Lightweight LaTeX implementation

ilembitov · 2009-08-05 04:04:12

Hi,all.

For quite some time now, I was looking for a lightweight word processing solution. I need something to produce academic papers in MS Office-editable format (be that RTF or Doc) while being able to meet the requirements of my university: specific cover page style, specific interval, margins, fonts, references, etc. However, I don't need sophisticated mathematic equations and plotting support (since my majors are history and literary theory). Lightweight markup languages don't have the functions that I need, although I really like txt2tags and co. I've tried lout, but I couldn't find a way to get a .doc or .rtf output out of it, only pdf or ps. I've tried groff. First, I had problems with Cyrillic, second, there is obviously a huge lack of documentation (only the man pages and some papers on the Net, including the original Unix Text Processing from 1987, heh). Second, there is no way of getting a decent rtf output from Groff, troffcvt seems to be dead and it is far from being perfect (especially, when it comes to footnotes). But there is one great thing about groff and lout: the size. Both are way more lightweight than Texlive. Which is important for me, since I am going to use a machine with pretty scarce resources as my mobile workbench.

So, now I am looking in a different direction. As far as I understand, LaTeX is a set of macros for TeX, as well as a special markup language. There is CTAN, where I could find various macros and templates (as well as tools) for any purpose. Texlive is not the only LaTeX distribution, there is at least XeTeX. So in theory, there could be more LaTeX flavours. Correct me if I am wrong. So the question is, is there a lightweight LaTeX distribution, comparable to groff/lout in size?

Last edited by ilembitov (2009-08-05 04:18:08)

shagrat · 2009-08-05 06:50:38

ilembitov wrote:

As far as I understand, LaTeX is a set of macros for TeX, as well as a special markup language. There is CTAN, where I could find various macros and templates (as well as tools) for any purpose. Texlive is not the only LaTeX distribution, there is at least XeTeX.

LaTeX and XeTeX are two incompatible extensions of TeX. Texlive is one (and the most used and popular) distribution of LaTeX.

ilembitov · 2009-08-05 06:52:41

shagrat wrote:

ilembitov wrote:
As far as I understand, LaTeX is a set of macros for TeX, as well as a special markup language. There is CTAN, where I could find various macros and templates (as well as tools) for any purpose. Texlive is not the only LaTeX distribution, there is at least XeTeX.
LaTeX and XeTeX are two incompatible extensions of TeX. Texlive is one (and the most used and popular) distribution of LaTeX.

So I can't use stuff from CTAN with XeTeX, right?

Pank · 2009-08-05 07:24:58

CTAN is the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network so it contains LaTeX, XeTeX and CONTEXT.
- LaTeX is the most common. With pdfTeX it can produce sounder papers typographically than fx XeTeX. You can do *everything* in LaTeX.
- XeTeX can use system fonts easily. Also, since it is sponsored by SIL International it is very good with lesser common alphabets. XeTeX is indistinguishable from LaTeX.
- CONTEXT is a more unified approached. Rather than lots of packages from different developers (like LaTeX) with different styles it is written by a single the developer (Hans Hagen of Pragma ADE).

I use LaTeX for most papers. For short, more stylistic papers such as CVs I use XeTeX.
I have only tried CONTEXT briefly.

--Rasmus

ilembitov · 2009-08-05 07:29:07

OK, thank you, Pank.
AFAIK I can get a minimal LaTeX installation with texlive, using only texlive-base and texlive-base-bin packages. That will be something like ~90M. Which is kinda OK, but can I go lower? I don't need anything exceeding the functionality of groff/lout. Since I am a beginner, I don't need much more than that. But I do want to be closer to their lightweightness.

bender02 · 2009-08-05 07:31:35

I think the answer is that right now there is no "lightweight tex distribution". If you go back in time, you can probably find some that fit on 3 diskettes (1.44M), but those won't have any of the goodies that came after (none of the extensions like xetex, pdftex, context, no postscript fonts, etc...).

Moreover, there's currently only one still maintained "tex distribution" suitable for linux, namely texlive.

Last edited by bender02 (2009-08-05 07:32:36)

ilembitov · 2009-08-06 02:38:55

Well, you know, at some point I realised that I am okay with those 100M. Not such a big deal, after all. But there is still an issue that most TeX textbooks and introductory papers offer help for those who need a fullblown desktop publishing solution. I, on the other side, don't need that. What I need is some basic functionality like AbiWord would offer: basic beautifiers, paragraph alignment/intervals/indentation, footnotes - that sort of thing. And I can't find a proper book - that would introduce LaTeX as word processing solution, without all those layout and typography stuff, which I appreciate, but don't need at the moment. Could anybody name some title here?

smurnjiff · 2009-08-06 03:11:47

Take a look at 'lout' http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/l … =Main_Page

ilembitov · 2009-08-06 03:20:21

@smurnjiff, thanks, but I need RTF/DOC output. But I couldn't find one for lout, although I wanted to try it out. Besides, the official manual is nice, but there is obviously not enough documentation. Furthermore, looking at the official manual, I would say that I like groff/TeX output quality more.

bender02 · 2009-08-06 06:15:59

For me the standard basic guide is "the not so short intro to latex" http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/info/lshort/english/
Feel free to ignore all the "typographical stuff", just browse through and read the parts that catch your eye.

Stefan Husmann · 2009-08-06 06:39:08

shagrat wrote:

LaTeX and XeTeX are two incompatible extensions of TeX. Texlive is one (and the most used and popular) distribution of LaTeX.

No. LaTeX is a macro package written in the tex programming language. TeX is an engine to interpret such macros. This engine is not widely used anymore these days. Other engines are etex, pdftex and xetex. Another macro package is ConteXt. LaTeX is compatible with all of the mentioned engines, i.g. running pdflatex will run the engine pdftex together with the LaTeX macro package.

You have do distinct between engines and macro packages. Both can be seen a extensions of the original TeX, but in completely different directions.

Texlive is a distribution of all that. It is not leightweight in storage usage, but it is leightweight in using runtime ressources.

There is a latex2rtf package in extra. But do not expect too much.

Maybe you should also take a look at asciidoc and texinfo. And, I do not think you really want to use groff.

Last edited by Stefan Husmann (2009-08-06 06:44:46)

ilembitov · 2009-08-06 07:19:54

@Stefan Husmann Do you say that latex2rtf is also not a really good option? What do you mean?

Concerning groff - actually, I liked the mom macro package. In comparison with what I see in LaTeX textbooks groff seems to be closer to common word processing. I mean, LaTeX is more about defining logical structure of your text: paragraphs, sections, chapters, etc. You define those, you pick a certain class (paper, book, etc.), define the options for this class (like page layout, basic font size, etc.) and LaTeX defines the rest for you. Which is quite confusing for me, since I am more used to defining the style myself (like in classical WYSIWYG systems or lightweight markup languages). As I see it now, the default approach in LaTeX works like this - you want to emphasize something in bold, you don't actually use a tag that marks a word in bold. You mark it as some object that supposed to be highlighted in the style you are using (e.g. you mark that this is a term, and LaTeX makes it bold, if terms are supposed to be in bold in the chosen style). I understand, that there should be a way to define it in a more direct manner (meaning, a tag that just makes something be displayed in bold), but it doesn't seem to be the preffered way in the textbooks. I guess, this is just another way of thinking (styles and structure vs manual formatting), which is understandable (since LaTeX is designed for large projects like books, where this is a more convenient way of managing the style). All in all, it seems to me that formatting something in LaTeX is about picking an appropriate class and style with options that will allow you to define the required format. Meaning, using LaTeX actually means knowing your way in CTAN.

Groff, as it appears to me, is more about managing the style manually. It probably doesn't offer the same freedom as LaTeX, but that's fine for me (since I mostly deal with papers 20-30 pages long at the moment). Groff doesn't have a vast number of packages, styles and classes, just several macros that offer certain features - and that's it. Which is more convenient for me, since you don't have to deal with all this great number of 3rd party stuff. The documentation (although it really needs to be more up2date and comprehensive) covers actually pretty much anything you can do with groff. But groff as a troff implementation seems to be a piece of low quality software to me. I remember reading the documentation for it on an Ubuntu machine where the examples of articles in .ps and .pdf that came with the package were rendered like a mess (with broken layout). Second, I can't see a reason why groff ignores all the i18n issues. I wish there were a project of a new groff implementation, with UTF-8 support and more output options (including RTF). There is [url mdocml]http://mdocml.bsd.lv/[/url], but it just manages the man pages. There is also Heirloom, but I guess, it's not active anymore. And certainly I wish there were more documentation.

ngoonee · 2009-08-06 07:27:16

A bit of a correction, you can and should simply mark a text bold, with \bf or whatever strikes your fancy.

I wouldn't NOT use LATEX for anything above 5 pages, honestly. It speeds up the process and keeps you focused on content, which is more important than the format any day. Unfortunately I've never output rtf, so don't know how good it is at that, but I believe rtf files are simple enough that you could just edit them manually in a standard text editor, perhaps create a template using openoffice and just refer back to it all the time.

ilembitov · 2009-08-06 07:34:53

ngoonee I always wonder, why is there no NCurses-based word processor with RTF support. RTF is an open specification, I believe (although I am no programmer) that it should be easy to implement. And I also guess, that most users who try to get a lightweight system get the problem with word processing (since this is actually a vital part of system, just like a web browser - lucky enough, there is uzbl and surf). And AbiWord doesn't seem to be an ideal option to me for a number of reasons. Sad enough, I don't have any coding skills - otherwise I would implement a WordPerfect 5.1 (Dos version) clone in C+NCurses (btw .wpf can also be a good choice, since every MS Word supports it).

Stefan Husmann · 2009-08-06 09:14:51

Which is quite confusing for me, since I am more used to defining the style myself (like in classical WYSIWYG systems or lightweight markup languages).

In this case LaTeX is not suited to you. The conTeXt macro package may suit better to your needs.

Last edited by Stefan Husmann (2009-08-06 09:16:03)

Stefan Husmann · 2009-08-06 09:42:40

ngoonee wrote:

A bit of a correction, you can and should simply mark a text bold, with \bf or whatever strikes your fancy.
I wouldn't NOT use LATEX for anything above 5 pages, honestly. It speeds up the process and keeps you focused on content, which is more important than the format any day. Unfortunately I've never output rtf, so don't know how good it is at that, but I believe rtf files are simple enough that you could just edit them manually in a standard text editor, perhaps create a template using openoffice and just refer back to it all the time.

I am not sure if you mean what you say. LaTeX is made for making books, that means big documents.

Trent · 2009-08-06 14:50:41

Stefan Husmann wrote:

ngoonee wrote:
A bit of a correction, you can and should simply mark a text bold, with \bf or whatever strikes your fancy.
I wouldn't NOT use LATEX for anything above 5 pages, honestly. It speeds up the process and keeps you focused on content, which is more important than the format any day. Unfortunately I've never output rtf, so don't know how good it is at that, but I believe rtf files are simple enough that you could just edit them manually in a standard text editor, perhaps create a template using openoffice and just refer back to it all the time.
I am not sure if you mean what you say. LaTeX is made for making books, that means big documents.

I think you may be confused by the deliberate use of the double negative in ngoonee's post. Read it again perhaps?

(In English, for those who don't know, a double negative makes a positive statement; e.g. "I don't want nothing" literally means "I do want something". This is in contrast to many other languages Archers may be familiar with, in which you can liberally sprinkle negatives throughout your sentence and maintain its negativity.)

Last edited by Trent (2009-08-06 14:52:23)

madalu · 2009-08-06 18:10:46

Stefan Husmann wrote:

There is a latex2rtf package in
extra. But do not expect too much.

I've found latex2rtf to be quite capable, provided that you don't use
too many fancy packages (biblatex, etc.).

Re: the lightweight question. LaTeX itself is not lightweight -- but
that's because it offers heavy-duty, industrial-grade typesetting.

But there are a lot of ways to convert "lightweight," readable markup
to LaTeX (pandoc, emacs muse, etc.).

ngoonee · 2009-08-07 00:37:32

Stefan Husmann wrote:

ngoonee wrote:
A bit of a correction, you can and should simply mark a text bold, with \bf or whatever strikes your fancy.
I wouldn't NOT use LATEX for anything above 5 pages, honestly. It speeds up the process and keeps you focused on content, which is more important than the format any day. Unfortunately I've never output rtf, so don't know how good it is at that, but I believe rtf files are simple enough that you could just edit them manually in a standard text editor, perhaps create a template using openoffice and just refer back to it all the time.
I am not sure if you mean what you say. LaTeX is made for making books, that means big documents.

Actually, LaTeX is more for papers, but is also very useful for books. Journal papers in my field are max of 20 pages, conference papers max of 6 pages. I use LaTeX to write those, and it does save me a lot of time (not counting the initial 'learning to use it' period).

So, to rephrase myself, and I apologize for the perhaps unclear grammar, I would use LaTeX as long as the document is meant to be 5 pages or more. Its simply easier. However, this is probably influenced by the fact that in scientific research we're mainly concerned with the ideas rather than the presentation, and having someone/something else handle the presentation is always A GOOD THING (tm). Pick something you're comfortable with, and if you have problems with LaTeX syntax (it CAN get a bit arcane) then avoid it like the plague .

iphitus · 2009-08-07 02:52:24

I use pandoc for my notes. I found it a pretty good compromise. The markdown2pdf export uses LaTeX, so if pandoc does not have a feature I need, I can use the appropriate LaTeX commands, eg: for mathematics.

Stefan Husmann · 2009-08-07 05:38:21

ngoonee: Thanks for clarification.

c0da · 2009-08-24 06:04:43

smurnjiff wrote:

Take a look at 'lout' http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/l … =Main_Page

Great. I wish it would be in extra.

Last edited by c0da (2009-08-24 06:05:30)

SiC · 2009-08-24 17:11:41

latex2rtf is ok for converting to a more office friendly format, it works well, but it doesn't support a lot of the fancier macros such as wrapfig, so you may need to do some extra formatting once you have converted it, which kind of defeats the object in my opinion.

I always use latex for anything non-trivial, so anything that has to look good basically. Simple documents to be emailed around of a page or so I use word (which in the 2007 version is a lot better than it used to be, despite the stupid interface_). Latex is definitely better for huge documents. You can break down a large document into chapters or sections, and just include them in a overall file, much as you used to be able to do with Office Binder before MS killed it.

The learning curve is higher, but it is well worth using. I use it for everything from posters to slides, and I've found since I started using it my productivity is higher, simply because I am not trying to arrange everything in a GUI, I let LateX do it, because I have learnt that I can trust it completely.

Arch Linux

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Lightweight LaTeX implementation

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