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#1 2006-04-30 21:44:00

elasticdog
Member
From: Washington, USA
Registered: 2005-05-02
Posts: 995
Website

Learning LaTeX, is it Worth It?

I've been motivated lately to look more in depth at LaTeX and knew ahead of time that there would be a steep learning curve.  I've read arooaroo's Getting to Grips with LaTeX tutorials, and also the The not so Short Introduction to LaTeX and have messed around a bit with various examples using the <code>teTeX</code> package available in extra.

Anyway, I'm wondering if LaTeX is really all that beneficial to a guy who just likes the idea of separation of presentation and content, wants to get away from bloated WYSIWYG editors, and doesn't really have plans on writing long research papers/books/articles.  I would love use it for regular small papers and possibly coding project documentation, etc.  I really like the fact that it's plain text, and thus easy to use version control with as well.  I think it has a ton of great features versus other methods of creating documents, but it also has a lot of drawbacks in my eyes.

The problem is not memorizing the syntax, but all of the different packages you can get, many of which do the same thing and not in consistent ways...it gets confusing fast.  Just inserting graphics into a document, or converting it to PDFs can be done by multiple packages/commands.  If you want graphics that will eventually end up in a pdf file, then you have to go a whole other direction (no longer converting to EPS, blah blah blah).  How do you find out the most common/appropriate package for your purposes?  Even the math related functions that LaTeX is so famous for requires differing packages according to what you want to display (the math stuff is cool, but I probably wouldn't use it much).  I also think it's strange that you are forced to run the command <code>latex</code> multiple times when doing things like building a table of contents or an index page...why can't it just run through it multiple times automatically?

Plus customization of styles seems overly hard...yes I know that the default styles are very well researched and thought out and look very professional, but I'd still like to be able to change things easily when necessary.  I don't like the idea of every single document being produced looking exactly the same.  I know a lot about graphic design and typography, etc. and feel like LaTeX might hold me back some.  I like the level of detailed control it gives you over your writing's semantics, but the design side of things seems too set in stone.

Anyway, I'm just not sure that LaTeX is for me...how do other people feel about it?  Are there other systems out there like it?  Am I really stuck in the world of OO.org and Word to do what I want?

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#2 2006-04-30 22:34:58

augustob
Member
From: Florianópolis, Brazil
Registered: 2006-03-17
Posts: 135

Re: Learning LaTeX, is it Worth It?

A little background on me, so you don't think I'm talking out of my ass: I work in a software/hardware integration laboratory in my university; hence I deal with LaTeX for both my B.Sc. thesis and various scientific papers.

So, to get a couple of things out of the way:

- The syntax for small papers can be as simple as

documentclass{article}
title{The Title}
author{elasticdog}
begin{document}
maketitle
section{Section Name}
Whoa! This is LaTeX!
end{document}

(Yes, I cheated)

But I can get VERY complex if you need to get images in some exact place of the paper or if the line-breaking heuristics start giving you grief.

- Creating styles is indeed a pain, but the things you can do with it are downright amazing. It's up to you to decide if it's worth the hassle.

Now, here's why I don't think LaTeX is for you:

- LaTeX shines on very large documents: Referencing bibliography, tables, images, etc. is as straightforward as could be, and it always gets the page right.

- Separating the document into a file per section; no problem! But it does kinda lose its purpose when the document is 2 pages long and doesn't have to be strictly formatted for a conference or publication.

- Also, BibTeX is a godsend. If your work isn't scientific, though, it goes to waste.

- Last, I think there are better tools for what you need:

In code documentation Doxygen is second to none in my opinion. Another problem with LaTeX for documentation purposes is that the whole team needs to learn its syntax and install the hefty packages to be able to contribute.

In small papers with limited formatting, why not abiword? while it falls in the WYSIWYG category, it's the least bloated of them. I mean, it doesn't even have any Gnome dependencies!

Hope I helped, and didn't dissapoint you. Learning is always a good thing, but LaTeX can be overkill for most common applications.

I say you go ahead and get used to LaTeX for when you need it, I think the cases in which it's really needed will become clearer then.

edit: me kant spell gud

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#3 2006-04-30 22:57:43

augustob
Member
From: Florianópolis, Brazil
Registered: 2006-03-17
Posts: 135

Re: Learning LaTeX, is it Worth It?

Also, if you're still looking, a couple of editors I've used for LaTeX editing in the last few years:

- Amyedit (very limited features, only gtk deps, but it's what I use)
- Kile (qt/kde deps, loads of features)
- Emacs w/ AUCTeX (well, it's Emacs, take that as you will)

And for Windows:
- TeXnicCenter

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#4 2006-04-30 23:46:32

Kopsis
Member
Registered: 2006-01-31
Posts: 15

Re: Learning LaTeX, is it Worth It?

Wanting to separate content from presentation is a wise and worthwhile goal. LaTeX is an excellent tool but it suffers from the classic problem of a markup language designed to make things easy on the computer rather than easy on the human. I go on at length on this topic at http://kopsis.blogspot.com/2004/09/wysi … rmful.html

An alternative that I strongly reccommend is reStructuredText (reST). Like LaTeX, reST document "source" is plain ol' ASCII (or UTF8) text. Unlike LaTeX the markup is much more "natural". In fact, when looking at a basic reST document, you may not even realize that there is any markup! Now, when you want to produce a "typeset" document, the reST tools can generate LaTeX, HTML+CSS, docbook, or raw XML (and there are some beta writers for OOWriter format). And the Python software framework makes it pretty easy to hack in your own "writers" or modify the existing ones if you want to do something custom.

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#5 2006-05-01 03:07:45

augustob
Member
From: Florianópolis, Brazil
Registered: 2006-03-17
Posts: 135

Re: Learning LaTeX, is it Worth It?

Wow, I'm definitely checking out reST! If it does all it says it does, Knuth and his TeX are soon going to be out of a job.

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#6 2006-05-01 03:21:56

cactus
Taco Eater
From: t͈̫̹ͨa͖͕͎̱͈ͨ͆ć̥̖̝o̫̫̼s͈̭̱̞͍̃!̰
Registered: 2004-05-25
Posts: 4,622
Website

Re: Learning LaTeX, is it Worth It?

interesting Kopsis.
Seems like reST is very much like markdown.

augustob speaks truth about doxygen kicking serious ass. I hate rdoc and pydoc comparitavely. Doxygen is portable across many languages, so you only need to learn the syntax once. Great!

For general documentaiton, I tried docbook. Terrible terrible toolchain. Sucky, awful, terrible.
LaTeX is good, if you can use it. It is powerful. It is also complicated and too large of a hammer for many things.

As for docutils, I know that the lighttpd static documentation was created using it..
*shrug*
I have't tried it yet though.

EDIT: Found this http://bluebones.net/2005/02/humane-text-formats/
interesting.


"Be conservative in what you send; be liberal in what you accept." -- Postel's Law
"tacos" -- Cactus' Law
"t̥͍͎̪̪͗a̴̻̩͈͚ͨc̠o̩̙͈ͫͅs͙͎̙͊ ͔͇̫̜t͎̳̀a̜̞̗ͩc̗͍͚o̲̯̿s̖̣̤̙͌ ̖̜̈ț̰̫͓ạ̪͖̳c̲͎͕̰̯̃̈o͉ͅs̪ͪ ̜̻̖̜͕" -- -̖͚̫̙̓-̺̠͇ͤ̃ ̜̪̜ͯZ͔̗̭̞ͪA̝͈̙͖̩L͉̠̺͓G̙̞̦͖O̳̗͍

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#7 2006-05-01 08:21:55

lessthanjake
Member
From: Norway
Registered: 2005-11-09
Posts: 319
Website

Re: Learning LaTeX, is it Worth It?

I use LaTeX a lot, and imo its by far the best out there. Once you get the grips, its as fast to write and as easy as anything else, and the result is always awesomely good looking.

To write LaTeX i absolutely recommend AucTeX and emacs, ist a huge time save (I love <Ctrl> c e smile), and together with *spell, you get a spellchecker that skips all markup.

Just two comments:
Why not automaticly run latex two times when needed; for large documents this may take a long time, and you do not care whether your refrences is right atm. If you want it to do so, just write a script.

Fixed figures: Do not use the figure environment, it is a floating environment(which of cause is the best, let LaTeX do the thinking). To force fixed figures:

begin{center}
  includegraphics[width=0.3textwidth]{file}
  caption{This is a fixed figure.}
end{center}

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#8 2006-05-01 11:30:15

arooaroo
Member
From: London, UK
Registered: 2005-01-13
Posts: 1,268
Website

Re: Learning LaTeX, is it Worth It?

Elasticdog,

It's a difficult question and one I often come up against when people ask me whether they should use Latex or just stick with WPs. I tried to sum up the advantages in an article called LaTeX isn't for everyone but it could be for you (which, in the interest of self-promotion, will be republished in  The PracTeX Journal soon wink ).

Latex is ideal for academic materials and reports - any thing highly structured I guess. When writing academic papers, Bibtex alone was the killer feature. Now in my fulltime job, I tend to write reports, which don't have any references, but they are still structured documents and I find Latex much better than Word.

However, your needs seem slightly different, and it's all about the right tool for the right job. For example, documentation. If you're writing a manual, then yeah, Latex makes sense, I think. If you're trying to produce a reference document with API specs, then you need something like doxygen, as already suggested. You don't want to be writing this stuff your self.

Perhaps using Lyx may make life a little easier. I will take care of some of the tedious tasks like image conversion and running latex/bibtex the appropriate number of times. I've used it quite a lot as sometimes I just want to work on text and not text+markup.

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#9 2006-05-01 21:10:05

elasticdog
Member
From: Washington, USA
Registered: 2005-05-02
Posts: 995
Website

Re: Learning LaTeX, is it Worth It?

Thanks for the info everyone.  One thing I forgot to mention is that I'm a big Vim fan, so the Emacs-based tools are out for me.  Arooaroo, I had actually read your "LaTeX isn't for everyone..." article before I really started looking into it.  You've produced a lot of helpful resources!

I guess LaTeX is somewhat overkill for most of my common uses, but I think you guys have inspired me to stick with it and explore its features...maybe I'll be able to customize it to my liking.  I agree that reST seems a lot like Markdown, which I've used before.  I'll have to look at some of the alternatives mentioned, and see how nice they turn out and how flexible they are.  Good stuff...

Can you use Doxygen for Ruby code?  I thought they only covered C++, C, Java and IDL...

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#10 2006-05-01 21:36:48

cactus
Taco Eater
From: t͈̫̹ͨa͖͕͎̱͈ͨ͆ć̥̖̝o̫̫̼s͈̭̱̞͍̃!̰
Registered: 2004-05-25
Posts: 4,622
Website

Re: Learning LaTeX, is it Worth It?

Unfortunately, I don't think you can use Doxygen for Ruby code yet. This makes me sad.
sad

http://www.stack.nl/~dimitri/doxygen/index.html
The supported languages list is near the top.


"Be conservative in what you send; be liberal in what you accept." -- Postel's Law
"tacos" -- Cactus' Law
"t̥͍͎̪̪͗a̴̻̩͈͚ͨc̠o̩̙͈ͫͅs͙͎̙͊ ͔͇̫̜t͎̳̀a̜̞̗ͩc̗͍͚o̲̯̿s̖̣̤̙͌ ̖̜̈ț̰̫͓ạ̪͖̳c̲͎͕̰̯̃̈o͉ͅs̪ͪ ̜̻̖̜͕" -- -̖͚̫̙̓-̺̠͇ͤ̃ ̜̪̜ͯZ͔̗̭̞ͪA̝͈̙͖̩L͉̠̺͓G̙̞̦͖O̳̗͍

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#11 2006-05-01 23:35:13

hotsauce
Member
From: Ann Arbor
Registered: 2005-12-28
Posts: 125

Re: Learning LaTeX, is it Worth It?

arooaroo wrote:

Perhaps using Lyx may make life a little easier.

It really does make your life easier. I'm a student and use bibtex extensively. I love lyx as it takes care of all the annoying latex tasks while letting you use the full power of the thing.

If I want to work away from my computer, I just export as a LaTeX file and work on it in plain text format. Portable fast and great.

Although if you want to write short letters/texts, you're way better off with abiword or something similar.

Editing classes/doc styles/bst files is not as hard as it would appear. I didn't manage to find a simple clear how-to for what I needed but I just opened them with vim and played around and it worked everntually.

But Lyx! Lyx!

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#12 2006-05-02 08:08:13

arooaroo
Member
From: London, UK
Registered: 2005-01-13
Posts: 1,268
Website

Re: Learning LaTeX, is it Worth It?

Did you know that Lyx was created by Matthias Ettrich (founder of KDE)?

That said, Lyx has never been that nice from the UI perspective and has taken a while to have decent KDE integration.

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#13 2006-05-02 17:35:39

codemac
Member
From: Cliche Tech Place
Registered: 2005-05-13
Posts: 794
Website

Re: Learning LaTeX, is it Worth It?

What about those of us who do not want kde, let alone kde integration :twisted:

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#14 2006-05-02 18:26:27

arooaroo
Member
From: London, UK
Registered: 2005-01-13
Posts: 1,268
Website

Re: Learning LaTeX, is it Worth It?

codemac wrote:

What about those of us who do not want kde, let alone kde integration :twisted:

I'm not saying people do. However, you may have expected the creator of KDE to have used QT for Lyx too.

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#15 2006-05-02 19:26:33

phrakture
Arch Overlord
From: behind you
Registered: 2003-10-29
Posts: 7,879
Website

Re: Learning LaTeX, is it Worth It?

VST for the win: http://skawina.eu.org/mikolaj/vst.html
reST generation for vim.

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#16 2006-05-02 20:05:47

Snowman
Developer/Forum Fellow
From: Montreal, Canada
Registered: 2004-08-20
Posts: 5,212

Re: Learning LaTeX, is it Worth It?

arooaroo wrote:

That said, Lyx has never been that nice from the UI perspective and has taken a while to have decent KDE integration.

You could try kile or texmacs.
Personnally, I prefer emacs with auctex.

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#17 2006-05-02 22:22:26

jakob
Member
From: Berlin
Registered: 2005-10-27
Posts: 419

Re: Learning LaTeX, is it Worth It?

texmaker from aur is very nice, too.

Looks very similar to kile but doesn't have as much dependencies and unfortunatel, the reference of kile is way better...

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#18 2006-05-08 15:07:07

barebones
Member
Registered: 2006-04-30
Posts: 235

Re: Learning LaTeX, is it Worth It?

A little OT: It looks like the version of texmaker in the aur is broken right now. The official version has moved up to 1.3 and they must have taken the aur version's source down off the site. v1.3 needs QtTools >= 4.0 which I can't seem to find anywhere. Theres also an installer script on the texmaker site, but I'm not good enough with PKGBUILDs to make that work with it. There's also a Tex program in the aur called winefish that builds fine and seems like it's pretty cool.

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#19 2006-05-08 20:36:52

user
Member
Registered: 2006-03-29
Posts: 465

Re: Learning LaTeX, is it Worth It?

Try wyneken, it is not beer. ;-)
http://www.99b.org/wyneken/


I removed my sig, cause i select the flag, the flag often the target of enemy.

SAR brain-tumor
[img]http://img91.imageshack.us/img91/460/cellphonethumb0ff.jpg[/img]

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#20 2006-05-15 12:49:00

jondkent
Member
From: London
Registered: 2005-09-13
Posts: 123

Re: Learning LaTeX, is it Worth It?

I've used Latex with vim without any markup and found it no problems at all.  Creating fairly big documents as well (40+ pages) and found Latex easy to use once you get used to it, there isn't a big learning curve, its just a markup language really.

Something I've always found useful is template latex and Makefiles which let me jump straight in without having to set the basics up.

Give a go, you may luv it

Jon

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#21 2006-05-19 10:35:36

palandir
Member
Registered: 2006-05-14
Posts: 73

Re: Learning LaTeX, is it Worth It?

I switched to LaTeX last year.

It's simply great to write your documents/letters with your favorite editor, and I like the fact that the output always looks good/professional, while you don't have to worry much about the layout.

It's quite easy to learn, it only took me about 1 hour to figure out the most basic things (title, sections, word emphasis etc.) to write a small all-text article.

If you have a good reference to look up things, more complicated things like displaying math stuff correctly are also easy, in general.
And even when it's not, the great looking output is always worth it, IMHO.

A downside of LaTeX is when you have to include many graphics, in particular when you have to position them in a special way. This is always a hassle. But I think there are addons available simplifying it.

In conclusion, I suggest to try it out, even for small things. It's worth it.[/code]

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#22 2006-06-27 11:30:44

jerome
Member
Registered: 2006-05-25
Posts: 2

Re: Learning LaTeX, is it Worth It?

tex becommes indispensible for big projects when you can keep all your sections independantly and numbering/references are taken care of almost automatically.   On the down side, your text will look completely scrambled once you've put in a few equations and tables.

Images, tables etc, are only sucked in when you make the output so you can tweak them ad nauseum (or re-do them) without having to reinsert them into your document.  Can do that in Word?

It is also much quicker and easier to edit text in vi than to have to scroll through dozens of pages in word~ especially when you've put your pictures in & your computer's a bit slow wink

On the other hand, I once wrote a letter in tex (yes, it looked gorgeous) but that's a terrible waste of time, really it is.

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#23 2006-07-22 07:19:45

lydgate
Member
From: London, UK
Registered: 2006-01-10
Posts: 60

Re: Learning LaTeX, is it Worth It?

I switched to LaTeX within the last five months or so, only a little after I switched to Arch.  I just graduated, I was an English major, and just immediately started writing short assignments in LaTeX based on the easy examples people gave.  My early documents look like default LaTeX, but I later got the hang of making everything look the way I wanted.  I actually ended up writing a senior english thesis (~85 pages) in LaTeX.  I used Chicago style citations, and found LaTeX's references and BibTeX not very worth it for this -- instead I just used my own macros.  This not only made citations easy and consistent for me, but also allowed me to index things very easily.

In the end, I had an incredibly beautiful, easy to read thesis, with nice headings, consistent style, table of contents, bibliography, index, etc.  Although I spent a lot of time learning how to format things in LaTeX (which was occasionally distracting), I don't think that I could have made anything comparable in a WYSIWYG editor, even had I spent more time on it.

I wrote it completely in vim.  I used a lot of splits and vsplits, since I divided the chapters into different files for such a long document, and I got very quick at finding things, although I must admit everyone else found it very strange looking.

One thing that will make your life easier is called latexmk, it's a perl script that will run LaTeX as many times as necessary.  It has a few cool options:

latexmk.pl file.tex makes the file, running whatever needs to be run
latexmk.pl -pdf file.tex makes a pdf
latexmk.pl -pvc runs it in continuous preview mode, meaning every time you save the text file, it will run LaTeX, and you can view it in another window

I personally used a bunch of autocmd in vimrc to nmap latexmk.pl and xdvi to make it easy to update and view LaTeX files.  I'm sure some people would find this too much work, but if you already love vim, I think it's a good solution.

Since then I've used LaTeX for many other purposes, papers, letters, resumes, etc.  It's a beautiful program if you ask me, and only took me a few months to "master" it, at least to the point that I'm very happy with everything I create in it.

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#24 2006-07-24 18:24:31

barebones
Member
Registered: 2006-04-30
Posts: 235

Re: Learning LaTeX, is it Worth It?

Latexmk is a pretty neat little script. I went ahead and made a PKGBUILD for it. I haven't had time to put it up in the aur yet, but I will later today, probabily.

Edit: Latexmk has been added to the aur.

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#25 2006-07-25 19:20:21

sasv
Member
From: Germany
Registered: 2006-07-25
Posts: 7

Re: Learning LaTeX, is it Worth It?

Hi, I started to use tex recently and I use it even for simple letters. I've got a template with my own address, header, closing and just insert the address of the recipient and the text. No formating, just plain text editing. And as a vim user, I use vim latexsuite [1]. You can use ll to compile the tex document (it even runs latex twice, if needed) and lv to preview the dvi output. Later you just run pdflatex or dvips to generate the document you want ...

[1] http://vim-latex.sourceforge.net/index. … e=Download

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