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Modern LaTeX Replacement?
javierzinho writes "For many years I have been using LaTeX to compose scientific documents, but truly I am getting tired of its complexity. You have to install new packages for new features, compatibility issues are everywhere, you need to know commands for everything, table composition is torture, image insertion is an odyssey if you don't have the 'right' format, and you need to be a LaTeX Jedi master to create a new document class. I'm looking for a document processor (not a word processor) that is a viable replacement for LaTeX, possessing all of its advantages — consistency between text and math text, automated cross references, direct PDF creation, etc. — but that is not stuck in the 1980s with the compiler metaphor and weird font technology. An application with visual interface and so on. I've tried Scientific Word and Lyx but both are front-ends for LaTeX. Publicon only produces PDF files by exporting to LaTeX and subsequently using pdflatex. Add-ons for MS-Word are a joke, and webEq is intended for web publishing, not for PDF production. Does anybody know of a decent, scientific-structured document processor that is a modern application?"
I know you said no word processors, but OpenOffice has a math thing built in. I don't have much experience with it, however. Anyone weigh in?
Framemaker?
And he prefers Job for his rolls.
It's called typesetting and, unfortunately, LaTeX is still the freakin' best.
I always used Lyx as an interface to LaTeX.. until it broke, and then I had to hack the LaTeX manually.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Well what's the replacement? Word/Writer are garbage for writing research papers or theses, so what else is there?
You just made it abundantly obvious that you have no comprehension of the submitter's problem.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
I don't know, but the first thing that comes into my mind is DocBook.
Then again, I prefer LaTeX because it's much more concise.
XHTML and CSS are a great combo. View it in your browser, then print it to a PDF file using one of the numerous apps for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux that simulate a printer.
And it's not happening. To beat latex at typesetting requires a lot of of work, and with latex basically perfect from a bug perspective any sort of realistic replacement is going to start with it as a base.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
http://lout.wiki.sourceforge.net/FAQ
Simple, do what I did and start using http://kile.sourceforge.net/>Kile
Remember, when you're doing highly technical writing like that, you're literally out at [or beyond] the top 1% of 1%.
The sad truth of the matter is that the servicing of highly technical writers just isn't a very big market [and, barring something like artificial manipulation of the genome, will NEVER amount to a very big market], and you're gonna be lucky if anyone bothers to release a product for it.
Heck, we mathies ought to count our lucky stars that Knuth ever took the time to design TeX in the first place.
If you have any reasonably recent version of Word, it actually has all the things you want, and it is easier to use and create publishable content than almost any other modern word/document processor for documents of the type that you seem to be interested in generating. It's not QuarkExpress or InDesign, but that type of publishing isn't what you seem to be talking about.
I suppose that referring to the product as "MS-Word" shows how far in the past you are since it hasn't been MS-Word for several years. Try the latest version and see how it suits you.
Like any tool, it takes a little while to get up to speed on all the useful features, but I think you'd be surprised at the progress has been made. Yes, you like all the power that a primitive typesetting program like LaTeX can give you, but to eschew new technology because it hides complexity behind a friendly interface is Luddism. Don't fall prey to the belief that simpler is better. As you have said yourself, you are finding dealing with the raw metal distracting and difficult. Let the program handle all that for you. Try Word again.
I find this funny that I just learned LaTeX two weeks ago. I ported my entire thesis over to LaTeX and have had nothing but professional and consistent results.
What's the problem with it, again? It doesn't have a fancy GUI? It works great for me.
It would difficult to find a good replacement that would also be accepted by the scientific journals.
I use vi+latex to write my papers, it is still
the best, but I would welcome something more flexible.
Paulo
I can't help but question the complaints on the complexity. I generally have a repertoire of packages that I use frequently like the ams packages, pstricks for image drawing, beamer for powerpoint-like presentations, and the external program image magic to make pictures the correct format.
Using other packages periodically tends to not have too many conflicts, except when trying to conform to required document classes of certain journals. But the workarounds generally don't take too much time.
I have yet to find something as robust as LaTeX, yet relatively user-friendly. Then again, I've never tried to create my own document class, merely modified what is already there. That always seemed to be the domain of the nuts-and-bolts programmers rather than the people who just want a typsetting language. So my idea of "user-friendly" may be a little skewed.
actually you lost. but then again maybe you knew this already.
PlAsTiC?
Learn something about math and computers. If you can't cut latex, maybe you should consider a different field. It isn't really very hard.
At least for mathematics publishing, LaTeX is still the first choice. It is more robust, and gives the user more control over appearance, than anything else I've seen. Kinda like the original post says, if it's not relevant anymore, what's the alternative?
Any replacement for LaTeX that intends to do most of the same things is pretty much doomed to be markup language, even if you dump XML pixie dust on it. XML after all is just a horrible human unreadable markup language itself.
So once one accepts that the question simplifies to can LaTeX be replaced with something more usable by humans. First off the font system is purely a legacy thing, since Tex predates pretty much all other currently popular font tech. So could LaTeX be retrofitted to use TrueType for everything? Probably. In a 100% backwards compatible way? Only if a genius pulls a freaking miracle out of his butt.
If someone were to do a total rethink/rewrite, and if said person were a genius on the level with Knuth, then by making use of what we know today a new and better typesetting system could probably be created. Getting everyone to agree on anything else would be the biggest problem.
Democrat delenda est
...you need to know commands for everything, table composition is torture, image insertion is an odyssey if you don't have the 'right' format, and you need to be a LaTeX Jedi master...
Then later...
...I've tried Scientific Word and Lyx but both are front-ends for LaTeX. Publicon only produces PDF files by exporting to LaTeX and subsequently using pdflatex. Add-ons for MS-Word are a joke, and webEq is intended for web publishing, not for PDF...
Wait a minute...isn't that a contradiction of sorts? First, he talks about commands and moments later, he talks about front-ends to LaTeX! What is this guy smoking?
What do you mean by "unfortunately"?
Badass Resumes
You didn't mention that you were unhappy with Publicon aside from the pdf creation portion, but there are useful tools out there such as CutePDF writer which acts like a printer option on your unit and creates a pdf file when you print to it. There are ways to get around your pet peaves, you just need to learn how to choose your battles.
WWPD - What Would Picard Do?
Having used LaTeX to typeset my dissertation, I share these concerns about LaTeX. The documents it produces are beautifully typeset and look great -- especially for math. The notion that the writer is agnostic of the typesetting procedure and methods with LaTeX is a complete lie. I've never had to worry about ratios, measurements, indentations, word-per-line, empty pages and other problems as I have in LaTex. LaTeX submissions to journals are becoming less and less available -- in physical chemistry and chemistry journals at least.
There is a large and important market for high-quality typesetting software with excellent math functionality. More importantly, something which interfaces with bibliographic software well, and produces high quality PDFs. (Bibtex does a decent enough job, but I find that it's plagued by the same problems as LaTeX.)
I've searched for an alternative as well, and I'm quite sure that none exist. I haven't seen other type setting documentation formats for journal submissions, which I think is an important hint.
I understand your qualms with LaTeX as a long time user, but given the alternatives I find it better (though word processors are easier to use, LaTeX makes things much prettier).
A word processor front end (let's pick Open Office Writer as an example) with a LaTeX backend would be a good mix, but also give you the downside of WPs, namely constant layout fiddling instead of focussing on content.
I don't quite understand your complaint about the way LaTeX is structured wrt packages. It's pretty much the same thing you see with Firefox where you have a core program with lots of useful plug-ins for added functionality, and as such it's the same argument as it has.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
You should take a look at ConTeXt.
http://www.pragma-ade.com/
http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Main_Page
It's a gray beard technology.
You need to be a master of the arcane to understand it.
How we know is more important than what we know.
yeah you should consider Adobe Pagemaker, great document creation program.... it's a widely used program int he publication world, I myself learned how to use it in High School while in year, easy program and very intuitive.
WWPD - What Would Picard Do?
Illustrator on a Mac is the best way I know of to do things like that. You put open the Character Palette (under keyboard input in International Preferences) to input get the characters, and use Illustrator to resize and arrange them.
ClarisWorks, back when it was still ClarisWorks, had an absolutely FANTASTIC equation editor, which was way ahead of its time. Symbols were either typed in or from a series of button menus, and once they were put in grey texboxes would appear that showed you all the available places to insert data. Data inserted there would be automatically resized and formatted attractively.
This functionality may have been licensed from a third party, as I don't think it appeared in the later versions named Appleworks, and hasn't appeared as a part of the iWork suite yet either.
Well what's the replacement? Word/Writer are garbage for writing research papers or theses, so what else is there?
PowerPoint, of course. To handle the math expressions, just use Comic Sans. That makes it look like the math problems were solved with a pencil, the way a real mathematician would do it.
If you do I highly recommend Mellel. It's a great middle ground between word processors and markup/typesetting programs like LaTeX.
Or, you could go with docbook and XSL transformations if you want pure markup/typesetting.
The problem is that all the things with decent interface have crappy quality of output. Truth is, latex (tex really) have far FAR better output than anything else. Nothing comes close in terms of typesetting text and math correctly. I can spot a word document once it's printed. Not by the font, but by text layout. Reading something written in a gui word processor like word (or openoffice) hurts your eyes and your brain.
Plus, your problem was the interface. So why not consider something that outputs latex? It needs to be a front end that handles all the dirty work and uses latex for what it does best. Just like you don't care that most of your operating is written in C which is just as old technology.
Plus, most places that want mathematics documents, really want you to submit latex. You're better off with something that can output it natively.
Writing something that does the same thing is stupid if what is wrong is an interface. If a good interface is written, you might never know you are using latex (or tex) in the background.
No internets for you.
troll
As used on the Internet:
1) As a verb, the practice of trying to lure other Internet users into sending responses to carefully-designed incorrect statements or similar "bait." In a real example, a Usenet newsgroup contributor mentioned the discovery of an ancient African carving containing a list of prime numbers. The contributor further listed some of the prime numbers found and included some numbers that, in fact, are not prime numbers. Other contributors then sent serious replies, correcting the list of prime numbers cited.
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
Hire a calligrapher. Its gotta be cheaper than a FrameMaker license.
It's called typesetting and, unfortunately, LaTeX is still the freakin' best.
What do you mean by "unfortunately"?
Unfortunately no software since [LaTeX] has come close to the feature-set and quality of LaTeX.
http://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/welcome.en.html
Might be what you're looking for and if I'm not misstaken, it's NOT a LaTeX frontend.
MathML is pretty full featured. Equations are stored in a standardized XML format. http://www.w3.org/Math/
I HOPE [snip]... LAST BREATH!
That's not a troll, that's a blunt, racist, unfeeling and callous diatribe. A troll is something else entirely.
A troll is an attempt to trick readers in to thinking that one is taking a taboo position or a position which runs against a generally accepted notion when, in fact, one is simply trying to egg newbies on and goad them into an irrational and impulsive riposte.
See the definition in The Jargon File:
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/T/troll.html
troll
1. v.,n. [From the Usenet group alt.folklore.urban] To utter a posting on Usenet designed to attract predictable responses or flames; or, the post itself. Derives from the phrase "trolling for newbies" which in turn comes from mainstream "trolling", a style of fishing in which one trails bait through a likely spot hoping for a bite. The well-constructed troll is a post that induces lots of newbies and flamers to make themselves look even more clueless than they already do, while subtly conveying to the more savvy and experienced that it is in fact a deliberate troll. If you don't fall for the joke, you get to be in on it. See also YHBT.
2. n. An individual who chronically trolls in sense 1; regularly posts specious arguments, flames or personal attacks to a newsgroup, discussion list, or in email for no other purpose than to annoy someone or disrupt a discussion. Trolls are recognizable by the fact that they have no real interest in learning about the topic at hand - they simply want to utter flame bait. Like the ugly creatures they are named after, they exhibit no redeeming characteristics, and as such, they are recognized as a lower form of life on the net, as in, "Oh, ignore him, he's just a troll." Compare kook.
3. n. [Berkeley] Computer lab monitor. A popular campus job for CS students. Duties include helping newbies and ensuring that lab policies are followed. Probably so-called because it involves lurking in dark cavelike corners.
Some people claim that the troll (sense 1) is properly a narrower category than flame bait, that a troll is categorized by containing some assertion that is wrong but not overtly controversial. See also Troll-O-Meter.
The use of 'troll' in any of these senses is a live metaphor that readily produces elaborations and combining forms. For example, one not infrequently sees the warning "Do not feed the troll" as part of a followup to troll postings.
I'm no scientist, so I have no experience with the math stuff, but you might be able to get pretty close with Docbook, and using the docbook-xsl package together with FOP for PDF output. I can't promise a complete solution, but if you can preprocess your math equations into an image of some sort, you can easily insert them into a docbook document that provides the cross-referencing, image support, table creation, and easy PDF output. I use Oxygen XML Editor (not free), and I find it's docbook editing features much more enjoyable to use than a word processor.
the real question is whatever happened to the lameness filter?
It is LaTex, but made easy. Made very easy. It's managed by a co-worker and friend of mine, so I may be biased. But he's done some exceptional work with it (including many internal manuals here at Red Hat). So check it out. He is a big KDE fan, so it's made the transition to QT 4 recently and it looks fabulous. http://www.99b.org/wyneken/
I've taken a couple of stabs at LaTeX through the years. I have no real need for a proper type-setting platform like LaTeX because I am not in the world of academia that demands it, so I was never able to get past the learning curve imposed by LaTeX.
Now, let me say... I get it. I understand how invaluable it is to submit a paper in a format so less time can be wasted "making it pretty" and more can be spent on the meat of the work. That fact doesn't elude me.
What I never figured out was how to download a stinking template from IEEE and start writing a document. I never figured out how to compose my own document type so I could use it to empower the written arts that I am interested in. I never got past the hurdle, so to this day I still use OpenOffice Writer as my word processor and haven't been able to "transcend" to a proper type-setting program so make all the boring formatting tasks easy.
I even read the LaTeX Wikibook a number of months ago and this didn't even get me over the hump on my way to publication.
So, I echo the sentiments of the article submitter. LaTeX is hard, and either better documentation or a better alternative is needed to make it accessible to the rest of us.
Support the 30 Hour Work Week!!!
It sounds like FrameMaker will probably do just about everything you want, including a very robust equation editor, automatic cross-referencing, robust table creation, Postscript and TrueType font support, and even XML includes.
However, know in advance that you will never love FrameMaker, nor will it ever love you. Its ways are Harsh and Unyielding. You will have to walk The Way of The Frame Within the Frame, and it will not make you any happier. (Except, unlike Word, your pictures won't decide to move for no apparent reason.) You must embrace the Pain Which is The Reference Page, and come through the other side.
But once you have mastered The Beast Which is FrameMaker, it will dance (albeit slowly) at your bidding...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Well it may not be modern but lambskin seems to have done the trick for hundreds of years...
If I can not smoke in heaven, then I shall not go. -- Mark Twain
I have not tried it, but I was a programmer for the ancestor company 25 years ago, and, at the time, it was a pretty good system. It claims to be able to import / export LaTex. It was designed by a mathematician so it is fairly complete. Free trial download available. http://www.mackichan.com/
I have no connection with the company other than 1 year of employment a quarter century ago...
You're a first year grad student trying to get papers written and procrastinating on learning latex, so are spending your time investigating all the various replacements under the guise of "doing work".
Just learn Latex. Not having a gui is a benefit, not a hindrance: you have the best typesetting environment available on any platform. No platform dependent GUI or clunky binary file formats.
If your in Windows, try WinEDT, if your in Mac OSX try TeXShop + TextMate
What is it about LaTeX that makes it so special? Can't scientific documents be laid out correctly in a word processor? I ask out of ignorance, not rhetoric.
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
Have you tried lout (http://lout.wiki.sourceforge.net/)? I've not, but it looks interesting.
LaLaTeX
Well its not that bad.. Sure making your own document class is pretty much impossible if you have a life, but using existing ones is pretty easy. Go to the conference you want to submit to, download their latex template and put your content into their sample file. That's all there is to it.
But I really only use latex for the stuff where exact formatting is critical and a template exists. Sure there are tools that let you use Latex for presentations, but it doesn't seem worth it for a presentation where the format is pretty much free form. You just end up with boring cookie cutter presentations.
I asked a mathematician how to solve constipation and he said, "Work it out with a pencil."
So I did.
I'm just glad I didn't ask an engineer or I'd have had to use a slide rule.
1.Netcraft confirms:In Soviet Russia all your base welcomes a beowolf cluster of CowboyNeal overlords. 2.? 3.Profit!!1!
An other strength is its flexibility. Any replacement which dumbs things down makes things more rigid. LaTeX itself is already a "dumbed down" version of TeX which sacrifices some of the beauty of TeX but makes it more accessible. I myself use it primarily.
I could imagine a variant of LaTeX, which makes certain things easier, like positioning of pictures.
From the user prespective the problem of LaTeX is that it has a relative steep learning curve which once overcome saves enormous time. Processors like Word get you started immediately, adding more and more frustration once the user wants more control.
I have been using LyX for quite some time and I find it pretty good, although it also has its shortcomings.
The math editor is really good, tables are relatively easy to work with (although inherently limited by latex support). There are only two things that annoy me: the scrolling is weird (the amount scrolled by each mouse wheel rotation seems random), and there is no on-the-fly spell checking with red squiggles below misspelled words.
If you work with latex-only people, you can easily write a makefile that takes care of converting back and forth between latex and lyx when you commit/update your work.
Hi, I recently finished a PhD in math; while I probably haven't Texed as many pages as you, I have plunked out my share over the years. I've found the unix/linux front end program Kile to be extremely labor saving, particularly its newest version. It has forward/backward search, automatic completion for \ref commands, and a built in library of click-to-use symbols (and for these you are automatically advised of what packages are needed to use them.) I am agnostic on the issue of whether something "better" than LaTex is possible, or whether with great power always comes irritating details, but for what's out there, I think Kile can greatly improve the experience.
I think you will be pleased. http://wiki.lyx.org/
...LaTeX is still the first choice. It is more robust, and gives the user more control over appearance, than anything else I've seen. Kinda like the original post says, if it's not relevant anymore, what's the alternative?
Polyurethane. A little more expensive, but thinner and hypo-allergenic.
The next thing you know someone will ask for a replacement for vi.
I Heart Sorting Networks
I'm going to come right out and say it:
Nobody cares how good your document looks. In the age of the Web, so-called "proper" typsetting is completely obsolete. And that's a GOOD thing.
Seriously. Quit worrying about how your papers look and spend more time on the actual CONTENT. I understand that the "powers that be" in academia are very snooty when it comes to these things, but fuck them. If your paper says something worthwhile, that's all that matters.
Or is the problem in academia that hardly anyone does any work of real interest, and instead try to make up for it with "pretty papers"?
If it is not broken... Really, I thought LaTeX's complexity was a feature.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
It's the pinnacle of usability.
Newfangled LaTeX - sheesh. :D
Silicone is a far superior material than Latex. Real Dolls are a major advance over the older blow up kind.
> LaTeX is hard
You're probably applying it in layers that are too thick.
I agree. Framemaker's frame metaphor is very useful, as is the way that character and paragraph styles are applied. The math editor always seemed like complete overkill for most of Framemaker's typical applications, but perhaps it might serve as a replacement for applications where LaTeX's power is outweighed by its learning curve.
Let the hate commence. Anyway:
XSL-FO is another markup language, but there's a good bit going for it, not the least of which is an application that renders it directly to PDF: http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/
The main good thing about FO is the ability to take advantage of related XML technologies to help you generate the documents (and the various tools that you can use to generate them). You can embed SVG diagrams and MathML if you're comfortable with the namespaces; FOP can definitely render SVG via Apache's Batik project (which is also very good) and I'm pretty sure will also render inline MathML via an optional plugin. A lot of people mentioned OpenOffice, and the cool thing there is that since the documents it generates are XML documents (I'm pretty sure its equation editor emits MathML), you can use XSLTs to transform the documents that it generates into XSL-FO documents for rendering.
The obvious missing feature is the WYSIWYG app, but you'll find a bunch of links at the W3C's XSL-FO site.
Anyway, like I said, let the XML hate commence.
C
The Sun is proof that we can't even do fire properly.
Sounds like laziness to me.
I'm not sure what you need. Corel Wordperfect Office used to be better at math writing than Word but I never used it for that. It has a 30 day free trial for the latest version. Last version I tried, v.9 about 8 years ago, was full of glitches.
Do what is right. You will please some and astonish the rest. --Mark Twain
Andrew Binstock has been working on a project called Platypus.
http://platypus.pz.org/
I sympathize with your predicament. One of the biggest problems with LaTeX/TeX is that while it has a strong mathematical foundation (see the Knuth-Plass line breaking algorithm), it's front end is a badly designed macro-based programing language.
Macro-based langauges can work, but most of them are just a pain to work with (M4 anyone?). Unfortunately, Knuth didn't have the advantage of a lot of language research that has been don't in the past few decades.
On top of this the layers that have been built on top TeX to make it "easier" have insulated users so much that they don't understand what is really going on when TeX formats a document. If you're doing simple stuff that's okay, but imagine trying to drift a car if you didn't know how the searing wheel controls the front wheels instead of the back wheels.
I think the cover of the book "Einstein Simplified" illustrates this matter:
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=cdtBd8ljWqYC&dq=einstein+simplified&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=uAfnTYjoWdsig=9IglIlkNjXdOT36u9CVMBpgrPPw&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=3&ct=result
A simple version of LaTex cannot fill my typesetting needs.
I find that Lyx addresses a lot of the ugliness. You have at least 50-90% less crap to remember using Lyx. This, for me, is enough of a crap reduction from raw LaTeX that life is acceptable. OP seems not to think so, but please do spend a little time trying it (if you haven't) before blowing it off.
That said, their style based formatting is as broken as ever. For short papers, however, there's no reason not to use Word 2007 anymore. It's equation editor is pretty much a complete rewrite, and a successful one at that.
Am I the only one that never liked LaTeX? I really tried, but plain TeX worked a lot better for me. I did my thesis in plain TeX and wrote the math tests I used to give in it as well. My solution was to develop a set of basic macros to import each time. I could never get used to how LaTeX tried to do everything for you. I much prefer a blank slate to build upon rather than someone else's vision. As I remember, even importing pictures (eps/ps format) was simple. Maybe plain TeX is worth taking a look at. You don't need to learn a whole bunch of complicated commands because there aren't any :). And it's a safe bet that once you've learned it, there won't be too many changes made in future releases. There's this four volume book set (I don't remember the author, but they were green) that I learned from. It showed you everything you'd want to know.
It's an MS Word addon that is specifically designed for highly technical formulas. I cannot personally rate it, as I don't use it. However the people who are using it are professors of electrical or computer engineering, so it clearly works for that field at least.
I'm currently using Texmacs to type in my math. Entering greek characters and structured expressions is a breeze. For example, to get \alpha^2 you'd enter the following keystrokes:
[a] [tab] [^] 2
Texmacs is WYSIWYG, like a word processor, so you only see the typeset document, and not the underlying text file.
There are disadvantages though; for publication, I have to make use of Texmacs "export to Latex" feature, which does not provide an optimal Latex file. It is also not possible (I believe) to import a Latex file. And Latex is the lingua franca of scientific writing. Texmacs also seems to have a small user base.
Nonetheless, Texmacs is the fastest and most efficient tool I have found for math heavy writing.
Thinner, and fewer allergy issues...
You sir, just won at the internet
Well, I had my fair share of work with LaTeX, first with my master thesis, then a book chapter. Possibly the worst experience was when I had to submit my master thesis again, for publication, and the publishing house wanted 100% vector-based fonts (as opposed to pixel-based fonts, which are used by default). Took me a long time to get THAT done. And I also have to repeat the concerns voiced above, that working with latex you spend a damn whole lot of time trying to adjust margins, width and height of pictures, and in general deal with space management issues. Also, while latex is the best (and indeed almost the only) way to edit and display mathematical formulae efficiently, it is a pain in the *** when you need to embed pictures: you will need to choose once whether you use pdftex or latex, by choosing the image format you want to use; and pictures will need to embed fonts properly, or else it can become really ugly. I have to say, for all it's worth, kile is a pretty damn good frontend for latex, and probably the best you'll find. To my knowledge, there is currently no alternative to latex, sadly, as MathML lacks a decent editor and converter, afaik. Hey, it's from 2001 and it still hasn't arrived in the scientific mainstream - that oughta tell you sth. I guess, I have to agree that instead of an alternative (which may be unlikely to come along unless some slashdot reader feels the call), we might need a pimped-up version of LaTeX: LaTeX PE (pimped-up edition). It should use/include True-Type and vector-based fonts by default, a more sensible handling of and higher compatibility with image types (svg, jpg, gif), and an easier-to-adjust general formatting (colors, fonts, margins, paddings, etc.) Ã la CSS. And, in my wishlist would also feature a nice WYSIWYG editor, similar to an office suite, or maybe similar to MM's Dream Weaver. Alright, more of a wishlist - future Knuth, hear my plea! :)
Of course, you have to like the smell of molten lead.
I can't believe there has been this many comments and not 1 Trojan or sheepskin joke .
*hides*
LaTeX is exactly as complicated as it needs to be. Sure enough there is a significant start-up cost, but it's really not that hard. Quit crying.
LyX is kind of (95%) What You See Is What You Mean editor that makes it easier to forget about LaTeX code and focus on the writing per se.
It's not as bad as it seems.
Let me begin by explaining how I came to use LaTeX. One of my friends pointed me to LaTeX. I read the Not so short Guide to LaTeX and loved the thought behind it. I used it for everything. Biology, chemistry, physics, math, papers, letters, essays, type setting in other alphabets... The list goes on and on.
And I discovered something: while it has a steep learning curve, LaTeX is easy. The problem is that people don't grow up using it.
That said, there are some poorly designed packages... These can be difficult to use... Just search ctan and read documentation till you find one that you like...
Publish it as an Excel Spreadsheet with all the formulas in the cells, a format someone can use.
"...and yet, I blame society" Duke - Repo Man
LaTeX is an abomination of the original TeX by Donald Knuth. LaTeX requires 17 some passes for a document, while TeX will only need one. The LaTeX designers failed to understand TeX so they took it apart and rewrote it. When Knuth wrote it in the first place it was after he did Metafont. What better way to understand typesetting than after solving the vector font problem? Needless to say there is much less support for TeX than LaTeX, and images are still an issue. I think it's time for someone to step up and fill Knuth's shoes and write up some core mods for TeX (keeping with the 1 pass elegance).
Suggestion: Why not make equations and charts into images, like PNG, and that removes the issue of big layout specifications. Just make them with good resolution so that they print well. I've never published a scientific article, so please don't hit me if its a dumb suggestion.
Table-ized A.I.
I agree, LaTeX can be a pain. In my opinion, TeX is to LaTeX like Linux is to MS Windows. It takes a little while to learn to write useful macros, but the freedom and control you get as a result is mind-blowing.
I wouldn't say that LaTeX has a 'compiler metaphor.' I would say that it is essentially a compiler. Nothing metaphorical it. I and I also don't get why you're considering that aspect of it a problem. You speak of having tried LyX but say 'its a front end for LaTeX.' Why is that a problem? What are you getting at, really? You don't want to use LaTeX because it's LaTeX? You're not giving us much to work with here.
LaTeX works just fine, and you just need to learn how to use it better.
Image insertion is an odyssey??? Come on, have you ever tried to insert images into Word? LaTeX image insertion works very well, thank you.
You need to know commands for everything? Just learn the few most important ones and keep a reference book on your shelf. No need for that if you have an internet connection.
First of all, you have zero chance of finding anything better than LaTeX for mathematical/scientific typesetting. However, there are ways of solving lots of the problems you mention without chucking LaTeX out the window.
Above all, be patient, and be open to learning. It's understandable that you want to do powerful and flexible document processing, without having to learn a whole bunch of commands. Unfortunately, this has a lot of similarity with people who want to program computers without learning a programming language. ("Why can't the computer just understand what I want it to do, in plain English?") Any program powerful enough to do everything you want is also powerful enough to do lots of things you don't want -- and because the computer can't read your mind, you have to learn how to tell it exactly what you want.
Cheers,
IT
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
flying saucer XHTML renderer / itext, hacked to support svg and mathml via batik. For the wysiwyg you just need a decent XHTML editor.
Just a thought.
All's true that is mistrusted
Despite it's non-standard interface (which is been rewritten right now), it can increase your productivity, what 5, 10-fold?
Have you tried LyX . It is essentially a front-end to LaTeX. It advertises itself as a "document processor", and addresses many of your concerns. Saved me while I was writing my dissertation.
You should think of TeX as a slightly high level description language for your document, eg if PDF (say) takes the role of machine languague, then in this analogy TeX would be C and LaTeX would be C++, and LyX would be like Visual Studio. With this analogy, we can see the flaw in your question: there's nothing wrong with these tools, other than the fact that you're no longer willing to use them, because you want something even higher level.
You really have two choices depending on your temperament: If you like to have control of all the layout details, then you should learn the tools properly and start taking advantage of the features to simplify your workload dramatically (you obviously don't know the tools well enough or you wouldn't complain about document classes, table composition, etc.) I suggest you learn how to use macros, and maybe read the TeXbook. In this way, you will be able to grow your own high level interface to LaTeX which will suit you extremely well. Since you've used LaTeX for years already, this is a good investment.
If however you're happy to delegate the fine tuning of your documents to the software, then your other choice is to give the LyX developers some feedback on what you'd like to see, or wait for a better front end to come out, which hides the complexity even more than LyX. Those things happen every once in a while, but they invariably introduce complications that make life more difficult when working on a joint paper together with other people. Try TeXmacs if that's what you want.
I have been using inDesign for several years, so when a project came to create dynamic client statements I used inDesign to create the master template. I then searched for a method to take the xml data and feed it to the template - allowing for auto-size section and page wraps - without success. (btw - if you know of a way to do this - do tell). With failure fresh, I set off to learn LaTeX as it seems like the only tool that will gives me the flexibility to do what I need for this project. The learning curve feels steep, but so far I am enjoying it.
Unfortunately, because it's an imperative language used to perform an inherently declarative task. Maybe growing up with HTML spoiled me, but I'd rather describe what my document is, rather than sequential instructions on how to create it.
Also, I like the separation of semantic meaning and presentation that comes with modern HTML+CSS, and I don't think LaTeX offers that.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I believe BIC has a good solution.
Interleaf is the only "book quality" document creation program I've personally seen (then again, I am not a mathematician or an author). It apparently became Broadvision Quicksilver after being acquired, sold, re-acquired, etc.
I'd say its main problem is that it's the wrong paradigm. Documents are declarative, not imperative. Therefore, the computer language used to express the document ought to be declarative too.
Personally, I tend to use HTML+CSS for writing documents (although lately I've gotten lazy and just used OpenOffice). The trouble with that method, though, is that despite "media:print" it really wasn't designed to be used in anything but a web browser (it's hard to control pagination, for example).
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Any good TeX-based package that does Hebrew?
Only losers need GUIs. Period.
LaTeX is hard
Didn't Mattel get in trouble having Barbie say that?
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
NyLoN
Homonyms are fun!
You're driving your car, but they're riding their bikes there.
Know what's harder than LaTex when you need math typeset correctly? Anything that's not LaTex.
http://www.naturalamb.com/latexalternative.aspx
oh wait...
Assuming Lyx or Scientific word provide adequate editing interfaces, it strikes me that the missing piece is a LaTeX class editor (a la CSSEdit) that helps you modify or create classes to achieve your desired layout.
My experience with LaTeX, Lyx etc is similar to the original poster's and my primary problems are in getting the class right, not in generating the content. For what it's worth, I find the KomaScript classes to be the best basis for modern-looking documents with reasonable fonts.
Perhaps there is also an opportunity here for a service provider to offer LaTeX class design services.
I use Mathematica for this problem. It cannot cover *all* the bases covered by {La}TeX, but it handles all of my technical document preparation needs (including equations, tables, et c.). Almost all charts/plots I generate directly (although sometimes in a separate notebook to separate implementation from result). Import of random graphics is also possible. In fact, there is TeX import/export, but since I have never used this feature I will not comment on its usefulness.
It's also kinda handy for some of that crazy computation stuff I do in preparation for document creation.
However, do not trust its PDF export. It does not embed relevant fonts in the PDF (thereby producing a potentially malformed document, depending on the font set on the recipient's/viewer's machine). Of course, I use PDFCreator for this purpose and just "print" it.
A troll is an attempt to trick readers in to thinking that one is taking a taboo position or a position which runs against a generally accepted notion when, in fact, one is simply trying to egg newbies on and goad them into an irrational and impulsive riposte.
Actually, it was a troll. The troll had nothing to do with the racist crap (I agree, not a troll, just spastic keyboarding from a troglodyte), but in the definition of troll... which you bit on. Although, given the usual lame ass GNAA-style sh(l)ock posts, I figure this more subtle troll was completely accidental. A real troll is a thing of beauty and is a fine art. Most of what gets labeled "Troll" around here is the internet equivalent of a penis crudely spray-painted on the back of an abandoned shopping center.
For the mods: I'm posting without karma bonus, but "Offtopic" is warranted for this post if you really feel the need.
Are you sure you really tried Lyx? It has everything you're looking for, and it is *really* easy and intuitive to use. And it is 100% free/open source. Yes, in the end it is just a front-end to LaTeX (albeit a very thick one), as you argue, but that's hardly a drawback, since you don't even need to know any LaTeX at all to use it.
The advice given in the above post may sound intuitive, but it lacks on certain details. The most important being tool selection, and the wrong type can be a real pain. If following the above, remember to ALWAYS use the right sort of pencil. A #1 is generally too soft and will not be effective. A #3 or above will definitely be too hard of a choice and can lead to severe problems. It is imperative that the right pencil be chosen: and for the task at hand, that of course would be a number two.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
I tried writing a novel a few years ago, and after playing around with TeX and LaTex found TeX easier to use. In the end, to get page numbers in the right places on the opposite sides of the page, I found myself having to kludge something with LaTex, but generally, it was easier to use TeX. But that's because online I found a good guide, "A Gentle Introduction to T E X" by Michael Doob, much more useful than Knuth's "The TeXbook" for 99% of what one would want to do.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
I use LaTeX because its output looks better than anything else I've seen on the market. The difference is subtle, but noticable. If you place a LaTeX document side by side with the same text processed by a different system, the LaTeX one is obvious. The reason for this is that the designers of TeX and LaTeX knew about proper typographical conventions. They knew about how to space letters, about line spacing. Looking at a well made LaTeX document is like looking at an elegantly typeset book. You aren't sure exactly why it looks good. But it does.
I've used Framemaker. It isn't bad. It's keystrokes for creating mathematical equations are efficient. However, its output still doesn't have the elegance of LaTeX. LaTeX does things that no other system does. For example, when you put an equation inline with text, it changes the format of the equation to fit in the line. Usually, inline equations don't cause the spacing of the line they are in to change. Try that in Word!
I do agree that tables are a pain to use. But I usually find that once I've made a template, then I don't have to mess with the details later. I use LaTeX to create mathematics exams, and I wouldn't use anything else. Using templates, it is faster than any other tool I have seen.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Forget it. Nothing else is close, and nothing else is likely to be close any time soon. TeX/LaTeX are quirky, but they work, are well documented and supported and are flexible enough to do difficult typesetting well. The paying market for this is tiny, so you won't ever find a lot of corporate interest.
Honestly, the best you can do is find a really good environment (emacs + AucTex + RefTex is the best I know of) and learn it well. Packages isn't a practical problem (these days, just download all of TeXLive and install it) and many journals have style files you can download.
The compiler approach is a strength, actually. It's one of the reasons LaTeX is so much better suited to writing long and/or complicated documents (books, manuscripts) than Word is. Of course, Word is hardly an exemplar of what can be done with a word processor, but even better systems fall far behind for technical documents containing mathematics. That, and none of the alternative you and I have access to can typeset mathematics nearly as well as TeX does.
At the Internet, but not at condom selection.
Polyurethane condoms don't stretch---and one size does not fit all. Neither falling off nor cutting off blood flow and leaving an angry purple ring bruise under the band is a desirable outcome.
On top of which, they're usually shaped like crayons, and since they don't stretch... suffice it to say that "purple Crayola with a white wrapper" is not the most dignified look, even for that least dignified of organs.
You should read the Not so short guide to LaTeX 2e by Tobias Oetiker et al. Probably the best intro I've looked at, plus look at comp.text.tex or your local TUG (Tex user group).
I don't know enough about PostScript's capabilities, but it might be up to the task, though perhaps the users would not, without some more-friendly front end. BTW Don Lancaster claims that he writes [mostly everything] in it, and has very fine control over the output. http://www.anastigmatix.net/postscript/direct.html In the early 1980's I hacked the PostScript output file of Corel Draw, to correct a scaling problem with a large image, which was tiled. I had never encountered PostScript before, but had some Forth experience, which made it do-able (but not simple).
How many times can one person +5 for saying the same thing repeatedly in the same topic?
A hypergenius that could not only exceed Knuth (Knuth, for Bob's sake!), but do it without resting on the established highest technology in the field (i.e. TeX and packages built around it)
I don't know about that. I think a more ordinary genius could do it, simply because they have the wisdom of Knuth plus others to build from, even if they reject the technical base of LaTeX, but incorporate the ideas and theories behind it.
Still, it would be quite an achievement, and I still agree with you that a full-on replacement is unlikely in the foreseeable future.
Speaking as someone who is now pretty experienced at TeX (haven't yet *released* any packages but I've been writing some as I work on my thesis) and knows about the internals I have to say that LaTeX has an absolutely awful design. Sure, it produces pretty output but the macro language is almost as bad as brainfuck or assembly language.
To be fair this wasn't really a design failure on Knuth's part. He specifically wanted to avoid TeX becoming a full fledged programming language and I believe he expected other front ends to produce TeX commands but was eventually convinced to add some programming features to TeX. Combine this with the strong emphasis on compatibility and the restrictions of machines at the time and you get a language whose programming model is based on redefining parts of the language and involves finite numbers of registers and tokens.
Not to mention a number of really annoying limitations like the inability to use more than a dozen or so math fonts in the same document.
Unfortunately TeX works well enough to typeset papers but is too complex to inspire many people to hack the source. Thus there is not a great deal of manpower devoted to producing a successor and no one will buy an incompatible commercial product that won't interoperate with their colleagues.
This isn't to say no one is working on a replacement. LuaTex seems to be the way forward but I just wish it would come along faster. BTW as a stopgap measure perltex is pretty useful.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
It runs on TeX, without all the crap, offers nearly everything Tex does, and provides all kinds of macros to make designing/tweaking layouts easy. I used to layout my resume in ConTeXt and had a shell script do 'mail merges' back when I was job hunting.
http://www.pragma-ade.nl/
It's really polished, with good user manuals.
Yeah, LaTeX sucks, chock full of one-off incompatible packages.
You didn't mention what type of science you are doing, so if you are an EE the best way to get schematic diagrams is still a LaTeX derivative. Circuit Macros is still the best I can find for now, located at:
http://www.ece.uwaterloo.ca/~aplevich/Circuit_macros/
Takes a few weeks to get really good at it, but the diagrams are the absolute best. There was a person who was making print quality symbols for gEDA through gschem, but I'm not sure that ever panned out. If you want a simple way to draw diagrams in ps then you might send the author an email.
I don't know if this is the case for you, but I find most people who find LaTeX hard are using it wrongly. Specifically, they are trying to precisely control the formatting, placement, etc. etc. of everything in their document. This is, pretty much, how you use today's WYSIWYG word processors. It's very cumbersome and arcane to do the same in LaTeX, and the results don't usually look very good in either case.
The right way to use LaTeX is to basically enter the semantic structure of your document, let LaTeX do all the typesetting, and then tweak it a bit as necessary. Realizing this was the point where I stopped fighting with LaTeX and started letting it work for me. I've been getting compliments on how beautiful my documents are. There's a lot of typesetting knowledge encoded in LaTeX, and, really, it probably does a better job than most of us can hope to do. One particular example I like to share is that, when I took my thesis to the printer, he remarked how glad he was that, finally, someone had thought about making the margins large enough that the text would be readable once printed and bound. I hadn't. But LaTeX had.
Incidentally, the above is also why I don't see a lot of value in WYSIWYG editors for LaTeX. On the one hand, being able to see what your final document will look like while you are creating it is good. On the other hand, it makes it very easy to fall into the trap of spending all of your time correcting this or that perceived layout error, instead of getting your actualy work done while letting LaTeX do the typesetting. I am not even sure WYSIWYG can be made to work right; a lot of algorithms in LaTeX are simply slow, and changing even one letter can cause your text to jump around, which is very annoying while editing.
Then, of course, there is the matter of commands. I recognize that having to type in commands is a significant hurdle for many people. Being a programmer and having a lot of experience with HTML, this isn't the case for me - I am used to using commands. As a programmer, I actually see LaTeX as having an advantage here: by defining new commands, you can automate repeating tasks and increase the maintainability of your code...err...document. I don't actually do this a lot, but it's very nice to have that ability for when it's useful.
All in all, I won't deny that LaTeX is hard. I know it is. On the other hand, I am not actually sure it is harder than Microsoft Word, which, in my experience, is its main competitor. Although Word is probably easier to get started with, learning the basic LaTeX necessary for creating a simple document is really not that much work, and the documents you produce will look a lot better than what Word produces. When you get to more complex documents, I find Word has a tendency to screw up - it will crash and/or eat parts of the formatting or content of your document. Granted, that's bugginess, not something inherent in WYSIWYG word processing, but it still ends up causing you a lot of frustration and losing you a lot of time. I've never seen LaTeX do this, and, even if it did, you would still have the source code of your document - at the very least, all your content is still there.
So, there you have it. My opinion, my experience, with input from quite a few others - LaTeX users, non-LaTeX users, and "I tried LaTeX but couldn't figure it out" users. In the end, my conclusion is that LaTeX is far from perfect, but it's still the best.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Mathematica has an amazing WYSIWYG typeset feature, but it costs a fortune. If you can get it through work, it is pretty awesome to use.
Side note: I use LaTeX and have persuaded people from Humanities to use it. I also use LyX because it can save me time but if it breaks I can always look under the hood. Once in a while I get a problem with my LyX installations on ubuntu or vista but they take at most an hour to fix.
I am very happy with LaTeX [my job involves math] but I think it is a little bit of an overkill. You see... Why do I have to use LaTeX to write a simple report (no math, mind you) that looks good? I think this is the main question. I honestly don't know why output from both Word and Open Office look so ugly compared to TeX?
Even if you want to maintain WYSIWYG, can't we have an option for publication quality pdf/ps output? I think developers of office application are more concerned with the average grandmas and bosses than me.
I dunno. How many times can one person +5 for saying the same thing repeatedly in the same topic?
You are asking for Lyx, the Document Processor. It is basically a GUI frontend to LaTeX, and it hides all (most) of the underlying code. It also retains nearly all of LaTeX's flexibility.
JWL.Freakwitch.net
Intresting questiong in deed, since I work in a scientific enviroment been a computer tech, I allways find intresting how Mathematicians and Physics wordship that program. Many times I strive wondering if I should learn how to use such cumbersome word processor, programming enviroment, and so much more.
Then I realize that all those thing this guys do with latex could be perfectly done with Write and Math, and less time. So though I'm still couriouse I can tell you, there is nothing you wont to do with latex that you cant do with Writer. Of course if you wont to write a program pleace use a programming language enviroment, a real one.
Cheers, and good luck in your quest.
Here is some info from the FAQ:
Lout is similar in function to LaTeX and troff. Indeed, it borrows ideas, techniques and conventions from these typesetting systems. For example, Lout uses Knuth's (the author of TeX, on which LaTeX is based) optimal line breaking algorithm, and has extended it to paragraph breaking across pages. For simple documents, Lout, LaTeX and troff offer much the same functionality, with different syntax (see the "Simple Examples" section). Lout is much more "programmer friendly" than TeX's macros (and a fortiori than incomprehensible troff macros). See the "Advanced Examples" section.
Lout makes it easy to mix text and graphics. You can draw lines, arrows and boxes, scale and rotate objects, use color commands. While many of these things are possible in LaTeX by including Postscript files generated by utility programs such as xfig, you have to specify the size of each included figure, losing a lot of Lout's flexibility.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
PlayTeX
to give you that extra typesetting protextion
at least 3...
It realized that it was lame, and filtered itself out.
But Polyurethane bushings on my car's anti-sway bar makes for a squeaky experience over speed bumps... Rubber all the way.
I still use vi (and a few other pre-historic apps, as well), but I no longer do anything in LaTeX. I used a mixture of LaTeX, WordPerfect 5.1, and Word (mostly depending on complexity) until 2003, but moved completely to Word when 2003 come out, but not before I had to a full library of fonts and symbols (Bill can keep his 2007 and the fru-fru ribbons; I won't be using them).
Before I moved, I have figured out how to control all of the automatic formatting, pagination, layout, and lists that Bill gifted to us (surprisingly it uses a logic very similar to WordPefect, which is very similar to LaTeX and HTML, if you have a little imagination--you just have to see what isn't actually there).
With minimal effort, pictures and tables are easy, and having a graphic ruler and a GUI really makes layout a lot easier--the trick is keeping hidden marks on, and turning everything automatic off. When I need to really control something exactly, and I know Bill is going to fight me on it, I'll use something else to create an image (Visio, an image editor) so that Word won't f@#k it up.
The only really frustrating parts are the size of longer, graphic rich documents, and the inability to re-calc data in tables. After about 60 pages with imported images, Word will just crap out. No solution for that yet (except splitting it into chapters or parts), but on relatively simple stuff (equations, graphics, non-dynamic tables), I can focus on what I'm writing, finish it, and just spend on hour or so formatting, paginating, and tweaking layout at the end. I do admit that most people are surprised when they find out I've used Word--which leads me to believe that I'm not the norm when it comes to writing large technical docs, but I never really have been, either.
I have to agree that OO and other options are not in the same league yet (although I'm hoping non-MS options will get better). Frame and other Adobe products are great and I use them when appropriate, but I don't want to spend more time typesetting it than I did researching it.
Sorry for selling out to the dark side, but it is just more practical, unless you have more scientific notation than text. I'd go back to LaTeX for any given writing if I thought it would be better, but at this point, I'd be hard pressed to do find a reason.
BTW--I started with computers in 1981, and I'm a network engineer. I write a pretty fair amount (if you can't tell from my post).
The alternative would be, of course, to write by hand. If computer is too complicated, then don't use it. You need to think outside of the box, people. XD
It may or may not work for your needs, but we actually considered it for our in-house publishing needs. [www.princexml.com]
Also, the product we ended up with XML Professional Publisher (XPP) from XyEnterprise. Kind of different products, but both produce PDF from markup.... sooo.....
LaTeX's text-based nature is it's most attractive feature. It allows you to see what's going on, just by reading the .tex file. If you impose a gui on it, you would have to open a plethora of sub-windows and menus in order to track down a problem. To me, that's much more cumbersome.
The best (only?) way to learn and write in LaTeX is to take another person's example file, and modify it with your own text.
When it comes to typesetting, never do anything yourself. Steal, steal, steal.
While it's not quite as flexible as CSS, LaTeX is flexible enough for most people's needs display wise. The exact same document can easily be turned into a presentation from an article or similar with few changes beyond the document class. In fact, this is one of the major benefits of LaTeX over any other document preparation system: you write the content, and the document class takes care of making it look like whatever it's supposed to look like.
http://www.donarmstrong.com
I never figured out LaTeX; TeX always did what I needed, so I didn't see what the point was.
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
No, not the program, the Linotype.
You can't set math on a Linotype. Math had to be hand-set, and this was not easy. Formulas had to be aligned with little brass spacers (what typesetters called "furniture"). Text that couldn't be machine-set was called "penalty copy", and involved large extra charges.
MOD PARENT UP!!! Thanks for your extensive comments.
/tx/ pronunciation (that is, with a voiceless velar fricative as in Modern Greek, or the last sound of the German word "Bach", similar to the Spanish "j" sound)."
What software do you use with LaTeX?
Quote: "When you get to more complex documents, I find Word has a tendency to screw up - it will crash and/or eat parts of the formatting or content of your document."
I've experienced that. Sometimes Word even ruins its own files so badly that it can't read them. If that happens, here's a tip: Load the Word file in Open Office, and save it in Word format. That repairs the file. Word will then be able to read its own file. So, Open Office is a necessary Microsoft Office utility.
I sure wish Open Source authors would choose sensible names for their projects. The name TeX and LaTeX has undoubtedly reduced the acceptance of the software. See this quote, for example:
"TeX's creator Donald Knuth promotes a
Didn't he look around and see that no professional communication was using "Voiceless velar fricatives"? Did he decide that all other writers in the entire English language were wrong, and he was being more communicative than the professionals? Or was he intentionally making communication difficult?
You, sir, would be well served by LyX.
File>New from Template... - IEEtrans.lyx
(I do agree with everyone else though that LaTeX could benefit from some refactoring and modernising.)
any mention of the open source project TexPerfect, a Project on Sourceforge whose homepage gives a lot more information on this topic: http://texperfect.sourceforge.net/en/texperfect.html
Anyone using PCs in the mid-80s to early 90s may remember WordPerfect fondly for ability to handle the most complex of documents with ease. It's easy to use equation editor even used Tex as it's typesetting engine!
I have yet to see any other piece of software handle complex documents that include lots of equations and graphs as well as WordPerfect did. I wrote two graduate theses in WordPerfect; having used Word for the last 10 years, I can't imagine doing the same with Word or with OOo.
Unfortunatley the Linux/Unix version of WordPerfect never got beyond a crude prototype of WP 5.1. Another, more recent downside: Microsoft paid Corel $150 million in the late 90's in exchange for Corel rewriting WP in VBA instead of Ansi C. I had purchased every version after 5.1, but never tried the VBA based versions. I heard the initial VBA version didn't work as well as previous versions. Two more versions of Corel WordPerfect have come out since then, but I don't know anyone that has used them enough to comment on how they compare to the older, excellent versions of WorPerfect.
The TexPerfect project seems quite interesting, if any developers wish to take on the challenge!
But you can include TrueType and other fonts.
Given that this is a clean rewrite, some other problems might have been solved on the way.
The newest Word (2008) has significantly better typesetting of mathematical equations than latex. (I attended several presentations by the designers). Notably, it gets kerning right for glyphs that don't occupy their full space up to their corners, and fonts are the same as your document because it's all unicode. Word 2008 uses a markup language that's similar to tex -- \frac, \over, \rightarrow, \Longrightarrow and so on. You can toggle between markup and display, similar to that latex/emacs integrated package.
What Word2008 lacks is marcos with arguments. It only uses autocorrect, which amounts to argumentless macros. Which makes Word2008 fine for conventional maths, but awkward for computer science where we always like to define our own funky notation.
LaTeX is the final stage of evolution in its category, there will never be anything better. Let me show you some basic points here:
LaTeX works internally like old typesetting mechanisms (lead matrix,...). It composes everything of boxes and springs (the simplest decomposition possible). There is no better system to make it universal.
There's no shorter sintax for markup language. You specify command only where it acts, and you only have one excessive backslash.
It's Turing complete. It has to be, in order to be able to do anything (you can play chess in LaTeX). If it wasn't so, there would soon be a document that couldn't be typeset.
I find the learning curve of some of you disturbing. For a basic user, all you need to remember is \sqrt, \frac, ^, _, \section, \insertgraphics, \tabular. For advanced user, you only need some more logic and understanding, and some 40 other commands.
Templating is the heart of LaTeX. You define your macros, indentation sizes and formats only once. Then you just import it. You have to go fishing for examples only if you deleted previous documents.
I agree that font management is strange, but it has to be. It's badly known only because of ignorance of 99.99% population. Regular font system is meant for 1D-type of stacking together and treats everything as a character. LaTeX needs more flexibility (positioning accents, stacking symbols together, similarities), and more special symbols (integrals,...). Anyway, it should decide completely against bitmapped fonts and rely on postscript fonts only.
Good day to all of you.
ConTeXt? Like LaTeX, but perhaps better in many aspects?
Sorry, no help here.
Oh, somebody cruel has forbidden you to use XeTeX, write in UTF-8 and use OpenType fonts directly from your system? Shame on them!
Ezekiel 23:20
This is the same like arguing over superiority of whatever XYZ language over powerful things like e.g. C, or C++. People always complain how difficult it is to learn, bla bla, not realizing that the complexity is there in place for a good reason: the problem we are solving is intricate. Any attempt to simplify the looks while maintaining the level of control will inevitably lead to the very same mess in the end, just with a different user-interface. I am not sure who said it, but it applies here very well:
We are also not giving chainsaw into hands of children.
You want a full 100% low level control over the resulting look of your document? You go and use the most powerful tool you get. And that it is not easy to learn and understand? Well, after all you are after a damn hard thing: the complete control over a document, right?
Although TeX has its issues here and there, problems with learning it is certainly not one of them. There are zillions of tutorials and books out there.
My advice:
1) try to learn the tool if you really need 100% control. Anything what will give such a level of control is going to look in the end very similar to TeX in the end (discounted for the markup - @ instead of \ perhaps?).
2) Read the Knuth's TeX book. That will show you that there's no magic in there and things are easy to control once you understand the philosophy underneath. In a way LaTeX did a bad service to TeX by trading a user-friendly markup for obviousness of functionality and philosophy.
I am using LaTeX for writing my documents, plain TeX to produce LaTeX document classes and styles and LyX for typesetting. For short stuff like letters I go to Open Office, or similar. LyX is doing a good job once you understand TeX, or you need just vanilla documents in the default styles (article, book, report). If not, I wouldn't go into fighting with LyX without an expert around...
Remember, covering the steering wheel with a colorful sheet for aesthetic reasons always leads to a difficulty with high speed driving on a highway.
Get:
- TeXnicCenter as a nice gui (http://www.toolscenter.org/)
- For images, install the free OLETeX Utility (http://oletex.sourceforge.net/), it gives you an ole container so you can paste your image/graph from excel/paintbrush/whatever and generate what you need in the right format without fuss.
What I never figured out was how to download a stinking template from IEEE and start writing a document.
1)Download IEEETrans.cls from IEEE website to the folder where your .tex file will rely (you may not need that step since it is provided in your recent LaTeX distro).
2)Search for "IEETrans" on google. First answer is the CTAN entry that provides all the needed documentation in pdf format:
http://www.ctan.org/get/macros/latex/contrib/IEEEtran/IEEEtran_HOWTO.pdf
(or even better, just look for the pdf documentation provided in your recent latex distro).
I agree LaTeX can be a pain in the back when trying to change some parameters, but in many cases, a lot of ways to easily do what you want are provided.
Documentation (manuals, howtos,) used to be quite difficult to even obtain and in the legacy dvi format. However, availability has improved a lot, lately. Most package manuals are now easily available on the CTAN website in pdf format, for example. I hope this will continue.
LaTeX is hard
Mmm, Ok?
How many times can one person +5 for saying the same thing repeatedly in the same topic?
You didn't seem to say why lyx didn't address the problems except to say that it is a front-end for latex. I have heard that TexMacs is good, allowing you to run some computer algebra and numerical software within it
It's a decent front-end to LaTeX. If you know the latter you can always get into the nitty-gritty. For much of the routine work, however, LyX does it for you... Exports to pdf and many other formats and the packages build and install on Linux, MacOS, and Windoze...
If it ain't broken, don't fix it. I really don't understand why you would want to replace LaTeX. Sorry, but your points sound pretty weak to me: LaTeX does a pretty damn good job at placing figures automatically (and if you insist, you can always fiddle around with those "htbp" tags, but I find the default location to be generally fine), I never had any problem producing EPS or PDF figures, etc... Besides, if you've really been using it for years, like me, you should be used to its "complexity" (I'm sure I'm much faster with Emacs + LaTeX than people using MS Word or whatever...)
Really, I think you're gonna have a hell of a time finding any serious alternative out there, especially for this price. But then again, why would you ? Just because it's been around for so long ? Please...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Stylesheet
Maybe we should exchange Unix, it's just plain old.
mm, anyone heard of Windows?... Guess that's old too..
My conclusions: If it work, use it.
docbook is an XML language similar to LaTeX.
you can render to PDF, html, and many others.
google for: "xmlto" "docbook-xsl" and "apache fop"
I find that mathml: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathml is the best alternative for me. It is often as verbose as LaTeX but it is much easier to learn/remember, and it is quickly becoming a standard.
Do you need a robust document setting system or do you want to have the latest, stylish application?
It's not state of the art of july 2008, so I don't use it? Week 30 in 2008? Too old! Just the other day? Beware!
If you want a robust system, stick with LaTeX, if you want something stylish, take Word, which is the newest stuff for years now.
cb
FWIW (and for some it's a lot), Publicon can create a PDF on OS X in one step from the print dialog. No add-ons from Wolfram or Adobe required since it's part of the OS.
The same is true for _any_other_ program.
Old news to many, but just thought I'd mention it.
GNU TeXmacs is the best document processor out there. It is also Free as in speech. It is inspired by TeX, but not a frontend for LaTeX like LyX as many believe. It will import your old LaTeX documents. I've used it to write my thesis (100 pages plus many, many figures and photos) and it works excellent, because you don't have to worry about layout. It just produces beautiful text and math.
http://www.texmacs.org/
Eclipse with Latex support: http://texlipse.sourceforge.net/
If changing the OS system to Risc Os or running a Risc Os emulator isn't a problem you could try Techwriter from Icon Technology UK.
http://www.iconsupport.demon.co.uk/Products/TechWriter/TechWriter%20pro.html
it's not LaTeX, but it will allow you to use your existing LaTeX knowledge if you want, otherwise it takes very little time to learn and has useful extensions to have various math package environments right in the editor (R, Octave and the like).
if i recall correctly, it exports to TeX, .ps and .pdf as well as some other formats
http://www.texmacs.org/
Lyx is a gui frontent to latex. It si not wysiwyg but let you focus on document structure. It enables to type your doc nearly as with word or openoffice but then output latex code and enables to have the latex rendering without latex syntax learning. It output pdf directly and also latex.
WYSWYG is how things will look like printed.
Maybe I do not understand LaTex? But it seems outdated and the FreeBSD handbook did make fun of it quite extensively for people thinking they are going to be artist without actually knowing what the document will look like until they print.
Postscript, Windowscript, and PDF make sure what you see on the screen is exactly what you see on a printed document.
There are commercial apps like Pagemaker too that can do this and it makes sense.
http://saveie6.com/
Have you tried TeXnicCenter?
Funny after reading all the commentary, but I seem to remember using TeX on my Atari 16-bit because it was a nice GUI editor compared to the other options and made the printouts - even on my dot matrix Panasonic - look much nicer. Am I misremembering the GUI editing and it just gave me a fully rendered print preview or something? I remember it being amazing at the time either way.
-Matt
Mellel is the best word processor for scientific writing I've ever seen. Its main advantage is stability (of the program and of the layout). One downside is, that it doesn't have a formula generator, but you could use either Grapher or LaTeX Equation Editor to do the job. Here are a few links: On equations on the Mac and Mellel's Homepage
Maybe reportlab fits your needs. It leverages the python language to make pdf documents going from low-level drawings to complex table layouts and page layout.
Much easier than LaTeX if you have needs that don't fit in one of the standard templates, and its programmability makes it more powerful yet.
You just described Lout. Here's a list of the features, taken from Wikipedia:
1) Lout is a batch document formatter [...] it reads a high-level description of a document similar in style to LaTeX and produces a PostScript file which can be printed on most printers. Plain text and PDF output are also available.
2)Lout copies some of its formatting algorithms from TeX but is intended to be much easier to program due to the use of high-level functional programming language, instead of a macro language.
3)While a usable set of LaTeX modules together with TeX binaries takes from 50 to 300 MB, Lout is about 1 MB.
Wikipedia link
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lout
Lout at SourceForge link
http://lout.wiki.sourceforge.net/
Have fun.
anf
I bet everyone has already suggested it but, let's put another oar in...
Simple Latex is ok; but usually some bug or need occurs which means that you *must* make an amendment to an existing format, and then two days later you still haven't figured out how to do it. The often-found combiation of Latex plus Deadline is nerve-tearing.
This is not a signature.
Know what's harder than LaTex when you need math typeset correctly? Anything that's not LaTex.
Agreed, I just finished my PhD thesis in Latex ac ouple of months ago and I have say that I like Latex quite a lot.
Although Latex is not for everyone, once you get to know it, you will see all the benefits. For example, just yesterday a colleague was preparing a paper to submit for a conference, in word (2007 no less) and he spend about 4 hours (or more!) getting the references right. In latex, a combination of using the JabRef [bibtex] database and \citep [Natbib] take care of the references for me.
Not to mention indexes, references (I work in the same Word paper I mentioned putting references in word, having to mark, insert a label, then insert reference, sheesh!).
Similarly, just about two months ago (for my Viva) I decided to "learn" to use Beamer to do my presentation. I tried to do it in Lyx, but I felt like if Lyx prevented me from doing things, I finished going back to Kile and doing my presentation in Latex + beamer.
BTW, for those of you who hate the Maths package available in Microsoft Office, I would recommend Texpoint. That lets you edit your formulas in Latex inside powerpoint, and creates an image (png IIRC). That is what I used (before going to Beamer).
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
DocBook has GUI editors when you need them, and an XML source if you want to tweak the underlying structure either in a text editor or generic XML editing tool. Depending on the renderer you use it can support SVG, TeX or MathML for equations.
foo mane padme hum
I had moderate success with TeXmacs back in the days (despite the name it is not a LaTeX frontend).
http://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/welcome.en.html
Check out Papyrus Office at http://www.rom-logicware.com/. It's really great for scientific documents and it's only 5-10MB on your hard disk.
Papyrus Office is also known to be extremely stable.
-Dennis
Sigs suck!
In the past I have used Word to write a document, then used a few weird conversion tools to formats such as rtf and html to produce a LaTeX file.
Word was good at all the grammar stuff and editing and LaTeX produced a beautiful document at the end.
Now the world has moved on and we have the ODF, so why doesn't someone (me not being a programmer) write a LaTeX that can read the ODF instead of the .tex files. Then I can edit to my heart's content in openoffice or abiword or whatever and produce a final output in LaTeX.
The original poster mentioned that he didn't like the funny fonts in LaTeX but to me that was one of it's beauties. Word and I think openoffice use Truetype which is a quadratic curve spline whereas LaTeX goes a power further and uses cubic splines. All of us who have done linear algebra know that a cubic spline will allow a smoother curve than a quadratic one but that it requires more calculations.
So could openoffice not give the option of using cubic splines??? that would go some way to reducing the gap between LaTeX and the rest!!
What are your opinions on Texmacs. I first discovered it in linux and have also used it with windows. It has been more than sufficient for my needs (which are not that demanding) and seems to make certain parts of TeX easier
I wrote up my thesis in DocBook. It had everything I needed then, but I don't know how it would handle formulas etc... At the time I had the impression that it was more specialized for software documentation. But that was five years ago, and I'm pretty sure that a lot happened since then.
Editing XSL-FO was pretty much a pain, though.
BTW- the DocBook book itself was written in Docbook.
> I don't know if this is the case for you, but I find most people who find LaTeX hard are using it wrongly.
Very true words. The whole idea of LaTeX is that it does all the formatting work for you. So complaining about "complexity" is really missing the issue: LaTeX is as complex as necessary for the task. Use it wisely, and it will go a long way.
If you do not want to deal with the complexity of different styles, then a front end like LyX can hide a lot of it. You still get high quality results, you can switch between styles, and you can use additional features manually if necessary. This does not mean that LyX is without fault, but I think it is a step in the right direction (very much unlike Word).
Concerning the OP's question about a document processor without the "compiler metaphor" (and it is a paradigm, not a metaphor)... there is no such thing. The whole idea of a document processor is that things are done right, and not fast. Doing this in real time is just asking for trouble. So you either end up with a draft view as in LyX, or with a sluggish real time preview (as you find in a few LaTeX editors). Anyway, with a document processor you are supposed to put down semantics, and not form, so looking at the exact final form is wasted precision. If you want to have certain things in certain places, LaTeX has commands and overrides to achieve that.
I don't know if this is the case for you, but I find most people who find LaTeX hard are using it wrongly. Specifically, they are trying to precisely control the formatting, placement, etc. etc. of everything in their document. This is, pretty much, how you use today's WYSIWYG word processors.
no, this is how you _wrongly_ use today's WYWIWYG word processors and end up with a horribly hard to maintain document.
It's very cumbersome and arcane to do the same in LaTeX, and the results don't usually look very good in either case.
isnt that the common complaint about Word, and usual reason why everyone should use LaTeX instead? because it's cumbersome and a nightmare to work with. if you learn to use word properly (start with paragraph styles and work on from there) it's a much better program than people give it credit for. it's just that most people try and micromanage the document, and then when you decide you want to change a font size you have to change it in 20,000 different places, instead of just editing the style.
that said, I still dont know anyone who can use word for bibliographies/referencing effectively. LaTeX completely dominates it in that respect.
TIAEAE!
Wish I had mod points. Informative, at least.
Something bad is coming when people are suddenly anxious to tell the truth.
You have to install new packages for new features
apt-get install
compatibility issues are everywhere
Compatibility between what and what?
you need to know commands for everything
Not if you use a GUI like Kile.
table composition is torture
\begin{tabular}{ll} col & col \\ col & col \end{tabular}
image insertion is an odyssey if you don't have the 'right' format
\includegraphics{foo.png}
Use \DeclareGraphicsRule to convert
and you need to be a LaTeX Jedi master to create a new document class
You can thank Don for that; the underlying language (TeX) is indeed about the most user-hostile language ever devised. Fortunately, LaTeX hides it pretty well.
However, designing new document classes is hard: there are dozens of parameters and rules that go into one. LaTeX actually makes it fairly simply by reducing it to a bunch of parameters.
but that is not stuck in the 1980s with the compiler metaphor and weird font technology.
Trust me, it's not the 80's. The 80's was the decade of graphical user interfaces and object oriented programming. TeX is more like the 1960's: machine language and macro processing. LaTeX is trying to bring it into the 1980's.
An application with visual interface and so on
Well, if you want a WYSIWYG version of LaTeX... you can't have it. People thought 20 years ago that TeX/LaTeX wouldn't last long because of GUIs. But nobody has figured out how to combine the power of something like LaTeX with a WYSIWYG interface. Microsoft Word tried, and you can see the result for yourself.
There are several LaTeX editing environments with live preview; those are quite neat and help a lot.
Does anybody know of a decent, scientific-structured document processor that is a modern application?
LaTeX is pretty good at what it does, that's why it's still the de-facto standard for scientific publishing. It's also an intermediate format that a lot of word processors can output. The other standard in this area is DocBook, but if you thought LaTeX was messy...
I'd recommend to invest the time to learn LaTeX reasonably well; if you write a lot of science, it's worth it. You'll write faster than you ever could with any WYSIWYG tool.
I think any LaTeX replacement will basically have a LaTeX syntax, but replace the underlying language (TeX) with something more modern. Also, TeX's layout algorithms, groundbreaking as they were 20 years ago, are pretty obsolete.
I use latex on linux and it is fine. On windows MikTex actually goes and finds missing pacakges and downloads and installs them for you which is cool. Texclipse (Eclipse plugin) makes a nice editor - its not WYSIWYG like lyx but rather a code editor and understands the latex codes and bib references etc. I have used Word DecWrite FrameMaker WordPerfect - you name it and I have used them all in anger, nothing tops latex. We looked again acouple of years ago for a large long project we started then and decided for Latex - especially as Adobe droped framemaker on linux) We recently introduced a yound student to latex, he was using word. Within a couple of days he said "I am doing everythign in tex from now on". So train up and become a Jedi master - stay away from the dark side (WYSYWIG;)
Imagine a beowulf of these.
Know what's harder than LaTex when you need math typeset correctly? Anything that's not LaTex.
I needed a few equations for a [rejected :-(] paper I wrote recently and, rather than try to do it all in TeX/latex, I used the free "TeXaide" tool. (Hmm. A quick search seems to show it's no longer available from Design Science... that's a pity.)
Essentially, it is the equation editor from MS-word except that it produces TeX code that you simply paste into you document. A complete doddle to use.
You win this thread. Pity that the comment scores don't go higher than +5
siener's youtube channel
That is FUD. (Though the FUD is Adobe's own fault. One of their departments stupidly issued a deprecation notice while another was basing a major future direction of the company around FM.)
The fact is that the technical document departments in large enterprise are converting to modular DITA, and FrameMaker is one of the major content creation tools with good support for DITA XML.
So Adobe is making plenty of money from FM, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. You can be sure that they will keep investing in it. But there may be more emphasis on improving its abilities to generate good DITA XML than on improving its abilities to do typesetting directly.
Personally, I think it would be incredibly awesome if Google Docs (or one of its competitors) eventually got some sort of LaTeX support. Having a tool like that to allow multiple people to edit either the raw LaTeX source or a LyX-style graphical interpretation would be fantastic for scientific collaboration.
If you use an editor like Texlipse, a plugin for the eclipse framework, latex becomes EVEN easier. You have the possibilities to add and use your own shortcuts together with 'code'-completion and all other advantages eclipse gives you... biuld in version control and all.
Backwards compatibility is nice, but there are really things horribly wrong with TeX: its macro language defies any kind of language design principles and its layout algorithms are aging, make numerous errors, and are hard to customize for new styles. LaTeX itself repudiates many of TeX's design decisions by changing the syntax and hiding as much of the ugliness and TeX design problems as possible. And Knuth's macro-riddled "literate programming" paradigm that was used for writing TeX itself was another abject failure; no sane programmer or computer scientist writes software like that.
At some point, we need to throw out the underlying TeX language and create a new LaTeX processor, one that actually has a real, modern programming language in it and one that fixes the many algorithmic deficiencies in TeX that have become clear over the years.
Not compatibility between (La)TeX versions, compatibility between different packages. Everything in TeX needs some package, and when I try to combine different stuff I invariably run into incompatibilities between different packages, so I totally agree with the submitter's sentiments that the TeX world is full of incompatibilities.
The output is still the best I've seen to date, but TeX is just an awful awful language to program -- which makes doing anything nontrivial an utter chore and insanely error-prone. Especially the macro parameter expansion... Oh, the Pain! Combine that with absurd and archaic limitations like the fixed-size stack/heap, etc. etc. and you have a complete nightmare.
HAND.
I'm not submitter, but I share some of his frustration.
First, I've used LaTeX since around 1987 (that was on the Amiga, btw) and I'm still convinced that for most of the documents I write LaTeX is clearly superior to other systems I've tried.
That's not to say there aren't some obvious points for improvement. Font support is archaic and really not something from this decade (nor the previous). I understand that XeTeX has some improvements in this area, I'll check it out. I need/want to use the Gentium font but after jumping through all the hoops that are indicated in the sparse documentation, it no worky.
But, for me, the number one frustration is the sheer impossibility to create a new base class. I write software for a living and have used many obfuscated languages. However, I just don't "get" the intricacies of programming for LaTeX.
I would love to have a letter.cls that doesn't look like it's an afterthougth. There is dinbrief.cls, but that has all sorts of problems of its own. I've tried several times to create a letter class, for A4 paper, that looks professional to use in a business. No such luck, I just couldn't do it. And the lack of alternatives on the 'Net seem to indicate that there aren't many others that could do it either.
So, to summarize, LaTeX a wonderful tool for typesetting reports and articles. Especially if those are heavy on math. But for other correspondence it isn't so great, or at least, it hasn't kept up with modern developments in font technology and document design.
ConTeX is another set of TeX macro packages. It's is slightly newer than LaTeX, and might hide more of the internals of TeX.
OTOH, LateX probably has more momentum going, and you seem to need the deep features. So finding any
I usually use plain wordprocessors (grudgingly used Word in the past, and OO now), but for the larger documents I always return to LateX. I don't need all those skills that often, and it is nice then that everything is still the same. I nowadays use LyX a lot too, for a lot of non-throwaway documentation
WinEdt is lean and yet flexible enough. It helps you easily manage large documents split into different files and helps avoiding syntax errors to vastly improve your productivity with. You're able to edit, compile and debug your documents using the same WinEdt application.
I've used it for mulitple lengthy documents with above average complexity and it never failed me.
This would analogous to writing in TeX instead of LaTaX. Yes, some people do that. But it forces you to fiddle around with formatting details instead of just writing your content.
And MathML is much too low level, as AC pointed out. It's not intended to be human readable.
What you would really need is, say, a DITA plug-in that supports some nice human-readable math language, like OOo-math or troff/eqn. Or a DocBook extension, for those who still use that. Then the DITA (or DocBook) would render to XSL-FO with MathML, and from there to PDF, HTML, Eclispse Help, HTML Help, etc. Or perhaps even to TeX or LaTeX, if you'd like.
Why on earth?!?!? Nobody in this forum seems to think Silicone is an excellent Latex replacement.
I'm amazed at the seriousness of this thread. It says something about the demographic inside this topic that somehow disturbs me.
Even though the name contains TeX, i don't think TeXmacs actually uses TeX. The documents produced look good, and it seems to be extensible, for example there are lots plugins for many CAS, like Maxima.
http://www.texmacs.org/
Long time ago when preparing my thesis, instead of learning all the details about LaTeX, I was using LyX (see: http://www.lyx.org/) with very good results.
My 2 cents ;-)
unless you posted anonymously before, grandparent doesn't count for you.
unless you posted anonymously before, grandparent doesn't count for you.
unless you posted anonymously before, grandparent doesn't count for you.
wait, this method only would get me one... d'oh!
When all else fails, try.
tried TeXShop? (OS X)
Scripus + Inkscape + the TexTex plugin for Inkscape can give you some gorgeous-looking technical documentation if you're not committed to a system that's theoretically independent of layout. My experience with LaTeX has always been that I actually spend more time on layout than writing. If there were a LaTeX plugin for Scribus similar to TexTex for Inkscape then you'd be in business.
I've never understood this desire to separate content from presentation. Presentation is part of the content. LaTeX seems more like an effort to force people who don't know better into using a specific format of presentation that's well-suited to most technical needs. A better solution would be a word-processor with nice type-setting and equation capabilities and some good default templates for technical writing. MS Office and OOo will never get there for reasons already discussed.
Ok, it's complex, that is, not easy to learn. But IMHO true ease-of-use has to also consider correctness, that is, the fanciest GUI doesn't help you if the software produces incorrect results or crashes regularly.
TeX may be the most "correct" software in existence, at least for anything of some complexity. Not only is Donald Knuth one of the worlds best programmers, and TeX is written in a language he specifically designed to be readable and to make it easy to understand the programming logic, but he even offered a reward for the discovery of outstanding bugs that started with $2.56 and doubled every year. I don't think anyone has collected on that for a while...
LaTeX has been retrofitted to use TrueType - it's called XeTeX, and it's good stuff.
And Unicode, OpenType and Unicode, it's brilliant, but you still have to be a "LaTeX Jedi" to use it, which apparently bothers the original poster, but then XeTeX and LyX should do the trick.
This is your father's mark-up. The typesetting system of a Jedi Knight. Not as clumsy or random as a WYSIWYG editor. An elegant program for a more civilised age.
"Hannibal's plans never work right. They just work." Amy/A-Team
I have used LaTeX since about 1990. I still have some old documents from that time that I can read - and with very minor tweaks re-format. I wrote a book with LaTeX in 1994 and published my wife's full-colour cookery book with it in 2002. I am just finishing off a book written with DocBook XML and LaTeX is certainly simpler to use - in fact my wife prefers LaTeX to MS Word. My approach is to concentrate on the content and define a small set of macros suited to the job in hand (e.g. an "ingredients" environment in the case of cookery books). Class design is a bit of a black art, and I could wish it to be simpler, but the key is to keep things simple and well structured. I find the LaTeX Companion series of books to be enough to get that job done. If you are rigorous about separating all the styling into the class files then you also parse the .tex files quite straightforwardly.
MikTex is really good. LEd is pretty good free IDE, not really WYSIWYG but with instant preview.
-- mg
Having just written and published a book in Latex and being a LaTeX-user for many years, I share most of your criticisms. LaTeX does its job, but it sucks. And most LaTeX enthusiasts have no clue about typesetting, even though they think they have--Many books about LaTeX have an absolutely horrible look and layout. In fact, LaTeX is partly responsible for the decline of typesetting quality in the academic domain, since many publishers nowadays expect you to deliver a book camera-ready instead of hiring a pro to do the typesetting. (You can do good typesetting in LaTeX, but that requires you to go through every paragraph and adjust and check the word spacing manually, and do a lot of other tedious things that no unpaid hobbyist typesetter does.)
So I've also been looking for alternatives for many years and have come to the conclusion that there are none. lout has a cleaner underlying programming language, but has much less extensions and has a too small user base. Then there are a number of document preparations systems, for example aft, sisu and various xml based ones. Some of them have nicer markup than LaTeX, but none of them allow you to typeset as much math as LaTeX does. They are more suitable for large organizations that want to publish the same document in various formats (html, pdf, etc.)
My advice is to use OpenOffice Writer for documents that don't contain many formulas, and use LaTeX for all math-related stuff. As long as you don't try to tweak the layout and use as few packages as possible, LaTeX is fine and there is no way around it.
I am a Technical Writer who has used LaTeX and MS Word over 8 years . My former employer forced me to use LaTeX to write technical documents such as user guides and assembly procedures. It was for the most part a joy to use. I used WinEdt (windows) as my LaTeX authoring tool. So not only did I need to learn LaTeX but also the macro language of WinEdt for automating common tasks. The main criticisms I have is the difficulty to create complex tables and the inability for a third-party to update documents unless they understand LaTeX. I rarely used LaTeX to write scientific content. My current employer forces me to use Word to write technical documents. Word is easier to produce a single stand-alone document, but I would prefer to use LaTeX to create documents for projects that need to \include snippets from other documents. In LaTeX, referencing figures and tables is solid. To summarise: LaTeX is the King for producing consistent, reliable, clean and fully featured PDF documents without dealing with the brokeness of Adobe Acrobat. Word is the King for creating a one-off document.
No one's (I think) mentioned longevity yet. This is a really important benefit to something like LaTeX, especially for academics.
I wrote my PhD thesis in LaTeX 20 years ago. I still have the source in my home area somewhere, and it still works perfectly. I needed a copy for my homepage and I was able to reformat it to make a double-sided, single-line-spaced, 10pt PDF in just a few minutes.
With LaTeX, papers aren't fire-and-forget. You can be pretty confident that if you come back to a subject again, maybe many years later, what you wrote last time will still be useful.
I use an online real time latex editor, no need to install anything
http://www.sitmo.com/latex/
How is LaTeX3 going? Long time no news.
Also, is anyone using ConTeXt? Last time I checked I didn't find anything it can do the LaTeX cannot.
I am going to stick with LaTeX2e for as long as it takes for LaTeX3 to get ready.
BTW, there is a nice MediaWiki plugin for collaborative LaTeX.
As some has suggested in the comments, what you are asking for is a type settig tool, not a document processor. I don't have personal experience on any but latex (and I'm very happy with it) but I think that the only true alternatives are either proprietary solutions (which will lock you in a particular product for ages) or using an Xml based open standard, like Docbook (a derivative of SGML, the precursor of all Xml stuff).
All our documentation was in LaTeX and we moved in 2001 over to XML DocBook. The reason for this is that we are able to process the information so much easier through standard XML tools. DocBook is quite big and polluted with all sorts of domain specific aspects, but we restrict ourselves to a relatively small subset and do automatic course note generation from a knowledge repository of little docbook documents. We still render via LaTeX as the LaTeX rendering is more mature than the FOP rendering.
If you don't mind the Stephen Wolfram kool-aid, Mathematica 6 seems to have some pretty decent (and semantic) markup. At least, the one Mathematica guy I know raves about it.
I still prefer LaTeX myself.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Latex is to Word what Linux is to Windows :)
If you like to create *perfect* things yourself, then use Latex/Linux
If you want to let the computer do it fast (but probably far from *perfect*) and go on to the next thing, use Word/Windows
I prefer the second option... And I get lots of nice things done
That makes it look like the math problems were solved with a pencil, the way a real mathematician would do it.
Actually, there is a book co-authored by Knuth ("Concrete Mathematics") that used a custom-made font for the math parts that was inteded to look like an accurate math teacher wrote it.
So why is it that all of these math-typing programs insist on alternating caps and lowercase in their names? I mean, that was cool and all when I was in sixth grade and we wanted to look "leet", but it just looks odd now.
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
The language for creating new BibTex styles is so retarded it's not even funny. Basically, you can't do it.
Check out the biblatex package (http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/biblatex.html). It is far easier to create and modify bibliography styles. Although still rather new, it is rapidly gaining users and hence robustness. I work in the humanities and bibliography citation has never been handled adequately by any BibTeX style. I stumbled across biblatex a year ago and never looked back.
I just think you've used the wrong tools. In Linux there's nothing better (convincing me otherwise won't work, I've used everything there is) than Kile, and on Windows Technixcenter seems to be the best option.
I'd say if you really are over writing a few real articles in LaTeX then you should really know enough to be able to deal with 90% of situations. I've written some of them myself, and a dissertation, and I still say I wouldn't change LaTeX (actually the tetex+kile combo) up for anything else that we have today. For scientific papers and articles we simply don't have anything better today.
I'm not convinced that anyone could create such a wysiwyg environment that could reliably replace LaTeX, and I'd stick to "what you type is closer to what you get than anything else you could find out there" and stay with LaTeX (with kile in my case).
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
putting a lameness filter on slashdot is like putting a shit filter on your asshole.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I dont find word and latex compete. In my thesis I used both. I wrote the main chunk in word for ease, spelling / grammar checker etc. then copy / pasted into a latex document doing the refs as I went.
I have discovered a truly remarkable sig which this post is too small to contain.
BTW, for those of you who hate the Maths package available in Microsoft Office, I would recommend Texpoint. That lets you edit your formulas in Latex inside powerpoint, and creates an image (png IIRC)
If you don't need to do it from inside Powerpoint, you can try laeqed, a small cross-platform java program that converts LaTeX formulas to .png. It even saves the latex code in the png comment, so you don't need to have to separate files. I've had good use of it when doing posters. Oh, and it's GPLed :-)
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
For my final year project report I worked on the text in a plain ascii text editor until it was DONE. I also scribbled my diagrams a few times until I had the main features.
Then I imported all the text into a fairly fancy typesetting system and got it all laid out in one extremely long day (it wasn't THAT big, but having almost no revisions to the text was a big help).
Now... the actual tools were some text editor whose name I forget but it came with Apollo/Domain, and the typesetting system was Interleaf (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interleaf) which I thought was freaking awesome. However I felt the principle worked really well for me. I would say I would never have gotten it done if I'd allowed myself to get sidetracked by "Desktop Publishing" issues when the text was not nailed down. Interleaf was great at technical diagrams too.
We had some really high-tech tools - a full-page (Portrait mode) monitor and a Laser Printer. Ok but it was the 80s!
who read that as "bad anal orgy guy"? And wondered WTF it had to do with LaTeX?
Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?
I wonder if there is any thought given to how packages age, get complicated, and then fail to keep the learning curve shallow.
Suddenly the smart and lazy look at something like TeX and think: "I'll re-invent a smaller, rounder wheel"
So you need to ponder the full distribution of users, not just the starboard tail where all the shiny people are posting to the newsgroup.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Also, I like the separation of semantic meaning and presentation that comes with modern HTML+CSS, and I don't think LaTeX offers that.
Errr . . . sounds like you haven't really used LaTeX then. Or maybe I've missed something in the melange of CSS tricks that make up the WWW today. The whole point of LaTeX is to separate the formatting from the content, although you do have to annotate the content with tags to invoke the formatting (just like HTML + CSS).
Mon chien, il n'a pas du nez. Comment scent-il? TrÃs mauvais!
Scientific Workplace is what many in my Math Dept at Georgia Southern are using. Though, I do have some users using the combination of MikTex, Texnic Center, GhostScript, Ghostview, and a PDF creator.
Scientific Workplace is not free, but it isn't cheap either. Many of the professors in the dept. have moved to it, and seem to like it the most.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
lout?
From it's homepage:
The system reads a high-level description of a document similar in style to LaTeX and produces a PostScript file which can be printed on most laser printers and graphic display devices. A plain text output option is available, as is a highly experimental PDF output mode (users are encouraged to generate PostScript, then convert to PDF using GhostScript instead.)
I've used the PDF output and definitely it's not that experimental.
Take the use of Dreamweaver in web design -- it lets you get a pretty prototype, but falls far behind hand-coding when it comes to putting the final web page together.
Similarly, you can get a quick approximation of a document (save the equations) in Word or something, but LaTeX gives a little more precision when it comes to the final version.
I think the reason no-one's come up with a decent visual paradigm for inputting equations efficiently is that it can't be done -- in general the number of discrete choices offered by a GUI is far smaller than what can be accomplished by a few keypresses. The problem is memory.
I for one would welcome a modern LaTeX replacement, but I'd still expect a markup language with programming facilities. Once the learning curve is passed, there just isn't another approach that's as efficient. You can make things much easier for a 'Visual Studio/TextMate' type environment, but the fundamental approach of a markup language is the correct one -- you've just got to learn the thing.
John_Chalisque
As many times as people keep asking the same question.
LaTeX has become a virtual standard for scientific & mathematical publication, so I don't think you're going to find much in the way of replacements any time soon.
... I can't disagree that LaTeX has a sharp learning curve, but the same can be said of any programming language.
... Yes, it is.
... Use OpenOffice Draw to export your picture to ".eps". (Be sure to export just the "selected" image, so that it creates an eps bounding box.) This will solve 99% of your LaTeX image problems.
... Most people should not have to create a document class -- they can comfortably start off with an "article" or "report" class and override many of the basic settings. This typically works for most cases. It's quite rare that I've seen anyone having to create a whole new document class when there are many such classes already made and available for free download. (Plus, the typical IEEE or ACM conference usually has their own style files.)
... It's the compiler metaphor which makes LaTeX so powerful, in my opinion. If you read Knuth's TeX book, you'll find that Knuth did this on purpose because (to quickly summarize) he wanted people to focus less on layout and more on writing.
Ever try to submit a conference or journal paper to an IEEE or ACM publication? Some will allow you to submit in Word format, but most will ask you to submit the camera-ready copy in LaTeX.
LaTeX isn't without its faults, to be sure, but it's simply unbeatable when it comes to publishing acceptably-formatted academic papers.
Regarding some of your points, I think that most of them will be cleared up as you become more proficient with the language.
- Under Linux, I find that tetex has almost all of the packages that I require, and under Windows, I find that MikTex has even more.
- "you need to know commands for everything"
- "table composition is torture"
- "image insertion is an odyssey if you don't have the 'right' format"
- "you need to be a LaTeX Jedi master to create a new document class"
- "the compiler metaphor"
Back in 1992, we were forced to use VAX-Document. It was declared, by a boorish, narrow-minded Veep of Engineering that PC's would never catch on - mere toys. DEC-VAX and VMS would live forever. OMG - how much paper and toner we went through back then! You would think the Sierra Club would/should have killed off DEC.
What?...A candle has only two ends?...
No Fucking Way.
Postscript is a printer language. without some more-friendly front end.
Exactly.
I've hacked Postscript too on occasion. But I would never ever imagine trying to write a laid-out page in it from scratch.
If you try, you'll just end up creating a huge pile of macros and end up with something vaguely like TeX, but much harder to use and more limited.
The "modern" format to describe documents is Docbook.
However, it just sucks and its rendering is far from reaching the quality of a LaTeX document.
Txt2tags is a document generator. It reads a text file with minimal markup:
http://txt2tags.sourceforge.net/
I tried use this when it was at version 0.8. Now it's at 2.5. Maybe it is a good solution for some cases, but not all.
I'm still taken aback by the fact that a full LaTeX install is hundreds of megs.
I mean, seriously. There are other typesetters like groff or lout, even apache-fop, are no where near that size. Granted they have less features, but I think still think they're capable of excellent rendering.
For someone like me, who will only really produce one or two types of documents, its a bit of a pain to set up an environment to do so, without it turning into a second operating system.
That being said, I still use LaTeX. It makes my papers way prettier than those chumps that use Word.
LaTex can be arcane. I am no longer a frequent user of LaTex (not in a job which requires that level of output) but I did use it last fall to make a CMYK door hanger for a political campaign by hacking a poster document class. The output to the printer was so good I got an email back saying it was the best they had received for such work. And that is the advantage of Tex, warts and all.
So before trying to write your own from scratch, check around and you might find one that is close enough that you can just make a few minor changes and get what you need.
I don't know if it is what you are looking for, but one alternative to LaTeX is "Lout". Here's the home page for Lout and the Wikipedia page, which provides a quick summary. I've only dabbled with it, but it might be worth a look and isn't on the list of what you've tried. Unfortunately I don't know if there is a GUI front end for it, so that part of your request isn't satisfied.
Q. How do mathematicians solve their constipation?
A. They work their logs out with a pencil.
That's the proper version. Probably something about natural logs in there too!
The key word was "semantic." For example, I dislike \textit for the same reason I prefer <em/>, <cite/>, or other things that might produce italicized text instead of <i/>.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
You mentioned Lyx which is the closest thing to what you want right now, I've used it myself and it's great though once in a while you might need to dive back down into LaTeX.
Anyway, a project that very few people seem to have heard about is Platypus: http://platypus.pz.org/index.html.
A few issues though - it's still at least a year away from matching the feature set of LaTeX, and could use some extra developers since right now it's a one man programming job. In many ways it's intended to be a better version of TeX, check it out!
"You have to install new packages for new features"
You don't say!
I used to write everything in LaTeX until the demands of my job made using the language too inefficient. I found the free tool XMLMind (www.xmlmind.com) that lets you visually create documents using the XML DocBook standard. DocBook basically works the same way as LaTex letting you define chapters, sections, references, etc...
Also, the free version of XMLMind doesn't let you convert to PDF but I found I was able to use CYGWIN's xmlto utility to do the job.
Sorry, but that is wrong. I have tried using MS Word in it's styles usage and it's just a PITA. Sure, you can define styles, but it still does all kinds of screwy things; heaven forbid if you want to define a custom bullet-point style, or if you want to change styles within paragraphs (e.g., emphasis).
Word also seems to do screwy things with multiplying styles for the exact same formatting. In short, anyone who's used word styles for any length of time knows that there are all kinds of horrible problems with screwy things Word does.
Not to mention the zillion other screwy things Word does. The way it deals with tables, when you have to split cell, or merge cells, is just awful. After you've created a split or a merge, try deleting a row or column you want to delete, or inserting a new row or column. It just doesn't work.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
MathML does not seem to be a step in the right direction to me. I'm a card carrying mathematician who has to use LaTeX for papers (although I tend to use it for lectures, presentations and so on, since like the original poster, nothing seems to be available that is better). Latex 3 seems to occupy the same mythology as Duke Nukem Forever.
Whatever problems exist in LaTeX (and there are many), it has one huge strength - it is essentially trivial, after a little practice, for a human to type maths straight into LaTeX format. For this reason discussions in email or within maths mailing lists are often conducted in TeX or LaTeX fragments.
On the other hand, MathML was never designed to be easily human writable, and when I read that years ago, I immediately lost interest - what's the point? When you're typing huge amounts of maths, any sort of helper equation editor is a complete PITA. The irony that the WWW, design by scientists for scientists at its inception sucks so much at rendering mathematics cleanly is never lost on me. If MathML sucks on the web, I guess it sucks for documents too.
I don't know what editor you use for your LaTeX, but in mine a simple
!pdflatex $title.tex && kpdf $title.pdf
(actual commands may vary)
lets me see what it outputs. I imagine if you're using a good text editor you can do the same thing.
This then gets you both advantages, you get to see what you write AND you get the prettification of LaTeX
Agreed. LaTeX IS hard. But if you want to have a painless start, you get LyX and use one of the more world-oriented document classes to type in something. Chances are you will find it to be easy enough to use. I did, too bad I can't use something that reduces my type-a-technical-report time in half document processor at work.
Here's a list of applications to look through.
http://www.linuxlinks.com/Software/Wordprocessors/Typesetting/index.shtml
Registered Linux user # 170078
Yay!!!
I knew early greying would finally work for something useful!!
I've used only three guides to LaTeX to get along with it so far. The first two are free to download, and the third is a book by the father of LaTeX:
1)The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX2?
2)User's Guide for the amsmath Package (Version 2.0)
3)LaTeX: A Document Preparation System
I'll be your candy shop of infinite deliciousity if you'll be my discotheque of endless rump-shaking.
You do not understand the diffrence between 'printing' and typesetting. One example would be the word first. WYSIWYG = a dot over the i Typset = no dot
The big win for me was that I could put my LaTeX docs in subversion and track them that way.
Then i could ask subversion:
"What changes did i make to my dissertation last week?"
Can't really do that with plain old word documents and i'm not sure if there's a workaround now that they are pseudo-html
Some people seem to think Lout is a viable LaTeX replacement, as it uses a functional programming model to typesetting rather than a macro language.
Well we used Mathematica for the formulas. But Doesnt sage help with the mathematical formulas which can be then exported to Latex.
No Fucking Way. Postscript is a printer language. without some more-friendly front end.
Postscript is a Turing-complete language.
As for front end maybe a2ps, and then edit by hand.
You could have just hyperlinked your first comment into the others, thus making the moderators' job a bit easier, in the case they cared.
What sort of documents are you writing? For whom are you writing? It would be easier to offer advice if we knew your goals. I just returned to LaTeX after many years suffering with various WYSIWIG programs, mostly MS Word. Frankly, given that Knuth wrote TeX (and therefore LaTeX) to emulate mathematical typesetting, and the inherent incompatibility between rendering text on the screen and on paper, I don't see any better options. Have you tried some of the LaTeX front ends like TeXnic Center or WinEdt (Windows), or Kile (Linux), that provide macro buttons for creating the more complex document elements like tables and formulas? (I know there are similar programs for the Mac, but I don't remember them off hand.)
I don't know if this is the case for you, but I find most people who find LaTeX hard are using it wrongly. Specifically, they are trying to precisely control the formatting, placement, etc. etc. of everything in their document. This is, pretty much, how you use today's WYSIWYG word processors. It's very cumbersome and arcane to do the same in LaTeX, and the results don't usually look very good in either case.
That sounds like someone who's used LaTeX for a couple classes but no serious document work. I was going to say, I think there are probably 2 or 3 things which could radically improve LaTeX and its complexity.
LaTeX is awesome and it's something else to be reckoned with when it all works, you do have to do a fair amount of work to make it work though.
LaTeX is hard
Didn't Mattel get in trouble having Barbie say that?
BDSM Barbie?
the development ecosystem around TeX is filled with souls that are of lesser stature than Knuth. They're mostly people that need to write mathematics (physicists. mathematicians), as opposed to people that know how write software.
What is software other than applied finite mathematics executed by a machine?
The OP's comments are all valid criticisms of TeX/LaTeX in the 21st century. I'll add my own in a moment but I will start by saying that I love TeX/LaTeX, all my research is published in it, I do all my documentation in it and I've written thousand line class files for it. I am the LaTeX Jedi for my university. I also HATE TeX/LaTeX for everything the OP said and more.
The fundamental problem is the paradigm. TeX was developed in the mid 1970's. NOTHING had graphical front ends. Hell, lots of things didn't even have a monitor or keyboard. Everything was ASCII edited, command line based or punchcards. So it was natural and efficient that D. Knuth wrote a compiled/markup language to describe how a document was laid out. Nroff and troff are mark-up languages and an efficient expression implementation for the time but they didn't understand typesetting thus the need for TeX. The typesetting is necessary but this implementation paradigm is woefully outdated.
Heck TeX was so difficult and outdated by the mid 80's that Lamport had to create LaTeX which is just a set of macros that make TeX sufferable.
But there are two paradigms at play: The first as I described is how you go about expressing an intention, the implementation. The second is the purpose. TeX is designed to capture the world of typesetting which is a very complicated and standardized discipline that dates back hundreds of years. There are strong rules about what makes something well typeset or just junk. TeX understands and performs this purpose better than anything before it or following it. That's why it is unbeatable for typesetting math. D. Knuth learned how to typeset before he wrote TeX.
So you are faced with a tool that excels at its purpose but its implementation is now terrible compared to modern interfaces.
It also suffers from coming from an age when the concept and benefits of object oriented design and inheritance weren't well known and understood. One of my big pet peeves with LaTeX is sometimes I want a list and I want it formatted similar to another list. Why can't I extend that previous list. Like... same format only I want a different font for \begin{emphlist}. Why can't I have different paragraph types that inherit the indent, spacing or font from some other description. Why does \itemsep get reset for every single list?? Microsoft has this right in their styles. But in LaTeX you have to go and basically write a whole new list and all the code for it. And if you change the spacing for the original list it doesn't change for the new list.
The other peeve is yes, I understand the jokes about WYSIAYG. This is a stupid bias heldover from a time when computers weren't fast enough to reformat a paragraph in real time. There's no reason in this day and age that a program could not be created that fully understands and implements typesetting while graphically formatting the results in real time and allow the user to specify any typesetting criteria they want that TeX can perform. None. period. In other words you can have a program that understands typesetting, can be told what to do and yet graphically displays exactly what the output will look like.
Lastly, while TeX is a Turing complete language, it's garbage compared to what we could design. It has a cryptic syntax and horribly complicated paradigm for processing and evaluating "tokens". Do you need to \protect in any other compiled language? And what *exactly* does \protect do... no fair Googling, that's just cheating and a waste of time. It's terrible at representing and manipulating information. Retaining information in memory when your mainframes memory is only 16MB is something that needs to be avoided if you are to process large documents (one of TeX's "classic" advantages). But today when a laptop has 2Gig there isn't a textual document large enough that you can't retain and manipulate it entirely in memory. ODF is just a markup language as well. Why couldn't OO have it's layout engine rewritten to properly understand and implement typesetting? Whe
I will never live for sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
You can use a document processor (like Frame, which is expensive and dying), or OOo, which is close but not equivalent (though still much better than Word for large technical documents), you can use a word processor (Word, etc.), you can use LaTeX, you can use some other markup language (whether XML or other), but you can't beat LaTeX for performance, never mind price-performance.
XML solutions can have near-equivalent results, but you have to pay ~5 kUSD/processor for the formatter licenses and you have to do a lot of work to build the output toolchain. (Guess what I do at work?) It's worth it in a commercial environment, because semantic tagging and form/content separation drive productivity way up, the solution scales across many people, and XML integrates well with content management solution approaches, but it's way more work than LaTeX to set up and get running, even if you just start authoring directly in XSL-FO. (Don't. You won't like it.)
LaTeX has a notable case of the Unix concatenating geniuses problem -- someone of sublime genius does something persons of notable genius explain to regular geniuses, and by the time folks like thee or me get ahold of it, it's not completely obvious how it works or what to do to change it.
LaTeX is still really effective. If you're an academic and need to consider yourself a publication environment, and you're in a field that expects LaTeX submissions, it's definitely a good investment of time to learn.
I am probably feeding a troll here, but I don't understand how this could have gotten "3, insightful". There are lot of things that can be said against LaTeX, and there are lot of reasons plain TeX can be preferable to LaTeX, but the parent post contains none of them.
First, LaTeX designers did not rewrite TeX. LaTeX is a macro package written on top of TeX, every time you use LaTeX, you in fact use TeX. It may not be the best designed package, and your claim that its creators failed to understand TeX does have some merit (the way they tried to hide some "complexities" of TeX and failed), at least you are not the only person claiming that, although others actually have produced some supporting arguments for that claim.
Second, could you perhaps elaborate on the source of your information that Knuth did METAFONT before TeX? It seems to be commonly accepted that he started working on METAFONT when he was already working on TeX, and realized that he will need a way to create fonts, as none of the existing computer fonts were suitable for TeX.
Most importantly, LaTeX generally does not require multiple passes to process a document. Again, LaTeX is just a macro package build on top of TeX, so if TeX can process a document in one pass, so can LaTeX. LaTeX will need multiple passes if your document include any floating material (figures, tables, table of contents, page headers, index etc). The reason is that some of this material must appear on paper before it appears in the source code, and there is simply no way to do that without multiple passes. Back when I was writing my master thesis, I did not know about LaTeX (it was very new then), and I used plain TeX. I wrote a package that produced things like table of contents, list of figures etc. It turned out I did it pretty much exactly the same way designers of LaTeX did (theirs is much more complicated and handles many things mine couldn't), as it is pretty much the only way to achieve this result in TeX: during the first pass, write all this "floating" information into a file, then include the file at a proper place during the second pass. Including this extra stuff changes pagination, which means that a third pass is required to fix that. Sometimes, if you are very unlucky, the change in page numbering or figure placement will cause another change in pagination, so you may need a fourth pass. If you are really unlucky, that is still not enough. Theoretically you can get into a situation where you will never have a document in which all the page numbers and references are correct. It has never happened to me, and I use LaTeX a lot. As far as I can tell, there is no way to avoid multiple passes for purposes of floating material.
Anyway, number of command line utilities and LaTeX editors can be used to completely hide this from you (unless you run in the very unlikely situation described above where an infinite number of passes is needed). They run LaTeX, detect if it needs to be ran again, and run it again until all is correct.
As far as writing core mods for TeX, number of people are working on that. There are PdfTeX, XeTeX, Aleph, LuaTeX at least. Lot of good work going into these projects, look them up. There are also other macro packages besides LaTeX: CONTeXT, eplain, lollipop, ... But none of them will be able to "keep with the one pass elegance" if you want to have an automatically generated table of contents at the beginning of the document.
AccountKiller
I actually prefer lambskin to latex.
Even with all its problems, I'd have given just about anything to have the table support in LaTeX that they have in Word. Latex has no wrap support whatsoever. I guess the theory was to give the user absolute control over the look of the table. But since it's not wysiwyg, it's a crap shoot whether or not your table is going to even fit on the page. And if you're off by a bit, you have to go in and re-edit each row by hand. Best part? If your table is too big, it will just go right ahead and write that thing directly off the page. Like that helps me. Splitting tables between pages? Be prepared for hours of excruciating detail work. Even the packages that claim to support that are dubius at best. Thanks supertabular, I really don't need two pages of tables with completely different column sizing. And editing those things? It's just lines and lines of data and \'s and & symbols. It's like reading ancient code.
Now don't get me wrong - in many ways I'd be very lost without latex - the ability to just dump writing into a style sheet is a godsend. But spending frantic hours fiddling with sizing did not exactly make my thesis writing less stressful.
...no two people are not on fire.
The article does not mention any specific problems the author has with LaTeX. It is especially revealing that at the end he says `lyx is just a frontend to LaTeX'. So what is wrong with that if it does what it is supposed to? TeX was supposed to be a typographical engine on top of which typesetting systems are built (like LaTeX). It has AMAZING documentation (the TeXbook), even a fully documented source code printed in the form of a book. Outdated font technology? Like pdf, truetype and Type ii (or whatever) fonts are all that good and modern. I have trouble reading old .pdfs already with Adobe Reader, yet I can still easily process my 15 year old tex files. Read the specs for .dvi. They are well thought out, albeit somewhat limited with respect to graphics and unusual typesetting styles. Heck, I even tweaked TeXs source code when I needed to and consider it time well spent (I am not a programmer). It is not the design of TeX (and do not forget METAFONT and METAPOST) that is the problem, it is the way Knuth's excellent paradigm got misused (I never use LaTeX for this reason). So use LyX (or anything else out there) to produce TeX sources. I am afraid if people jump into designing a totally new and improved typesetting system all this modern flak like OO programming, truetype fonts and other crap will work its way into it (not to say OO programming does not have its uses but it not nearly as universal and convenient as many would make you beleive). TeX and METAFONT are beautiful if not canonical, and I am yet to find another piece of software that does not look like a hastily thrown together collection of hacks in comparison. Build on top of it. Better yet, take some time to learn it and use raw TeX. I do, including complicated nested tables. Takes a bit of patience but the results are spectacular.
LaTeX is hard
Hold everything! I gotta call Mattel. They'll love this one: Dominatrix Barbie!!
He specifically wanted to avoid TeX becoming a full fledged programming language and I believe he expected other front ends to produce TeX commands but was eventually convinced to add some programming features to TeX.
It's hard for me to imagine that Knuth was eventually convinced to add some programming features. Much of TeX is written in TeX. The programming features go to the core of the design. It hardly seems like he wanted to avoid these features but was eventually convinced to add them to Tex.
Do you have a source that backs up your assertion the Knuth wanted to avoid making Tex a programming language?
The trouble I found recently when submitting a paper was not LaTeX (or LyX) per se but the journal side not having a their own accepted document class even though they said that LaTeX was an acceptable format for submission.
After about a *year* of vague feedback, I finally realized that they were not accepting my final edits due to the numbering format of the references! Since I wasn't worrying about that due to the separation of content and style with LaTeX, it took a while to figure out that they didn't have their own class they were going to apply and wanted me to do style editing. Since I couldn't find a class that matched what they wanted, I ended up having to recreate all the references manually ... kind of defeating a lot of the purpose of using LaTeX.
Looking at the final paper in the journal, it looks like they went and manually retyped everything in Word anyways. It was frustrating that they accepted TeX yet completely ignored what makes it great for journal submissions.
Before you dump a document processor for wysiwig (not meaning math, but rather the whole thing) -- understand that it's at least possible that your productivity will go down the toilet.
With wysiwyg, you spend a lot of time making things look nice. With a document processing system like LaTeX, you spend a lot of time on writing.
It takes real discipline to use a wysiwyg word processor and not waste half your time trying to make it look good.
Hi javierzinho.
I'm sorry you've gotten tired of LaTeX, but I really don't have a replacement to offer you. I am very interested in typography and have come to the conclusion that LaTeX is really the best system for typesetting scientific documents.
Some people recommended desktop publishing software like InDesign or Quark. These sorts of programs will give you well-typeset math and text and will generate text, but do not shine at automation.
If you've used LaTeX so long, I'm surprised you're still having all sorts of problems like you describe. Image insertion isn't all that hardâ"the formats supported are clear and conversion isn't too hard. (The compiler should really know how to do conversion for you, I agree, but that does not make it hard to know how to use the software.) Yes, creating a new document class is pretty advanced stuff, but, well, that is an advanced task. You do need to know commands for anything you want to do, but at the end of the day, you don't need to know all that many to get by fine. When you don't, the answer is usually a very quick search away.
You claim that LaTeX is stuck in the 80s with "the compiler metaphor" and "weird font technology." I wish to defend (La)TeX a bit. The compiler metaphor is even to today fairly necessary for what LaTeX does. To do the same sort of processing would result in a laggy-to-unworkable WYSIWYG display. And as to the font technology and all the little quirks where TeX does things its own way and not in a more standard way, I give TeX a lot of slack. It has out-survived a lot of technologies rising and falling. From a user perspective, that means your TeX will always be there. It's a dangerous thing to get in bed with new technology; when you marry the technology of today, you may be a widow tomorrow.
I'm sorry I cannot help you more. It really sounds like the closest thing to what you want is a word processor like Word, but you don't want to hear that (nor do I want to tell you it).
Good luck!
Right. And you enter your programs by soldering contacts on the circuit board.
ever heard of \emph?
I have been using XSLT, DocBook XSL, and Apache FOP for many years to produce my scientific and techincal documentation. I use Inkscape for my drawings and keep them in SVG.
FOP still leaves a few things to be desired (plus it is very slow and memory intensive) but it has gotten better in the past year.
FOP seems to generate decent PDFs even with lots of complex vector graphics and text layout.
In many ways plain TeX is much easier. Unlike LaTeX, it will accept a plaintext document with no markup as input (and actually produce decent output). The math markup is the same as LaTeX, so you don't lose anything there.
On the downside, when it comes to more advanced typesetting, TeX gets more complicated quickly. (LaTeX was originally Layman's TeX, after all.) Tables are more complex, and if you have to conform to a specific template or styleguide, then LaTeX makes it easier to just load it up. But I have personally found LaTeX to be harder for simple jobs because I have to define various unnecessary (to me) document types, sections, etc. before I can actually write, which means I have to have a model of my document structure in hand first, and understand the templates I am using.
It's like programming in a framework; you have to know the framework first. You can save a huge amount of time if the framework actually matches what you are doing (eg. producing a publication-ready paper for a particular journal). If not, the framework is just a nuisance.
1. I have been looking for a way to define multiple bibtex keys for a single citation, as one might like to do in a multi-author document (each author may have their own key-naming conventions). I have not yet found a way to do this. Maybe I'm missing an easy solution here?
2. Also, adding url links to the bibliography (or any links to the document) takes a quite a bit of fiddling with formatting. Line breaks for links don't work very well. I've also found that choosing pdflatex or latex processing matters a lot in the way you do things (links for the hyperref package for example).
I love the structure that latex introduces in creating documents. The fact that the "Tex-monster" produces pretty (very pretty) output is almost secondary to me.
TeX/LaTeX have been used for scientific journal articles for over 20 years. It's going to be difficult to replace something that has proven itself to be reliable for that length of time.
Please remember that your "structured document processor" needs to be supported by the journal you're going to submit to.
And also remember that journals already know what their layout requirements are, and already provide the necessary header files, so unless you're a journal publisher yourself I have to question why you need to create your own document class.
I've personally used TeX/LaTeX for 20 years. The absolute best implementation I've ever seen is TeXtures by Blue Sky Research. I started using TeXtures (v0.91) back in 1988. Unfortunately, it's only available on the Mac. However, if your job is to produce high-quality scientific publications then buying a Mac for TeXtures is probably the best use of your time and money. It really is that good.
The user interface is very Mac-like (always has been), and you can see the typeset results immediately as it dynamically updates your typeset document as you type.
Dealing with tables is easy, create all tables in excel and embed them in the word document, then you don't have to deal with the way word adds and splits cells and whatnot. Make it look good in excel, and add it. This is why people use office suites.
Well, a little bit of research shows that the p-attribute for tables will wrap them.
Btw, the way MS handles tables blows as well. See the problems I mentioned above. It's really awful.
My suggestion for editing tables in LaTeX, is to create a script to convert them to csv tabular format that OO.org can open up, and then edit them there. Then convert back from tabular format.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
The main problem here is that making such a program without throwing away at least some of the good features of TeX/LaTeX is hard, and the market is small so there is not much manpower available. There is at present not even a full-fledged GUI toolkit for mathematical typesetting (GtkMathView is good, but this really should be integrated tightly with a text typesetting engine such as Pango).
One attempt you might want to have a look at is TeXmacs, which at least keeps a very structured approach to document creation and has all the TeX typesetting and layout algorithms.
Maybe I am being naieve here, but doesn't what you use depend on what the journal asks for? I've been using LaTeX for years since its the preferred format for APS journals. At this point I'm past the learning curve for LaTeX, so I don't really struggle much with it. Some journals prefer Word instead so if you submit to those journals you have to use Word with its inane equation editor. Its kind of a pain, but the important thing is to make the paper acceptable to the journal so it gets published and people can build on your work.
Now if its something simple like class notes, the output quality isn't all that critical and you can use whatever you want. I personally use LaTeX, but just use whatever is easiest.
http://www.adobe.com/products/incopy/
Not sure if it is exactly what you need, but this sure will make your documents look pretty!
Take a look at tbook http://tbookdtd.sourceforge.net/
I don't think its what YOU want but it may be of interest to many readers.
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
[OFFTOPIC]
i don't need a whole thread for this so i'm going to ask this here.
i'm looking for an app that will help me make something like an org/flowchart that will allow me to collapse/hide the portions above or below it. What i'm trying to do is make a system for classifying words and meanings that operate on an either/or basis. For instance Noun Related vs. Verb Related. Noun Related divides into Nouns and Adjectives. Nouns into Abstract and Concrete. Each division adds a bit, so Abstract Nouns might be 111. But i'll want enough space to get it down to very specific meanings. So it's like a 20 questions chart for every word.
i tried Visio and found that i needed links from page to page. i'd rather be able to navigate up and down, while showing a step or two up and a step or two down. atM, i'm thinking an database with something like Flash to render it.
What do you guys suggest for this purpose?
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
1. Rewrite Tex in another language. (Heresy!)
2. Add interfaces that will construct internal parse trees without
having to write TeX source. You could still write TeX and
compile it - but this would help support a UI.
3. Implement de-batched operation. E.g. An interface funcion could
be called to immediately layout a box (or a complete document)
defined by the caller.
4. Develop UI tools to create templates.
5. Develop UI tools (or work with lyx) to support mostly-WYSIWYG
operation. User changes would call the interface to produce
immediate output for display. All your favourite tweakables
could be tweaked and the results viewed in real time.
Anyone interested in a sourceforge project?
I think this is one of those cases where you get to pick two of three. Do you want (1) Free, (2) first rate typography or (3) Ease of use. Pick any two. You can't have all three at the same time.
If you need fine control over typography then the current industry standard is Adobe's "InDesign". Most of what you read in print is designed with this software. But if you want free and easy to use then you have to use a word processor like Open Office. If you want very good typography and free then I think you are stuck with LaTex.
Adobe FrameMaker is actually pretty much what you just described. Additionally, it has an API back-end that you can use to drive it, if you're the code-writing type. Takes a little getting used to some of the concepts in it, but mostly because there's so much functionality there.
LyX is a really nice front-end to LaTeX. With ImageMagick, I haven't had any image format problems. True, it does not help create new document classes, but I just Google for them and find what I need. TeXLive should take care of your dependency issues.
Have you run through its tutorial or used their online documentation? It's really a nice, modern app. Cross-platform. GPL. Give it another try.
The problem is that in the real world, you can't just let LaTeX do its thing and make your document "beautiful" (according to Lamport's and Knuth's idea of beauty) -- quite often the journal editor, thesis office, whatever, wants the formatting just *so*, and trying to get the formatting that way in LaTeX is like fighting a mule. Of course, the right way to handle this is is for the people in charge to create packages which will do the work for you, but often the people see the formatting issue as *your* problem and not *theirs*.
Math in OpenOffice is even uglier than in MS Word.
While OO math is slightly more limited than MS it has one incredibly useful feature: a text editor. I can edit my equations in a text box rather than have to play with the GUI. You can also get OOLatex but that would probably be missing the point.
Obviously I wouldn't push OOo as a viable substitute for LaTeX
Have you tried OOoLatex?
I used TeX in college in 1983, it was great for highly technical writing, but more than a bit complicated to use.
LaTex is easier.
I have not found anything else that works better, although some solutions mentioned above are less complicated.
What you're talking about sounds exactly like the problems web designers are having with HTML. You can't control the look of the page. Web designers go through all sorts of pain and headaches just to get a page to look like they want to (single pixel wide images for spacing for example) when it could have been designed with rigid formatting in mind.
Oh, don't give me that "but the browser decides how it should look" garbage: given enough wiggle room in the specs everyone will design their web browsers in such a way as to make it impossible for a page to look good on all of them.
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
Is there any scientific journal that acccepts submissions in other formats than Latex or MS Word?
I'm suprised noone has mentioned Docbook. Is there a descent front-end out there that people like? I only know of oXygen, but don't know how well it works.
Try rubber.
It's a script that takes care of converting figures to the right format, it will run BibTex for you and run LaTeX as many times as needed.
With just one command line argument it can switch all the compiling tools to produce dvi, ps or pdf output.
What about Lyx?
http://www.lyx.org/
Tried TexMaker?
http://www.xm1math.net/texmaker/
Free cross-platform LaTeX editor
Regarding the awkward font mechanism, have a look at Xe(La)TeX: http://scripts.sil.org/xetex (or the upcoming luaTeX, http://www.luatex.org/).
For an experimental from-scratch replacement, look at Ant, http://ant.berlios.de/
Concerning bibliographies, the biblatex package is moving things forward (together with the many bibtex-aware bibliography managers). Graphics have gotten a big helper since the inception of the pgf/TikZ packages (for info about packages, see http://www.ctan.org/)
A lot of good editors are around to lighten the (not-so-heavy) code burden: emacs, kile, winedt, texshop, ...
If you want things to be simpler, but still get acceptably typeset (math/science) stuff, you're currently out of luck.
No easy way to do scientific notation? I defined a simple command so \scinot{10.6}{-6} does what you would expect. No dedicated "degrees" symbol? I defined one.
It's my personal preference (not necessarily that of anyone else), but I would never switch to a front end that took away my ability to create tools to make my life easier.
For the record, the definition is
\newcommand{\scinot}[2]{\ensuremath{#1 \times 10^{#2}}}
Hey there, joined to say sumthing, cuz you seemed to need a good couple trial replacements. I've got one recomendation and it is called "Syntext Serna" and is pretty amazing, and is a XML document editor, and MathML editor that is quite modern (released a new version just today antually). They have a a quite complete tutorial on their site, and can indeed output to PDF, docbook, you name it. It's a nice application and I hope it can be your LaTeX replacement with some practice. http://www.syntext.com/products/serna/index.htm Enjoy the free trial, and buy a licence when your up to it, I think it may be your best option, considering you actually read my reply ;)
Mathcad is awesome and cannot be beat for calculation documentation. http://www.ptc.com/products/mathcad/
I took my thesis to the printer, he remarked how glad he was that, finally, someone had thought about making the margins large enough that the text would be readable once printed and bound.
Wow, must be some printer. My printer can only complain (paper jam etc)
At least they look different from all the cookie-cutter powerpoint presentations.
GNU TeXmacs (http://www.texmacs.org/) attempts to be exactly what the poster is asking for. For research math, though, there is no real option. Journals require submission in TeX or a standard variant.
Interesting account, very opposite to my own experience: every article I've got published (in journals and conference proceedings) were processed by LaTeX using a formating class or style provided by the publisher.
My thesis was also formated using LaTeX and the university also gave me a LaTeX class.
Utinam logica falsa tuam philosophiam totam suffodiant!
There must be a sex doll joke in here some where ... but just cant seem to format it well enuf to get it past the anal retentive mods.
Actually, it wasn't so much made for European languages. It was made for typesetting in general. In fact, look to the KOMA-Scripts package, which was designed because European publishing wasn't originally well accounted for in TeX.
There are a number of other benefits which are, perhaps, why it looks more "bookish". Kerning, ligatures, finer control over hyphenation, glyph variants, real fonts, support for semetic languages, support for asian languages, etc. Take a look at the index of Knuth's Art of Programming. Arabic, Chinese, everything beautifully typeset. The Index seamlessly generated with appropriate sorting.
I suppose it's possible to look at professional typesetting and say, so what? In the end, though, that's the benefit. TeX is a typesetting system and a lot of people seem to want a Word Processor. These are different things.
There are things that are possible in TeX that aren't possible in Word. You have more control over the document (although Word certainly gives an appearance of control). TeX can make type that looks GOOD. However, some people think of text and publishing as commodities in the online world. They decide that they can live without these things.
That's fine with me. Personally, I enjoy seeing something done really well. I use TeX as it suits me. Someday, maybe someone will make a good WYSIWYG typesetting system. Until then, we have TeX.
I think Mauve has the most RAM. --PHB (Dilbert Comic)
WYSIWYG preview is good for big formulas. I can still read properly formatted math faster than the TeX source. I don't know that Auctex putting PNGs inline counts as WYSIWYG though.
There is a replacement for LaTeX on up
http://wiki.contextgarden.net/What_is_ConTeXt
The idea is access with TeX without all the headaches. It is popular though I know LaTeX so the headaches don't bother me so much.
You want mpm, the MikTeX package manager for unix.
UnNetHack: NetHack Improved!
Coming close to latex eh? I always found it much more satisfying to do everything freehand...
latex is hard ? Do you work at a hamburger joint ?
I'm sorry, pal, but you've just reached the downside of complex open systems. If you've reached the point where you're meta-ultra OSS document description language comes to a grinding halt, you have two options: Dive in further and learn to hack it or leave it for a systems that does the work for you. Systems that do the work for you are widespread. They're called 'Commercial Closed Source Software'. Here's are two pieces of software that delivers what you want:
Adobe InDesign
Quark Xpress
There is a third which I like to call my secret special tip - because it's professional performance and featureset are often underrated:
Corel Draw
The downside with Corel Draw is that they as of a few years ago only offer versions for Windows. You could try out Scribus, an OSS DTP Tool, but I doubt it offers all the features you need. The upside with Corel Draw is that it has a hallmark price-performance ratio. If I where required to go into professional print I'd even consider installing a Windows box for it. (And I haven't used Windows in 7 years)
If you don't like the options listed and consider them 'to commercial' or 'to closed' then you're outa luck and have to wait another few years before we see viable OSS DTP kits. Until then: Good luck diving into Latex to become an expert.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I've looked for alternatives to the sadly obsolete Framemaker and have come up with nothing. Word sucks. OpenOffice sucks more (no proper cross refs and the bibliography manager is a bad joke). Most other word processors lack features, stability or both or are ms write clones pretending to be ms word clones. I've even resorted to the retarded edit compile debug cycle for doing papers in latex again lately. It sucks but at least it produces results reliably.
I think making a desktop application for document editing these days is not necessarily the most natural thing to do anymore.
If you check out this techtalk,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcXUrNSvjhU You will see a nice presentation by CSS guru HÃ¥kon Lie and Michael Day on how XML/HTML + CSS can be used to produce professional quality books in PDF format suitable to go straight to the printer using a (commercial) print oriented CSS render engine. It's not quite to the level of Tex yet but should be more than OK for most purposes.
If you combine this with a nice content management system, you should be able to come up with a quite nice set of tooling. You could export to various formats, including docbook, latex, pdf, and even word if you have to. In the content management system you could support collaborative editing, versioning, commenting, fine grained security, etc. quite easily. There's no reason whatsoever why content management systems would not be able to handle complex document structures.
I'm thinking google docs for framemaker refugees. I think it could be done and could provide great value. People would migrate from word and never look back. Nothing like this exists today as far as I know even though essentially all of the required components exist in some form today. Something like Drupal could provide a great start with a flexible node based content model and loads of other content management features. Alternatively something based on the Java Content Repository JSR could be used. Ideally the tool chain would rely on open standards so that it could be easily customized for different tasks. Existing office file format "standards" are hopelessly mixing presentation, content and legacy features so I don't really consider these to be relevant here.
Jilles
Just curious, would Quark Express do what you want? I'm not familiar with how it's different than Latex, maybe someone can explain.
I suggest ConTeXt. It is a little bit like LaTeX, but it is more modern. It has no compability problems of LaTeX-packages, because everything that you need comes with it. But it also has counterpart of LaTeX-packages; they are called ConTeXt-modules, IIRC.
ConTeXt can use many TeX-engines: It uses pdfTeX by default and it may be possible to use original TeX or e-TeX. But right now the best TeX-engine is XeTeX, IMHO. As long as your operating system can use some font, XeTeX can use it, too. XeTeX supports OpenType- and TrueType-fonts and Unicode very well.
pdfTeX accepts PDF, JPG and PNG as format of embedded pictures. I donâ(TM)t know, what kind of pictures can be used with XeTeX.
But keep your eye on LuaTeX: One day it may be the best TeX-engine ever, but right now it is under development.
For editing ConTeXt-markup the best option is GNU Emacs with elisp-package called AUCTeX. Also Vim is good for editing ConTeXt.
Juhapekka "naula" Tolvanen - http://iki.fi/juhtolv
at texmacs.org
That's a really mean thing to say about brainfuck. \advance\x by\y? It's sort of a cross between Cobol and Etruscan.
I have never used it myself, but I have seen a (Computer Science) thesis produced with Framemaker and was impressed by the quality of the work.
LaTeX is basically just a macro package for TeX. There are other implementations that might suit your needs better - like ConTeXt for example.
Agreed that LaTeX could use a better GUI. Raw TeX is the 2nd worst programming language I've ever seen, and that includes various assembly languages. (troff was the worst). However, I have a more fundamental wish.
LaTeX needs better layout algorithms. It apparently uses dynamic programming to fill a single paragraph. However, it needs to fill whole pages and papers similarly. E.g., I want to be able to tell it to squeeze my paper, which is now 8 1/2 pages, down to 8 pages, and do it intelligently, say by compressing the font slightly. Currently, it's quite counterintuitive how LaTex breaks pages. When I shorten said paper by deleting content early in the paper, for a long time, the paper doesn't get any shorter. Then, suddenly, it gets a lot shorter.
Relatedly, LaTeX places figures counterintuitively and badly.
Internally, raw TeX is a horrible virtual machine language. E.g., registers don't even have symbolic names, but numbers, from 1 to 256.
Various intuitively simple tasks, like wrapping text around a curved box, are almost impossible to implement.
Color is not well integrated since color output didn't exist then.
Intuitively simple things, such as marking certain blocks of text to be hilited, are not done correctly (probably because that is too hard).
To be sure, LaTex does most of this much better than anyone else. I'm just an idealist, trying to make it even better. Everything needs to be reinvented periodically.
It's a modern alternative to LaTeX, but still uses pdftex to render PDFs.
You have a list of the features in the documentation :
http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Main_Page
I agree entirely with this, if you want to be anal about exact positions of images and the like, then use something else. Otherwise, make sure the image is good quality and tell it what size you want it to be. If you're upset about typesetting, my mind boggles!
On windows, I use TeXnicCentre as an environment for working with LaTeX (MiKTeX). It automates things like getting packages that you don't already have from CTAN and has menu options for symbols that you don't remember the codes for. It also gives support when you're typing, like suggestions for autocompletion which is dead handy.
For precise typesetting I've never found anything better. For working with large documents, in my opinion you'd want to be insane using anything else. I'll keep reading though, I'd be interested in any alternatives that come up!
Rational thought is the only true freedom
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Max_Planck
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
I get the impression that firstly people don't want to learn anything like LaTeX because it involves some effort, even though if you are a power user such effort in a career will repay you bountifully
and secondly people don't want to learn something that is old because anything old can't be as good as something new.
Those people are idiots and lazy idiots at that.
You miss on important point :
World Class Market Domination
At least in my field (artificial intelligence), and certainly also in physics and math and probably in a bunch of other fields, when you submit a paper it will have to be in a format specified by the journal or conference. I've seen an awful lot of LaTeX style files that you must use, and often MSWord style files (or whatever they're called in that world) as well, but naught else. I suspect that you'll want to make sure whatever system you adopt can use or port those style files pretty accurately.
If your field doesn't work that way, cool. But there are risks to stepping away from the dominant paradigm. Just be glad, as they force you to choose between two options, that one of them is not Microsoft :)
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
Math in OpenOffice is even uglier than in MS Word. I consider this quite an achievement considering how ugly Word is to begin with. AFAIK, LaTeX is still the only way to get decent-looking maths.
Office 2007 has much better math support than OOo. Doesn’t quite do equation numbering, but the product is nearly as good looking as TeX’s and usually with less work.
Platypus (http://platypus.pz.org) is an open-source project actively working on an alternative that is much easier to use and provides features currently missing in TeX. It's still in the early stages, but is under active development with a major release due later this year.
In other words, people are aware of the problem and working on it.
\documentclass[a4paper, 12pt]{scrartcl}
\title{Hello, World}
\author{Me, Myself and I}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
\section{Hello}
Some Text.
\subsection{,}
Some Text.
\subsubsection{World}
Some Text.
\end{document}
What I never figured out was how to download a stinking template from IEEE and start writing a document.
article, report and book are usually sufficient. These are available form CTAN, and are most likely in your basic installation of packages anyway. The AMS provides a number of alternate classes for free, and these are used in their journals.
see how broad it is used via http://svg.startpagina.nl
Good call, root_42. (=6.48?)
You can also get Latex into Powerpoint, and now Word as well, using TexPoint. A license is $30.00 USD -- not that bad. You use it in conjunction with a MikTex install.
Look into FrameMaker from Adobe.
Certainly by choosing a Greek name he made talking about his project more difficult. The fact that the name requires an explanation indicates it will confuse those who are new to the work.
I dunno about you, but I think that if there were no typesetting for mathematics, then mathematicians would be forced to design notation to express their concepts using just ascii characters.
IMHO, this would make most mathematics much easier to read and understand.
Translating this into computer code ( or typing it into a calculator ) is much easier if it is represented using the characters on your keyboard in the first place.
In a hundred years, I guarantee that people will be able to decipher ascii.
...
I've settled with a mechanical pencil (ratchet-type, 0.5mm B (= #1 US system) lead). It gives more contrast and smoother writing than HB. And blank paper.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lout
There was a system called Mathspad a while ago. It's a mix between a word processor and a tree editor. With the tree structure it was possible to specify how it was to be written in an output file -- so although Mathspad had its internal data structure, it could export to Latex, or whatever else you specified.
Why do people bring up turing-completeness when discussing the usability of a language?
Write a signed division operator for a turing machine and then come back and tell us how convenient it is.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Some technologies focus on doing things quickly and easily, and some focus on doing things correctly.
LaTeX is very much the latter. It's there for those who need it. And it isn't really that hard. I picked up the basics fairly quickly when I was TAing as a Sophomore. If you know another formatting language and another programming language and you wrap your head around the boxes and glue model, the basics are pretty easy.
But yeah, use someone else's document class. If you aren't a graphic designer, you shouldn't really want to create your own anyway.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
That's true... At the very least, any guaranteed page break should render anything before it kerning-irrelevant. I'm not sure the dynamic recompilation AND redisplay required for WYSIWIG is fast enough, especially on the word-by-word level.
The other problem with WYSIWYG is the inherent difference between view-on-screen and view-on-paper... which is the problem TeX is actually designed for. Example: Word document versus the printed output.
What I would LOVE is a simplified interface for creating (La)TeX styles: I do agree that creating a more than basic one is courting madness, currently.
While LyX is generally used with a LaTeX backend, it also has "SGML-tools support (both LinuxDoc and DocBook DTDs)".
There's also a relatively new project, TeXmacs (www.texmacs.org).
From the FAQ:
What is TeXmacs?
Answer. GNU TeXmacs * is a free scientific text editor, which was both inspired by TeX and GNU Emacs. * allows you to write structured documents via a wysiwyg (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) and user friendly interface. * lets you create new styles. * implements high-quality typesetting algorithms and TeX fonts, which helps you to produce professionally looking documents. * is suitable as an interface for computer algebra systems, as the high typesetting quality goes through for automatically generated formulas. * can be highly customized as it supports the Guile/Scheme extension language. * lets you export your documents to PS and PDF and offers both import and export to HTML, LaTeX, Scheme, Verbatim and Xml. We would very much appreciate your help for writing and improving converters for TeXmacs documents.
Although TeX fonts are mentioned in the FAQ above, the current version also supports the use of Type 1 and TrueType fonts.