What is Digg?95 Comments
- Omega697, on 10/12/2007, -1/+37As an avid fan of LaTeX, I can soundly say that it isn't for everyone. In fact, it's for hardly anyone.
It is easy for us as technical folk to look at something that is very simple for us and decide that everyone should do it that way. But that doesn't mean they should.
Microsoft Word and OOo have their purposes, and I'll be the first to admit that the vast majority of people should use those. - schestowitz, on 10/12/2007, -2/+30I have been using LyX (front end to LaTeX) for the past 5 years. It's easier to use than Word and OpenOffice. Its output is far more professional and it contained strutural sementics (styles apart).
http://www.lyx.org/
Some say that we should all be teaching our children how to use LyX, nothing else. Even the icon/logo is welcoming. - DoubtfulSalmon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+21I agree with rhesuspieces00 - emacs is great. The only thing emacs is lacking is a decent text editor.
- GreatDrok, on 10/12/2007, -0/+19I used LaTeX when I wrote my PhD thesis. It was a joy to use, the output was very professional and fit the requirements for the thesis because the university published a style for it. Best of all, I was able to carry the entire text contents of the thesis with me on a single floppy 10x over. Most of the large graphics I kept at the various sites I was working on the thing. Anyway, the best part was that once I had the style installed it was simply a case of concentrating on the text. What I find with Word etc is people spend to much time worrying about how it looks at this particular time. With LaTeX you can just type in the text and when you run the latex command you will see what comes out so it is less of a distraction during the actual writing process. It is rather like the old DOS based version of Word Perfect in many respects, or Wordstar in fact. Just write the damn thing and tell the program what each section is and let it worry about how to present it on the page. Fab!
- shreevatsa, on 10/12/2007, -0/+18Here's a rough summary: Roughly, TeX is basically a programming language for typesetting documents. The (plain) TeX was written by Donald Knuth. LaTeX is a set of macros written on top of TeX, which aim at "structural" markup. LyX is a GUI for LaTeX, which means that you don't even have to type the short macros (like begin{section} or egin{chapter}, and can instead select them from a menu.
So if you're a new user used to Word, etc., it's probably best to get a GUI like LyX. For Windows, you can download it from here: http://wiki.lyx.org/Windows/Windows
I haven't tried it, so maybe it requires you to first install http://www.miktex.org MikTeX. Or, it's easier to just get http://wiki.lyx.org/Windows/LyXWinInstaller this installer, which well get everything.
There is another nice intro to LyX here: http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/documents_with_lyx , and there is also an interview with the LaTeX maintainer here: http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/mittelbach_interview
LaTeX may not be for you. As he says, use LaTeX if:
* user’s preference is to think in logical structures
* designs that require consistency
* documents that require high-quality paragraph breaking
* documents that contain heavy mathematics
Use a more visually oriented system if:
* user’s preference is to think in visual structures
* designs that require a lot of visual flexibility rather than consistency (e.g., headings are designed one-off according to nearby objects)
* designs that require text to flow around arbitrary shapes (TeX is simply not designed for this)
* designs that change the horizontal measure from column to column
Hope this helps. - mercurysquad, on 10/12/2007, -10/+25You're dumb, speaking only from your own experience.
Installation process for me :
1) Go to Add/Remove. Find TexMacs (or Lyx or Kile). Check it. Click Ok.
Corresponding Latex packages installed automatically along with the editor.
TeXmacs is wysiwyg latex editor, btw. And it gives you a thousand times better control over your text than MS Word which is a circus interface. If you are a scientist writing a paper in MS Word, the only thing it is good for is to demonstrate the Uncertainty Principle. - johnsto, on 10/12/2007, -1/+15Ahh, LaTeX is great.
Unfortunately, whereas LaTeX overcomes all of the annoyances of the Word .doc format, Word overcomes all the annoyances of the .tex format. Just can't win!
It also takes a while to learn, but it's so very worth it if you're a coder and have a big document to write. - DnasTheGreat, on 10/12/2007, -4/+17He did show the installation process...
"sudo apt-get install tetex-base tetex-extra tetex-bin"
That downloads installs it for you. Without having to navigate random websites to find the download link or decyphering some MS-style installer.
And as far as a Windows-based install, it's even less complicated than installing Word. Download, double-click, hit Next a ton. No silly activation key to deal with, or CD to purchase. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+14The Word file format is a lot more obscure than the very simple TeX formatting, it doesn't cost a ton of money, and it generates professional looking output every time without needing to muck around too much with tabs and page settings.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+13@DoubtfulSalmon:
So, your answer to "trying to import their files in to QuarkXPress and keeping any formatting" is to strip out all the formatting, import the text, then manually add the formatting?
What part of "keeping any formatting" did you not understand, dumbass? - muffinmanpoo, on 10/12/2007, -1/+13This article should also mention the use of Kile (kile.sf.net), and/or TeXnicCenter (texniccenter.sf.net).
- maffiou, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11Promoting Latex for every user is just not realistic. Where it does the right for scientific writers, it can be so unintuitive and frustrating for non specialist users.
Looking up syntax all the time and managing to obtain the look/layout you want can prove immensely frustrating.
Actually the equation editor in word is not bad at all, if I remember my university years well (almost 10 years ago !)... Today, I stick to OpenOffice which has the merit of being fairly intuitive (IE I don't need to read a book to write a letter) - tropicflite, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11My 11 year old kid has to do book reports every two weeks, and he hates doing them. When he had all of OpenOffice Writer to 'play' with, he'd sit there messing with all the toys and hardly get anything done. Now that I have him working off a Lyx template, the distractions are gone and he gets a lot more work done. Also, his documents look great now because he doesn't tamper with the formatting.
- Buddhist, on 10/12/2007, -3/+14I can't use LaTeX, i'm allergic.
- Rorrim, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10I've been trying to use a few LaTeX distribution but I can never figure out how to. (I'm a Windows user that isn't very techie, go figure)
- jono1, on 10/12/2007, -7/+17@schestowitz:
I fail to see how anyone could use this logo (http://www.lyx.org/images/lyx_logo_hi.gif ), or even that entire website, and the word "professional" in the same post. - DoubtfulSalmon, on 10/12/2007, -2/+12Reported as *****. You either didn't read the article, or didn't understand the article. Get your mindlessly stupid misinterpretations off of digg. You're blocked, downmodded, the works on account of your sheer mindless idiocy.
- thydzik, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10i used latex for my final year project, there is a steep initial learning curve which is probably why most people don't use it.
one of the reason’s i liked using it was just to be different, out of all the documents that use word it is nice to produce something that looks different (and nicer) - utcursch, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8I've been using LaTeX/ConTeXt for creating reports/articles since three years now. I hardly ever use a word-processor these days. But, I feel it's not really fair to compare LaTeX and MS Word; LaTeX is a typesetting system, and Microsoft Word is a word-processor.
I really appreciate your effort to introduce LaTeX to non-technical users. At least the academicia and the computer professionals should consider using LaTeX. I used to typeset all my college project reports and papers using LaTeX; and they used to catch everybody's eye, since they were so much better than the ones typeset using Microsoft Word. LaTeX is much better at handling references, equations, creating indexes etc.
But not everybody would want to learn and use LaTeX. It's too much for people who are not scientists, mathematicians or engineers (say a Doctor, or my Manager). A lot of people find MS Word (or Abiword/OpenOffice.org Writer, for that matter) much easier because of friendly GUI and intuitive interface. Take for example, creation of a table or inserting images. LyX/TeXmacs or Kile don't make it any easier for such users (actually even LaTeX-pros prefer a text editor to LyX or TeXmacs).
LaTeX is more suitable for technical or scientific documents (though I must accept that in college days I prepared my "Presentation and Communication Techniques" report using LaTeX -- the topic was "Cartoons").
DocBook is another alternative, though I prefer LaTeX:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DocBook
By the way, here's one document worth reading: "Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient":
http://www.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html - Itkovian, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9It depends for what purpose you are using it, I guess. Everything over 10 pages that needs a frequent edit, such as an article or book shouldn't be written in word, OO, pages, or what have you.
- chickenselects, on 10/12/2007, -14/+22How is that easier then MS word or OOo? Learn to use headers?
Why dont they show the installation process? Im not saying its that difficult, but it is much more advanced then clicking install.
The average user should stick with wysiwig. - Roundtower2, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7I've been using Protext for Windows (Miktex, WinEdt or TexnicCentre, GSView bundled into one download, plus a range of guides). It is definitely not easy to install, but Protext made it reasonably easy (its freeware, so i amn't plugging it).
Also would advise Jabref for those wanting to include references in the doc. It's also freeware and has a very similar (better?) interface to Endnote for Microsoft Word.
Good luck learning it though - very difficult to grasp initially. The rewards, of course, are well worth it. - alloneword, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7LaTeX is great. I was first introducded to it for a specific subject at uni that required all documents to be done in TeX.
Now I use it for everything, I use a text editor for my work. For those running windows I suggest TeXniccenter. http://www.texniccenter.org/ - Belayman, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7MikTeX is a great LaTeX "flavor" (always kept up-to-date), and WinEdt is an excellent LaTeX editor - using both together is an awesome combo. I've been using them for the past few years to write my thesis.
And to anyone who is serious about using LaTeX - "Guide to LaTeX" by Kopka and Daly (4th edition is currently the latest) is an excellent resource - well worth the money. "The LaTeX Companion" is also a good book.
And for answers to most of your questions about LaTeX, you can visit the Google Groups comp.text.tex - it's dates back to the early '90s, and the people on there are professionals at this. It's hard to find something that hasn't already been answered. - bonaldi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Quite the opposite: they're for writers who don't want to know about widows, orphans, leading, kerning and so on. They just write and LaTeX handles all that for them. You focus on the words, and it does the typesetting.
The bibliography stuff is a work of genius: you make one list of all your texts, and it handles formatting them correctly for the first and successive cites, then produces a bibliography to correct style. For free. - iQuinn, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7I support all things LaTeX, so I dugg this one, but this is not really a good introduction, and the guy really has no idea what he is talking about. First, why book class? Article is the one most people will use! Second, newpage to seperate the titlepage from the document in the article class!?? The LaTeX gods frown. Try documentclass[11pt, titlepage]{article}! I really don't know why the Digg community picked up on this one--the LaTeX community is FULL of great intros and lots of friendly helpful people.
- cayamara, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7look into the babel package. It lets you switch the language with selectlanguage{lang}
(I don't know if Arabic is supported though, but most likely it is) - lydgate, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7I wrote my undergraduate English thesis in LaTeX (using vim) last year. Beautiful final product, completely digg anything that encourages its use.
- rhesuspieces00, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6I like TeXShop:
http://www.uoregon.edu/~koch/texshop/
Also, Aquamacs is good if you like Emacs, either as an external editor for TeXShop, or using the included AUCTeX package.
http://aquamacs.org/
I think LaTeX makes an especially nice Word replacement on Macs, since OS X has an integrated spell checker that can be used by any native cocoa application. You can use CocoAspell to install a dictionary that recognizes LaTeX syntax and doesn't get to many false positives. Its much nicer than spell checking the PDF after its been typeset and having to go back into the original to locate the error.
CocoAspell:
http://people.ict.usc.edu/~leuski/cocoaspell/home.html - bootle, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6The real issue I have with MS Word is that I don't want my writings locked into some binary, proprietary .doc format. In 2015, will I be able to read a .doc file that I wrote in 1995? I have no idea, but should I trust Microsoft? Hell Naw!
.tex files are PLAIN TEXT, making them totally transparent and future-proof. This also enhancing things like in-document searching. Do you think a site such as the arxiv (www.arxiv.org) would be able to exist if M$ had their way? Maybe, but not for free. - alloneword, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5For those running windows I suggest TeXniccenter. http://www.texniccenter.org/
- DerGeist, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5@daveisfera
That's a real professional Thesis template y'got there...check this comment out:
%Included because WinEdit is RETARDED and it needs it for Gather Purposes:
%input "refs.bib"
Nothing says "As Professor Blinkenblork, I had my grad student write this because I was too lazy and don't understand LaTeX" like a hilarious off-color comment ;-) - Hutch34, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5This is really cool, I'll definitely try it out.
- raisinbran, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5@phugger
Are you serious? No one said anything about Windows.
Widows (not "Windows"), also called orphans, are "lines that appear alone on a page while the rest of the paragraph is on the following or preceding page" (taken from Wikipedia's entry on TeX).
That's what bonaldi was referring to. - Haplo, on 10/12/2007, -4/+9"I fail to see how anyone could use this logo (http://www.lyx.org/images/lyx_logo_hi.gif ), or even that entire website, and the word "professional" in the same post."
You failed to see, yes. LyX is a front end for LaTeX. LaTeX is used one way or another by professionals, probably longer then you are walking this earth as an angry kid, pissing on everything. - DoubtfulSalmon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I wondered for a second too. They're 'left' (even numbered) pages. It makes all the chapters start on a right-side page.
- Belayman, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Are you using the "includegraphics" command (this Digg interface won't let me include the backslash in my command names)? I agree that it too is somewhat "bulky," but I wrote my own command (which I call "cfig") that uses the includegraphics command with some of my own parameters for filename, aspect ratio, and file location. That's part of the beauty of LaTeX, if you don't like how something funcitons, you can easily write your own commands - it's not really that difficult.
I will admit that inserting tables is a bit cumbersome, though. But, there are packages and other 3rd party apps that even help with that. - ubuntumatthew, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I love the idea of LaTeX and have played around with LyX a bit. Does anyone know a way to use two languages in the same document/book in LaTeX?
Specifically, I'm writing a book with quotes in Arabic that I am translating into English and I can't seem to use Arabic at all in the text. - curupira, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4LaTeX for word processor users:
http://www.tug.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/latex4wp.html
See also tug.org's catalog of references and manuals:
http://www.tug.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/bytopic.html - reploid, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Word is definitely easier for quick and dirty documents, say under 10 pages. But whenever you need to do some serious writing it becomes just horrible. Word is only good for writing documents in the way Microsoft want you to do it. If you want to do anything unusual you'll spend a lot of time wrestling with the software to get it to do things the way you want.
LaTeX is quite difficult to learn for a beginner, but anyone with any programming skills should be able to pick up enough in a day or two to be able to write a major document. The output of LaTeX is beautiful, and makes a Word document look ridiculously amateurish. Once you have an environment set up the way you like it it's much quicker too, you spend less time adjusting the formatting and more time on the actual content.
For the record I started to write my PhD thesis in Word and then switched to LaTeX half way though after a recommendation from a colleague. I seriously never looked back. My editor of choice on a Windows machine is simply called LaTeX Editor (LEd) with the MiKTeX distribution. If you have to write some big documents I suggest you give it a try. - JMcCYoung, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4An alternative to Babel for multi-language/multi-script *Tex work is XeTeX:
http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=xetex
which is Unicode-based and uses system fonts rather than TeX-specific versions. Although it was originally written for Mac OS X, it's been ported to Linux and Windows. XeTeX can be used with Plain TeX, LaTeX, and ConTeXt (which is natively pretty good with non-Latin scripts too, to judge by what I've read; I use LaTeX myself).
XeTeX has the drawback or excitement - depending on your perspective - of being on the bleeding edge of TeXdom, but there's a very active and helpful mailing list and the developers are quick to respond to questions, bug reports, and requests. - sedawk, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I wrote my entire M.Sc. thesis using LaTex and vi. Nerd rank 3 here.
- daveisfera, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Here's a pretty good explanation of everything that you should install:
http://www.ece.byu.edu/faculty/beard/Helps_for_students/
And here's a template for making a thesis that gives examples of how to include images as figures and common tasks:
http://www.ee.byu.edu/grad/latex/ - jefu, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Which raises an interesting question :
Was the problem TeX/LaTeX or Quark? - Belayman, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Have you tried googling "LaTeX for Word processor users" or "LaTeX Tutorials"?
There's tons on info online for people just like yourself. It's true that LaTeX is not for everyone and not for every situation, but I don't think that lack of documentation should be a problem for LaTeX. Hell, just go to the Wikipedia and look at their resources - they have a great list too. (There are also dozens of really good books about LaTeX, for people just like yourself.) - Whomever, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4As long as we're having a vi/emacs flamewar, I use vim almost exclusively (for coding and document editing). Once you invest the time to learn the keyboard based interface, it is extremely efficient and takes the menu-hunting mouse use out of editing. I feel like I'm stepping back in time when I have to reach for the mouse editing a spreadsheet or document at work (on unnamed MS products).
- statmobile, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3@benplaut
I am a HUGE LaTeX fan, and I use it all of the time. It's a godsend on my doctoral dissertation in Mathematical Statistics, so I'll just have to play devil's advocate to your challenge of finding something you can't do on LaTeX.
I challenge you to control the placement of your images when you have multiple images in a rather text sparse document. It's not that easy to control where exactly LaTeX places the floats, and every respectable book I've read on the topic will tell you this. It's not that I completely disagree with where LaTeX places it, I just feel rather helpless when I'm not completely content with the output given to me.
As I said, I still love LaTeX. The best part of it is the reproducible output, and I can't say enough about that. When I set it to look a certain way, it WILL look that way everywhere I open it or print it. I can say a lot less about MS Word, which is why most of the scientific journals I deal with insist on you using LaTeX. - indizen, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3"he Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX2e" is best for latex tutorial i have read.
www.ctan.org/tex-archive/info/lshort/english/lshort.pdf - curupira, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3In addition to JabRef, there are other bibliography managers (for *nix):
Pybliographer: based on Gnome
http://pybliographer.org/
Kbib and KBibTex (for KDE)
http://user.digisurf.com.au/~thachly/kbib/
http://www.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/~fischer/kbibtex/
cb2Bib: a tool for rapidly extracting unformatted, or unstandardized biblographic references from email alerts, journal Web pages, and PDF files
http://www.molspaces.com/cb2bib/
Zotero: a Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources.
http://www.zotero.org/ - the6thReplicant, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Even when you include the right package (which one? who knows, try them all) it is very confusing if not down right complicated to do something as "simple" as including an image.
I've tried using LaTex in a work environment and realised it took me too long to do the things that everyone else could do in Word without thinking. On the otherhand I don;t think I have ever been as violent or homicidal than when I'm using Word.
Writing a PhD in LaTex on the other hand, I loved every minute of it.
I would love a more business friendly LaTeX. Whatever that means...
Ciao -
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