what is /g/'s opinion on LaTeX (the document preparation system)?

>>62458813
pure cancer even by freetard standards

LaTeX>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Word>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>shit>>>>>libreofficw

>>62458813
see >>62458881
At best, it is a decent renderer for formulas.

Doxygen is better.

it's the best option around despite being awful, old, and unintuitive. if you're doing anything with formulas, you pretty much have to use it. if you're doing anything with any references or citations, you kind of need to use it if you don't want to spend half of your time writing spent dealing with citations. fortunately, there are decades worth of people getting support online. if you can't troubleshoot a problem, it's probably because you're an idiot.

>>62458813
Best documentoreoaration system if you are not a brainlet. If you are, stick to word

Much better than word for writing a document with lots of equations

legitimate uses but inevitably used by sperg turds who just want to pretend to be different than wysiwyg users

>>62461083
/thread
I wonder how the same doesn't happen with OpenSCAD or POVRay.

>>62458813
God tier document processing. Only idiots hate it, literal brainlets who not even know about LyX.

I love it, but my professors say PDF is unacceptable. If they get a printed copy, they must receive a word document by email the day before. Not printed must be handwritten. I don't know what the fuck my teachers smoked, but "all homework most either be submitted handwritten or .doc" is the most autistic thing I've seen outside of the /g/entoo generals.

>>62458813
Apparently you can mix it with markdown.

>>62459233
>Best documentoreoaration system
No, doxygen is the best documentoreoaration system

>>62458813
It's the absolute best way to write beautiful documents. Only downside is the learning curve, but when you know it then it's a much easier thing to deal with than Microsoft Word or Libreoffice

>>62462491
I have never heard of this. Will check it out. Thank you senpai

>>62462569
this

>>62462662
It's for documenting C, C++ and other programming language projects. Can produce a pdf, website and a lot of other stuff

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>>62458813
really like it
really neat to use with Vim with the uggo nnoremap

:-1read

trickery

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>>62458813
It is the non plus ultra for handling and preparing documents seriously. Stability is great and you can handle decades old tex files with no hassle. It is also stable and does not blow up on complex contents.

However as >>62459233 and >>62461559 point out there is a minimum brain requirement.

I've used it in the past to typeset some documents. I like it since it's pretty simple to learn (if you're familiar with other markup languages, this would be no different) and makes documents look very professional very quickly. My only complaint is getting images/charts to format correctly. That can be a pain.

>>62458813
Unless you're a math PHD it's too much time for nothing.

>>62462979
if you need to be hyperbolic to make your point, maybe reconsider whether you have a sound point in the first place?

if you're not super interested in typesetting, then markdown is probably better for basic documentation. if you need fine-grained typesetting and/or you have lots of references and/or you have complex formulas to write, then latex is pretty much the only good option you have.

there are lots of good features of latex that come along with it (like plaintext storage, reproducible output, etc...) but those shouldn't be things that make you adopt latex. there are other ways to create documents that work with git and whatnot.

>>62462922
>>62462979
>>62463080
>>62461559
At this point it's really hard to disassociate yourself from people who watch the big bang theory to pretend to be smart and "get" the jokes. There's nothing that any wysiwyg editor can't do with a bunch of tables (still the best and most cross-file supported solution, cry if you want) outside of circlejerking about pretending to be into math. you're just overcomplicating nothing so you can pretend to be "better than the normies". What do you do that requires latex? Emphasis on the YOU. You aren't some math professor because you don't have a job because you pretend to use latex. What do you even pretend to do with it.

It's shit and doesn't just work.

>>62463175
Hey I just prefer it over WYSIWYG. I prefer the workflow on Latex. And I am on MSC on Mechanical Engineering there is a lot of math involved.

Bottom line, I don't think wysiwyg editors are inferior they are just a tool to a job and you should use whichever you prefer. I prefer LaTeX

>>62463175
>What do you do that requires latex? Emphasis on the YOU.
i've already said some of them. my writing involves a lot of citations, and zotero, mendeley, etc... are all awful.

and plain text storage is convenient because when i commit this stuff to git i can actually track changes somewhat meaningfully. maybe it's not necessary for you, but going back and forth between versions of a text shouldn't be restricted to the program you're using, and the program you're using certainly shouldn't render your document incompatible with other versions of itself.

the reproducibility point i brought up is important because if the placement, margins, padding, or whatever else gets thrown off in word, getting it back to where it was becomes an incredibly tedious ordeal. it doesn't have to be. indeed, it shouldn't be.

if none of these things is important to you, then that's fine, but don't cast aspersions and call us big bang theory fans and whatnot just because you don't like a thing that other people use.

>>62458881
Latex can be really good if you are willing to spend some time learning it. Using it to make basic documents is not hard but it takes some time, not much, but some time for it to become really effective.

If you don't want to spend time learning and just want something to write documents it might not be the best platform for you

I use it everywhere I can, from my CV and Resume to documentation. It's really beautiful, but unfortunately I find myself copypasting to word in order to send to colleagues for proofreading.

For the papers you need to write in STEM fields it's pretty nice. Especially because you almost always have a working template and only need to worry about small changes to that and your own writing.
I can't really think of a better way to implement citations and formulas either (except mindreading technolgy).
But if you're not writing STEM papers or really need to control every little thing in your document I wouldn't really recommend it. But normies probably don't even know it exists anyway.

>>62463264
I am at the exact same situation as you. I don't dislike that people use word, but I hate when they make me use it

>>62463264
if your colleagues are doing proofreading and they won't use latex, just give them a google doc or something and then paste the content in at the end. or give them PDFs and ask for notes in the file or something.

there are ways to collaborate with latex, but moving it out into a .doc file is just clumsy

no idea why anyone would need it, I'd still rather use Word 2007 or something like that

>>62463287
i wish i wrote my undergraduate thesis in latex and i studied anthropology for my undergrad. the citation management alone would've made it worth it.

basically any academic writing that involves a lot of citations benefits heavily from bibtex. STEM fields are just more familiar with latex, so it gets more play there. i didn't really get into latex until i got into CS

>>62463338
When I did my thesis my advisor just told me about the official template my institution uses for everything internal. All packages anyone working there ever needed, nice documentation in 3 languages and already includes the institutions logos and color schemes.
Coming into that existing structure I didn't even need 3 hours to do productive writing, with some searches for uncommon symbols included.
Bonus: LateX formatting works in Python plotting libraries. So no need to learn new formatting commands for math symbols in axis labels etc.

>>62463466
basically, yeah. but my advisor at the time preferred word i think, so even if he was aware of the latex templates out there he probably wouldn't have clued me into it.

although in hindsight i don't think anyone would have given a shit if i had simply copied a template from someplace on the internet as long as the headers didn't all name the wrong university or something. undergrad theses aren't as serious as doctoral theses.

>>62463466
Many academic journals also include a latex template as well, which is very handy since it takes care of format automatically. I never worry about margins, font, citation style, etc.

>>62463517
Thank god for that. Writing for publication is already stressful and annoying, having to deal with 5 different journals and their citation style etc. would be a nightmare.

>>62463504
At my university nothing that isn't published in a journal really needs to follow strict formatting standards. Of course it has to vaguely resemble conventions you might find in some journal, but nobody really cares about the formatting details in a PhD thesis.
There are some advisors who found LaTeX proper cumbersome and recommended LyX instead. Don't really see the difference in practice if you have a template and use an editor TeXmaker anyway.

>>62463642
>it has to vaguely resemble conventions
exactly. i think i could have even had some flexibility with the citation style (there are obviously a lot, from IEEE to MLA to APA to Chicago, etc...) as long as i was consistent. and again, latex is so fucking convenient in that i just needed to change one line to switch the citation style, or to go from numeric citations to author-year, or author-year with "ibid" and whatnot.

if i had pushed myself to learn latex in my undergrad, i probably could've spent 6 fewer hours on that thesis than i did, just on the basis of the citation issues (social sciences and humanities fields tend to go deep on citations, so the citation problem in the social sciences really eclipses CS papers, in my experience).

>>62463724
Probably too about citations in humanities. I've read a couple (physics) PhD theses north of 200 pages that had at most 50 citations, none of them with any extra details except the standard stuff.

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>>62458813
Reminder that the most important scientific presentation in recent history was made in powerpoint, using comic sans.
Eat you heart out latexfags.

>>62463782
I'm literally a particle physicist working at CERN and if you think that's even close to the most important physics presentation this century you're a moron. Nothing post WW2 even comes close to any of the talks the early quantum physics squad (Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Fermi, Einstein...) might have given at a random conference.

>>62463175
I don't want to use mouse tho

>>62463781
yeah. i'm in CS now but i write papers that are basically social sciences, and my last ~10 page conference paper had like 150+ citations. the references section came out almost as long as the paper.

keeping track of those things manually would literally have made the paper infeasible to write within the constraints of a conference deadline. or i would've missed the deadline just because of the citations, which would probably drive me to kill someone or drop out at some point.

>>62463846
And I've just proven that reading comprehension is not needed to be a physicist. You said recent and I'm the moron, sorry.

>>62463846
not very good at reading comprehension are we cunt

>>62458813
>the document preparation system
Thanks for the explanation OP. It isn't like there is a thread every week about it.

>>62463871
I might have read less than 150 papers in my career, including 3 theses. But maybe that's just because my subfield is kinda small and there just aren't that many papers worth citing in the last 5 or so years.

>>62463175
I write faster in TeX than using Office.
Good enough reason.

>>62463969
i don't have the stats on hand but that paper cited stuff as far back as the 1850s. we cited a ton of stuff in the last 10 years, but there was a significant amount of stuff through the 20th century that got folded in (but the whole point was to illustrate that this problem people were studying had a lot of parallels with older stuff, so that's normal i guess).

but honestly i wouldn't even want to deal with citations for 15 or 20 papers. it's just housework. nobody gives you credit for your citations all being correct. it's just something that has to be done, preferably quietly. and even at 15 or so papers that's some tedious work that could be spent doing another pass of the paper itself.

It makes writing papers a pleasure, loads better than trying to make frustrating word features work correctly.
Not even STEM. Normal english papers are much more fun to write.

>>62464008
You're right. Nobody really looks at citations - or really much else than the abstract and last paragraph, maybe a picture along the way - and that makes managing them basically a waste of time that needs to be minimized.

does anyone know any convenient way to use right to left languages with LaTeX? I know some ways but they aren't as convenient as I'd like them to be.

>>62464127
Can't say I've ever tried to do anything like that. What kind of problems are you having?

>>62463871
LOL ofc you are

>>62463846
Hey I am literally Linus Torvalds

>>62458813
LaTeX is great, /sci/tard here. I write literally all my papers in LaTeX and it's literally effortless

>>62464283
~16k people work at CERN. Not exactly a fitting comparison.

>>62464348

OK you got me. It's hard to fool a CERN particle physicists.

math phd here, love it

How do I get started with latex?

>>62464521
Not so Short Introduction to LaTeX

How come /g/ hates LaTeX so much? I learnt it over a weekend during my first year as an undergrad when i was writing my first assignment. Literally all first years at the faculty of science at my uni are expected to learn this and I've never heard anyone complain.

>>62464521
What do you want to use it for? If at all possible start by working with a template (can be found online), and learn by writing what you need to write. Fixing little things that annoy you in the template and implement stuff you want from other peoples templates.
There really isn't more to common use cases.

>>62463893

Does this surprise you? I'm a fairly successful physics student and i can hardly read or write. I also use my fingers to do basic arithmetic.

>>62464521
Write your CV and/or resume in it. Also, don't use the modernCV template, everyone does. Write your own template instead, which will teach you a lot.

>>62464708
don't do this. the learning curve on making your own template is way too steep, and you're going to be insanely nitpicky about the layout of your CV because it's your CV and every little thing matters.

write a paper in latex. the formatting will matter, but not THAT much, and you'll get a few easy wins in when you see that citations are easy, and making layout changes that propagate across the document are easy, etc...

take on making a CV later on when you're more confident.

>>62464646
Not surprising at all, just admitting my fuck up.
None of the physicist I know have any writing talent, don't really know about their reading ability. But it's not like you ever really need to read long or complicated texts as a physicist. If anything is difficult to understand is generally not a problem of the text, but of the concepts themselves.
I don't even attempt to do any but the simplest calculations in my head anymore. If I don't remember the answer I either figure it out in writing, look it up or let the computer/wolframalpha do it. Working of a wrong number/formula wastes so much time that the risk of stupid mistakes just isn't worth dealing with.

>retarded build system (lol let's recompile twice the document when changing bibliography)
>idiotic syntax that doesn't fit the semantics
>decades to build non-trivial documents
It was a mistake. Sadly there's no alternative.

>>62464802
What is the alternative?

>>62464606
This is kinda how I learned to use vi, but the "shortest" latex guide is like 170 pages

>>62464806
Are you a physics student by any chance?

>>62458813
The "why isn't this piece of shit doing what I want" level starts high with latex and slowly decreases down to almost nothing, while it stays at a medium level in word processors no matter how much you use them.

>>62464809
I really don't think reading a full guide is worth it. The average user probably uses maybe 10 pages of that guide. Most people just need something that does citations and formulas and everything else is secondary. No reason to really learn latex syntax or the million options you have if you can just find every problem you have solved in some stackexchange post.

>>62464226
I mostly write documents in Hebrew.
Now it is mostly ok but alignment of images/tables/figures is sometimes kinda fucked, and also I have to write numbers in reverse for them to be displayed correctly (unless I include them inside dollar signs like inline equations). Also I constantly have to switch between the languages and I have to put English inside \L{}, and in addition most text editors can't handle bidirectional editing well.

It's all manageable but I was wondering if there is an easier way to go about it.

>>62458813
It's retarded. Every little thing you do requires you to \usepackage and read the documentation. Still use it though, because everything else sucks.

>>62463175
>At this point it's really hard to disassociate yourself from people who watch the big bang theory to pretend to be smart and "get" the jokes.
That is meaningless and irrelevant. I do not associate myself with fictional characters on a screen. What I do instead is care about results, like getting that PhD thesis done right. And later when I was in industry I had to get the documentation right. In Word. Which failed.

>There's nothing that any wysiwyg editor can't do with a bunch of tables (still the best and most cross-file supported solution, cry if you want) outside of circlejerking about pretending to be into math.
It appears you have exactly zero experience about serious documentation in academia or in industry.

>you're just overcomplicating nothing so you can pretend to be "better than the normies".
I don't care about what irrelevant people think, I care about getting the job done. And I don't care about pretending. I simply do not have to. Also it is hard to see why LaTeX is hard or complicated. TeX is more awkward but LaTeX is not.

>What do you do that requires latex? Emphasis on the YOU.
I used it to write my PhD thesis in the format required by the university.
I used it to write letters using a Japanese ascii keyboard that had no support for national characters necessary in my language for letters I had to send, before I had LyX available.

>You aren't some math professor because you don't have a job because you pretend to use latex. What do you even pretend to do with it.
And I never pretended to be a math professor. Physics is my field.

>>62464605
have you and I read the same thread?

>>62464904
> I have to write numbers in reverse for them to be displayed correctly (unless I include them inside dollar signs like inline equations)
Can't do anything about that, numbers aren't really treated any different than normal text. I'd always write all numbers in math mode for consistency anyway.

Have you tried creating some macros to make the \L{} stuff easier? I have macros for most longer \ commands I use. Your float (image/table/figure) alignment problem is there to stay though. Most manual fixes ontop of what latex tries to do automatically tend to make everything worse. You could try using the non-float alternatives, but every instance of those takes work and finetuning until it looks nice.

>>62464946
not him, but the thread started with people hating on it, so it wouldn't surprise me if his sense was that it was hated here.

It's just like Linux. If you decide to switch to it just for the sake of switching, you will have a bad time.

When starting out with my thesis I started attending a LaTeX course, but quickly realized that it's only programmers there who needed it to render formulas and other stupid shit that I had nothing to do with.

If you know that you need it, go for it. Otherwise it's a colossal waste of time.

>>62464812
Mechanical Engineer MSC.

>>62465078
Thanks for the suggestions on macros, I'm kinda new so I will look into that.
>Most manual fixes ontop of what latex tries to do automatically tend to make everything worse.
actually I was able to fix all the problems I faced so far, I hope this doesn't change.

I had an idea of writing a program that parses my Hebrew, like let's say for the Hebrew word for begin, and changes it to begin (in English), as so on... For images, for example, it would automatically do the manual fixes that I need to get it to work.
What do you think of this idea?

>>62465241
Good on you for fixing the float stuff. I probably thought of different problems then you actually had.

I don't even understand of what you're trying to do from that explanation, sorry. Don't think I'll be able to help you with any programming stuff anyway. I don't know anything I didn't need for basic data analysis and plotting in Python.

>>62465391
I'll try to explain it better (I just want you to tell me what you think of the idea, I can do the programming part and you seem to know more about LaTeX much more than I do):

For example, let's say I take the following word (begin in Hebrew):
התחל
and now, whenever the program that I write sees that word after a backslash in LaTeX it will replace it with \begin. Let's say I do it for more words, like document, section, equation, ect.
And then I also add something that when I add a picture the program expands what I write to the manual stuff I need to do to fix the alignment problem).
So at the end it generates a tex file that is how I would write the documents like I do now, but the source file that the program I write parses just is shorter.

I hope I explained it more clearly now (I'm not entirely sure that I did t b h)

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>>62458813
>we use a cluster of pentium 4 processors

>>62465712
What are you hoping to achieve by replacing \begin with the hebrew equivalent? I don't really get how that could improve your workflow. Or is it about switching between latin and hebrew letters?
Anyway, if latex doesn't have any problems with parsing hebrew letters that I don't know about it's very simple to create custom \-commands that trigger one or many standard commands.
Easiest to define those custom commands in some separate file, instead of per document. I do stuff like that in .sty files, and load that in the header of my document. That's basically creating your own package to be imported with \usepackage{}.
I wanted to give an example here, but 4chan thinks it's spam. I'll post it as an image in a bit.

Working from that your idea of turning
\התחל
into \begin should be trivial, without need to create any external program.

Without knowing what your alignment problems are I don't think I can tell you what can be done inside latex in that case.

started using now for real, doesn't seem hard at all.
have used it for resume and job hunts that ended up nowhere, but now it is my main for assignments that i used to use libreoffice for.

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>>62466043
Here is the example.
After the definition of the new command I just have to type \zns to get the bottom line as output in my document.
This kind of thing works for anything you could put in a document, including all commands, complete images with labels, captions etc. all preset. You could for example define a command that accepts a filename, caption and label for an image and autogenerates everything you need for you standard figure.

>>62466043
>Or is it about switching between latin and hebrew letters?
Yes, also. It is also for improving the way the editor displays what I write (as long as I'm consistent with either only left-to-right or right-to-left it's good), and also for doing manual stuff in one command.

It all seems like it can be solved with what you explained in your post, as LaTeX can indeed parse Hebrew letters, so thank you for all the help. You have been really helpful and I really appreciate the help.

>>62466247
Your welcome. I'm on /g/ on a saturday night, it's not like I had anything better to do with my time.

How to install latex on macos?

>>62466511
You could just use Google, there are easily found step-by-step explanations.
Generally you need to download MacTex and an editor of your choice (I'd recommend TexMaker on mac).
Just search for ''setting up texmaker on mac'' there is a lot of help available.

>>62466627
>google

Embrace the botnet

>Latex
Awesome naming conventions, FOSS crowd

>>62466696
Bad habit from talking to normies, don't even use google myself.

>>62458813
It's the best typography software available. Especially now that the LuaTeX has achieved a stable state.

>>62464809
Did you go through vimtutor in a day, or something?
You learned it slowly. Some commands by accident, some commands you found while looking how to do something...
I'm not entirely sure if it's a fitting comparison, though.

>>62458881
Do you have an alternative suggestion for writing mathematical formulas?

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>>62458813
>in a meeting
>need to have a quick table for assessing tasks
>one guy pops up a LaTeX window and proceeds to type a table from scratch

fuckin idiot

>>62466715
Old story but still amusing: back in the day a colleague of mine was recommending LaTeX to his boss who was interested. So my colleague took the boss to a computer, hit Google and entered latex. What next appeared could be said to, umm, format females but had little to do with text formatting.

The name is supposedly an abbreviation for Lamport's TeX but I guess the pun was hard to resist.

And over at >>>/s/latex/ these jokes are no longer appreciated.

I prefer LaTeX to formats like .doc simply because it's plaintext so I can version control it easily.

>>62467574
kek

Should've used Matlab

>>62467574
What's the problem? Tables are pretty simple

\begin{tabular}{r|c|l}
Foo & Bar & Baz \\
a & b & c \\
\end{tabular}