many types of writing, including novels or even screenplays. What it is not fine for is DTP-type publishing. Its integration between text and graphics is pretty minimal, so if you want fancy features like making a line of text follow a curved path, TeX is probably not the best tool to use. Although, there are efforts to make a next generation TeX that integrates TeX more fully with a graphics model like PDF.
TexMacs is fricking incredible. Integration of TeX, Emacs, Maxima, and Octave. It’s geek heaven.
Anyway, I don’t really get the comment about customization. It sounds like you’re looking for a DTP program like InDesign rather than a typesetter like TeX.
You’re probably right but I just want to be able to customize my thesis the same I could do it with xml+css. I think it’s much more flexible than LaTex. Maybe it’s just something else than typesetting, but LaTex is also supposed to do some customization with all these packages but I feel it’s a bit outdated for this.
True separation from contents and style is easier to achieve with xml based languages. Like tbook for content, css for style and fop for typesetting would seem to be a nice alternative.
But I agree that for now there are no valid alternative.
I also know that customization is really not important in a thesis and has to be used with caution but I am a perfectionist 😉
Try Lyx.Mac. I typed my PhD dissertation using it. Installing it is not bad at all: use Gerben Weirda’s i-Installer to install LaTeX, then download Lyx, unpack, & go. It’s awesome.
http://wiki.lyx.org/pmwiki.php/LyX/Mac
http://www.rna.nl/tex.html
XML + CSS is a completely different thing. IIRC, it has no notion of pagination, it doesn’t do automatic placement of figures or tables, it doesn’t do auto-numbering of anything, it doesn’t handle bibliographies for you, etc. It just seems to me to be a completely different tool for a completely different purpose. It’ll probably give you more control over the “look” of the paper, but then again, making the thing as a giant bitmap would give you a lot of control too, but it’d be easier to not do that…
with the listing package wich can include java/c/sql/whatever files and apply syntax highlighting and line numbering to it. so when a make my assignments in java i can include the files and get it automaticly formatted. when i discovered this i knew i would never use another kind of typesetter for writing documents.
when doing projects with other students they always want to use word and we always end op fixing the formatting (i have lots of horror stories about this
). my school should teach latex and give the students a choice between latex or word. people only use word because it’s the only thing they know, not because it’s the best tool around.
TeX is [u]easy[/u]. It takes 2 days to learn and 2 weeks to a become a proficient journeyman…
Of course, you rip the benefice of this for Life…
You gain time, when you use TeX instead of word to type formulas like :
“the integral from 0 to 1 the function (1 divided by 1 plus x squared) of the x variable is equal to pi.”
[u] The previous text, in TeX code would look like[/u] :
TeX is $underline{easy}$. It takes $2$ days to learn and $2$ weeks to a become a proficient journeyman…
medskip
Of course, you rip the benefice of this {f for Life}…
medskip
You gain time, when you use TeX instead of word to type formulas like :
$$
int_0^1{1over1+x^2}dx=pi.
$$
ye
Explanations
$maths$ = math mode between two $ symboles
$$maths$$ = the same but in beatifull formula mode
TeX = a core macro that writes TeX with eyecandy
underline = core macro to underline
medskip = macro to skip a bit vertically and indent
{f expression} = the expression is written with Bold Face
int = integral symbol
^Someting = overscript something
_something = subscript something
{exp1over exp2} = writes the fraction exp1/exp2
pi = the greek letter pi
There…if you have read that, you know 50% of what you need to know to type in TeX
I’ve written a lot of documents using LaTeX and I’m afraid the author has overlooked one terrible problem; indeed he even acts like it doesn’t exist! In particular, he writes: You add one sentence, which then pushes an image on to the next page, leaving a massive gap at the bottom of that page where your image once was. This then daisy-chains down, knocking other tables and images out of place all the way to the end of your document! It’s a real laugh. Fortunately, Latex is much more clever in this respect and positions your images and tables with a lot of common sense. So, if you want your image to appear at the bottom of a given page, it’ll stay there!
Heh, heh. Not really.
LaTeX is infamous for doing exactly the same thing; in fact it’s worse, because its algorithms insist on doing all the thinking for you: so, if you want an image (or a math formula) in a certain spot, good luck getting it there! The choice of vspace is often determined by what goes on two or three pages before (or after) the current page you’re on, so changing two pages before can really get you confused. I struggled with this very problem in my dissertation: white space would automagically appear all over the place. It took a long time to get things acceptable (I’m still not happy).
For horizontal spacing issues, however, you have the reverse problem: LaTeX is that it would rather overrun a right margin than leave too much space between words. (The infamous “overfull hbox”, whose black slug indicating an error certain styles remove incidentally, even in draft mode… grrrr) I’m not sure why Knuth thought an overrun was such a better idea than extra whitespace in an hbox, while extra white space was preferable to an overrun in a vbox, but the result in many published papers, and even some books, has been ugly. It certainly does not look professional, but the only way to fix it is to do some really obscure TeXing, or else completely rephrase your wording (the universal fallback I’ve seen in all LaTeX manuals). This, I think, is the worst problem: your choice of words is necessarily less important than LaTeX’s obscure rules. It’s the one frustration that unites both beginners and experts: when you’re proofing a 260-page document, you have to remember that hyphenated words like “S-polynomial” (for example) won’t break across lines, so they need manual hyphenation, and you often won’t notice the overfull 2-pt hbox unless you’re VERY CAREFUL (or you pay separate the wheat from the chaff in TeX’s output).
Those complaints aside — for scientific publishing, LaTeX far outclasses anything else. I’ve never used Word to write a math document; given what I’ve heard from people (and what I read here) I never will. It was immensely classy of Knuth to make his program freeware.
I recently did some school work in booth DocBook and LaTeX. I first decided to try DocBook because it seems more modern. I used the default XSL and Apache-FOP.
The first work was a Analysis & Design documentation for a system we would create.
The VEX editor for Eclipse was a nice way of editing XML, but tables and other complex DocBook stuff was a complete nightmare. We didn’t do any references so I never tried refdb (and I wasn’t sure I’d find a good APA style either).
Later we needed to create a report on the work which would neede to have some references in it. As I allready had a LaTeX setup ready with the correct APA style configured I decided to go LaTeX for that.
In booth ocation I decided to use a text based system to be able to coordinate our work through subversion. A nice post-commit script triggerd a make of the pdf documents and published them on a webserver.
In the end I realized, that even though DocBook is promising it is not as mature as LaTeX. LaTeX simply does a better job of typesetting images and linebreaking and stuff. Also the abundance of availible packages for everything you could ever need availible for LaTeX makes it quicker to set up.
On the learning curve end of things, it was much easier to convince the other members of the team to try LaTeX markup than to learn XML.
To have the APA-style Bibtex package work in Swedish I hade to do some customitations of my own and I also hade to some trickery to be able to use a title less section that shows up in the index. LaTeX is a real bitch when you need to do out of the ordinary stuff, I can agree with that. But I hear that the ConTeXt distribution is better than LaTeX in that regard.
So untill FOP and DocBook matures some more and gets som good (I’ve only tried a few) OSS editors, I’d recommend to go LaTeX. With ConTeXt as a fallback.
damn it’s easier to write with tex that to use BBHTML code :p
arhhhhhhhhh
And where have all my backslashes gone ?
(TeX commands starts with a backslash)
Sighs….. stripslashes()…. php function…sighs…..:D
Yes you’re right again but using something like fop could do that, the xml and css files would only describe the structure and layout like it’s done with the .tex file right now. Typesetting would be done with fop by example. I totally agree that pure static xml+css files would be useless for typesetting .
I think this could work (I can’t see why it couldn’t) but anyway that’s pure speculations and I may miss the whole point!
Nice to discuss that with you btw, it’s been on my mind for some weeks when I should concentrate more on my work !
That’s a good point, I hadn’t considered throwing FOP into the mix. It might work, though I’m entirely unsure about the mechanics of it
I basically was sitting in my Abstract Algebra class and had papers to write.. Equation editor SUCKED, messed up the work flow.
so, I started with LyX, but the output was bloated and slow. I then moved to straight LaTeX.
it was easy to do, and looking up packages and markup is easy on google.
LaTeX3 is much better with regards to your problems.
In fact, we might have more flexibility in the styling but it would probably be quite the same for typestting stuff (fop aims to be quite similar to tex for that) so it won’t probably behave much different (except for the styling).
I don’t know if FOP can handle css directly or if it does much of the styling itself taking only the document content and structure as an input. If so, there would only be the benefit of the tbook language.
Anyway it seems, tbook and fop are quite immature compared to LaTex right now.
For horizontal spacing issues, however, you have the reverse problem: LaTeX is that it would rather overrun a right margin than leave too much space between words
[]
Too much space between words or spaces between words that aren’t consistent with nearby lines are much much more ugly
The only way to fix it is to do some really obscure TeXing, or else completely rephrase your wording (the universal fallback I’ve seen in all LaTeX manuals)[]
you can either use the insecable space “~” between words like in “prevent~cut~there” or you can change the the default glue and white space allowed on a line
(you can’t do that in word)
you often won’t notice the overfull 2-pt hbox unless you’re VERY CAREFUL
[]
No, TeX produces a .log file where it tells you the location of ALL you errors and all your horrible underfullbox and overfullbox…
hyphenated words like “S-polynomial” (for example) won’t break across lines,
[]
it breaks accross line perfectly if you write it correctly, that is $S$-polynomial.
Besides, the hyphenation algorithm of TeX is really great
(I think I read somewhere that Knuth was proud of it)
except for long words with accents
(arhh..we..wicked frenchies
)
And…in a 80 pages document…I believe that you have to manually hyphenate like 30 words with accents…..
LoL….that doesn’t seem so awfull to me..
damn….I really can’t use bbcode
sorry
lyx is for me one of my favourite and most imprtant software. since the late 1990s i have used to produce many documents which are both professional in appearance and are extremely manageable.
its not just the separation of style and content, its also the very good management of things like bibliographic refereces, caption numbering, and the ability to export to many formats from the xml lyx sources – pdf, word, ps, html (yes, you cn produce excellent websites from your tech docs).
its not just stable and logical – is scalable – give it one diagram or give it 150, it doesn’t choke.
i wouldn’t be where i am without it – i owe it a lot. its a pinnacle of human progress.
*LaTeX is a real bitch when you need to do
*out of the ordinary stuff,
I agree completly with that assertion…
LaTeX is a set of macro and templates coded in TeX to make the work easier for your average LatEX user (who doesn’t want to get deep into things). That’s why LaTeX is so popular. People are satisfied with the standard defaults…
But, programming macros in TeX is easier that reprogramming macros in LaTeX.
this is why, I believe that the people that want a real tight control on what they type (well, me anyway)use TeX instead of LaTeX.
Why spend time learning TeX AND the LaTeX api if you want to change the LaTeX api anyway ?
LaTeX3 s not stable yet.
I’m in a hurry and on plain old copper line internet connection.
But LaTex could also be used to producer presentation, just like MS PowerPoint with the use of the package “Prosper”.
The last time I used it (that must be hmm 2 years ago), there already was “themes” that is templates for you presentation.
Of course, one can not expect to find all the supported “objects” that PowerPoint supports (like embedded video), but the point is that if you decide to write say, a Master thesis with Latex, you could also use Prosper to write your presentation !
I haven’t read all the posts, so I don’t know if someone mentionned it, but for those who wants the quality of TeX documents but not for scientific or maths documents (or novels or whatever you can do with LaTeX) there is ConTeXt:
http://www.pragma-ade.com/
And, trying to go farther than TeX, Omega :
http://omega.enstb.org/
Latex isn’t for people who are too lazy or dislike change
Well, I’m lazy and dislike change but I love LaTeX. Mind you, I’ve been using it for 16 years so maybe I’m not part of the target audience.
Those of us who would rather die than be caught using an “office suite” tend to use LaTeX for everything. For example, designing posters and presentations. I have some examples at
http://www.astrosmo.unam.mx/~w.henney/latex-poster/
http://www.astrosmo.unam.mx/~w.henney/latex-talk/
Too much space between words or spaces between words that aren’t consistent with nearby lines are much much more ugly
De gustibus non disputandum. In any case I was talking about looking professional, not looking ugly. I’ve seen lots of professional typesetting that looked ugly because of white space between words; I’ve never (outside of math journals) seen professional typesetting that had hbox overruns.
you can either use the insecable space “~” between words like in “prevent~cut~there” or you can change the the default glue and white space allowed on a line
(you can’t do that in word)
I don’t believe you understood what I was saying; I was complaining that TeX was keeping words on a line, not that it was breaking apart words in a sentence. Or maybe I don’t understand what you’re saying, but “~” is not the solution to any problem I’m thinking about.
(me:) hyphenated words like “S-polynomial” (for example) won’t break across lines,
it breaks accross line perfectly if you write it correctly, that is $S$-polynomial.
No, it doesn’t. That’s exactly what I was using. My dissertation was about skipping S-polynomials reductions, and I faithfully type, $S$-polynomial throughout all 260 pages of the text, except when I have to manually insert hyphenation $S$-poly\-nomial sometimes. A couple of those I almost missed, because it overshot the line only slightly. In retrospect, I should have defined a macro for it, but I don’t think that’s something that ought to come as a surprise.
Besides, the hyphenation algorithm of TeX is really great
(I think I read somewhere that Knuth was proud of it)
He should be proud of it; it’s great. I’m not complaining so much about that; rather, that one can’t adequately tell LaTeX to hyphenate $S$-polynomial automatically (or at least it didn’t work for me), and similarly that one has to hunt & correct its hbox overruns manually.
About log files: you’re right, but it still sucks. If you’re using a front-end like Lyx (maybe TeXmacs too, dunno) you don’t usually think about those log files; you look for the slugs or for the overfull hbox. Style files should not be removing slugs from draft mode.
Prosper rules. Thanks for mentioning it. There is even a Lyx plugin for it, but it doesn’t work so well IMHO.
I checked $S$-polynomial to be sure, and like I said it doesn’t automatically hyphenate: I get an ugly, overfull hbox. I knew 260 pages of that words had made me insane, but I didn’t think it made me forgetful. 🙂
You beat me to it
Of course, one can not expect to find all the supported “objects” that PowerPoint supports (like embedded video)
Actually, although you can’t do true embedded video, you can make a link that starts an external video app (or any other app for that matter). Not with prosper (which uses the old tex->dvi->ps->pdf route) but with any of the plethora of latex presentation packages that are based on pdflatex (I would recommend beamer).
As to the downsides of LaTeX:
1. It is insanely difficult to get text paragraphs to flow around arbitrarily shaped inserts.
2. As some have already pointed out, LaTeX has its own ideas about what constitutes good typesetting, which may not be the same as your own. With enough experience, it is always possible to get it to do what you want, but many intermediate users get frustrated with this. An excellent resource for solving such problems is
http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?introduction=yes
3. Programming in LaTeX/TeX is almost completely unlike programming in other languages. Another source of frustration for some.
4. For ultra-high-end artistic typesetting (think of Bringhurst’s ‘Elements of Typographic Style’), LaTeX is probably not the best tool, although with some of the experimental micro-typography additions to pdftex it is 99% of the way there.
Apart from these, I’d say it was pretty perfect
A way to embed LaTex equations onto webpages:
http://www.sfu.ca/~gswamina/EmacsWikiBlog.html#sec4
For ultra-high-end artistic typesetting (think of Bringhurst’s ‘Elements of Typographic Style’
That’s a beautiful book, isn’t it?
> > For ultra-high-end artistic typesetting (think of Bringhurst’s ‘Elements of Typographic Style’
> That’s a beautiful book, isn’t it?
Yep, sure is!
i am currently a high school student *loving* latex! since i’m a freebsd/slackware fan i tend to use latex for all my homework needs. i can’t tell you how great latex is, it produces papers *far* more professional than the others who constantly use microsoft word 2000. when i get to college, i plan to write all my notes in latex since i have horrible hand writing (worse than chicken writing
)
Why not go for the crossplatform one? LyX runs native on MacOS/Win/*NIX. It’s not exactly WYSIWYG, but WYSIWYM does the job splendidly:-)
Hi Jack,
About the hyphenation – you are half right and half wrong
You are right that LaTeX by default will not hyphenate already hyphenated words. However, as always, there is a package to correct this behavior: hyphenat.sty
I have made a demo just for you!
http://www.astrosmo.unam.mx/~w.henney/hyphentest/
hyphenat.sty should be part of any decent TeX installalation. If you have teTeX, then you can just type “texdoc hyphenat” to read the docs. Also, see the FAQ:
http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=nohyph
As for the overfull hboxes, if you use AUCTeX in emacs, you can turn on debugging of these with “C-c C-w”, then they will show up as compilation errors and emacs will jump to the corresponding source line as you step through them.
For an abstraction on top of LaTeX that makes LaTeX documents a little bit easier to produce and also incorporates a digital notebook concept, check out my software Wyneken at:
http://wyneken.sf.net
That’s my shameless plug — but I love LaTeX and developed this software to make day to day LaTeX use less painful.
I was using lyx recently to do a report, and wanted to insert a photo (a png file) into the document. As far as I can tell, image support in lyx (and probably latex & postsript) is for vector based formats only. I ended up having to switch to openoffice.org.
you can do png images if you use a package like graphics or graphicsx and process the .tex file with pdflatex.
I like LaTeX a lot. However, my main issue with it has always been fonts. I like to use fonts like Arial or Verdana, but installing and configuring fonts with (La)TeX is a bitch. Pointers are welcome.
I’m not unsympathetic to the general theme of Andy’s article. Here’s a few, er, marginalia …
– Word sucks for scientic publishing, this is known. But Word can be made somewhat less painful by using MathType, from Design Science (http://www.dessci.com). This lets you use Word (which can be useful for some purposes) and still have good maths formula editing, plus some Tex/Latex export ability.
– if you don’t have a doctrinaire aversion to payware, Scientific Word by MacKichen Software (http://www.mackichan.com) is a great way to create LaTeX documents *and* have a full-featured WYSIWYG environment. Kinda like using Microsoft Word, except (a) it works well for science and maths, and (b) the resulting document file is pure LateX, not some weird MSFT binary format. MacKichan have some other good writing tools as well.
– Microsoft have recently announced that Word, Excel and PowerPoint in Office 12 will save files in a pure XML format (ie not some weird bastard cross-breed “WordML”, but real XML). If this actually transpires, there will be excellent possibilities – eg you can modify all your documents with a Perl script, or some custom XSL, Xpath, Xquery, etc; and use the enormous range of other XML tools and tricks to munge your stuff. Okay that’s yet to be delivered, but it will finally break the closed nature of Word docs.
LaTeX is obviously a standard for scientific and maths publishing; but on the whole it’s a rather, ahem, 1980s technology. Technology is moving forward, except for retro-fetishists (& okay, I still use vi :-).
I may be antidiluvian, but I still use troff (or groff in its OSS form). It sets very, very nice type, and its preprocessors are extremely powerful. I use them all, pretty much — tbl, eqn, pic, refer, grap and chem. You can include images in .eps format.
It is much like TeX in that it uses an ascii input file, separates text input from formatting, and is a complete typesetting language. The macro packages make it pretty easy to use, and it is already installed on most every BSD, Linux and Unix system. It integrates nicely into Unix through the man pages. And yes, there is still active development going on.
One is also part of Unix history, as troff was the vehicle used to justify development of Unix within Bell Labs in the first place.
DrJ
LaTeX is obviously a standard for scientific and maths publishing; but on the whole it’s a rather, ahem, 1980s technology. Technology is moving forward, except for retro-fetishists (& okay, I still use vi :-).
While it is 1980’s technology, the computer industry hasn’t really come up with anything in the last 20 years better than what we had back then. Technology hasn’t moved forward, rather, it has in many cases moved painfully backwards.
you can do png images if you use a package like graphics or graphicsx and process the .tex file with pdflatex.
Yes, and if you would rather stick with normal LaTeX (I have no idea if lyx supports pdflatex) then all you have to do is convert your PNG to EPS first (I tend to use a makefile for this but there is nothing to stop you doing it by hand). It is best to omit the file extension when including the graphic, then you can use the same source with either LaTeX or pdfLaTeX. LaTeX will then look for a .eps or .ps file of the image, while pdfLaTeX will look for a .pdf, .png, or .jpg file. The order of search can be customized of course, and it is possible to define custom handlers that will, for example, automatically convert PNG to EPS before inclusion (although this may give you problems with bounding boxes).
Be warned, however, that there are a million-and-one bad ways to convert raster images to postscript and only a handful of good ways (by which I mean no degradation of quality or excessive file-size inflation). In my opinion, the best solution is imgtops:
http://imgtops.sourceforge.net/
“t’s difficult to disagree that the output from Latex is far superior to what Word can produce. This is emphasised greatest when it comes to documents with high mathematical content, which is a major strength for Latex. It also has much better kerning, hyphenation and justification algorithms that simply make the output far more professional than what any word processor. Its algorithms for laying out text are more sophisticated and extremely fine-grained. ”
:-p
http://texmacs.org/ is a great GUI, too
@will
You are right that LaTeX by default will not hyphenate already hyphenated words. However, as always, there is a package to correct this behavior: hyphenat.sty
Holy crap, that’s pretty cool, thanks. I wish I’d known about it three months ago. 🙂
For anyone who’s still checking: Wolfram (the developers of Mathematica) have got their own publishing package for scientific writing now, which I think interfaces with TeX. It’s called Publicon, and you can try it for free. Unfortunately, they didn’t pay me to mention it 🙁 and I forgot to try it during the trial period after I downloaded it. So could someone try it & let me know how it is? 🙂
http://www.wolfram.com/products/publicon/index.html
The Kanotix GNU/Linux distro is a Knoppix-based live CD which bears a LaTeX install. I haven’t used it myself, but from my research, it seems to be one of the precious few live GNU/Linux distros to have LaTeX as a runnable-on-CD package.
Though secretly I’d rather everyone just kept using word so my reports would look better…
I personally use vim, aspell, svn and latex (or pdflatex if .png’s are involved).
It’s great
. Well worth the spent learning.
LaTeX Editor of choice, followed by LyX and then TeXShop.
For an abstraction on top of LaTeX that makes LaTeX documents a little bit easier to produce and also incorporates a digital notebook concept, check out my software Wyneken at:
http://wyneken.sf.net
Looks nice. In a similar vein, people may be interested in emacs muse:
http://www.mwolson.org/projects/MuseMode.html
This is the next-generation version of the absolutely wonderful emacs-wiki mode. It can take your jumbled mess of hyperlinked notes and export them to HTML or PDF via LaTeX.
By the way, I can’t get any of the export functions in Wyneken to work. It gives me
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/usr/bin/wyneken”, line 1030, in on_build_to_pdf1_activate
parse_config()
File “/usr/lib/wyneken/pym/config.py”, line 24, in parse_config
f=open(str(config_path[0])+”wyneken.conf”)
IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: ‘/etc/wyneken/wyneken.conf’
The /etc/wyneken directory does not exist and is not mentioned in the installation script. This is the beta version I tried, so I guess I shouldn’t complain.
You need to read the install instructions on the page. To correctly set up wyneken, as root, do the following:
wyn –auto-config
This will generate the /etc/wyneken directory and the config file.
Karl
Sorry if that came off too strongly — I really goofed up by not putting the full instructions in the INSTALL file.
latex has the same problem that CLI has: its commands never get translated. When GUI programs are translated, they still work.
I don’t know how latex is used in asia.
Sorry if that came off too strongly — I really goofed up by not putting the full instructions in the INSTALL file.
No offence taken
OK, done that. Now it doesn’t complain when I export to DVI – it just hangs (frozen window and ps aux gives status of all the wyneken processes as “stopped” – very bizarre). I should really be trying the non-beta version, right?