Slashdot Mirror
Extended TeX: Past, Present, and Future
First time accepted submitter Hamburg writes "Frank Mittelbach, member of the LaTeX Project and LaTeX3 developer, reviews significant issues of TeX raised already 20 years ago. Today he evaluates which issues are solved, and which still remain open and why. Examples of issues are managing consecutive hyphens, rivers of vertical spaces and identical words across lines, grid-based design, weighed hyphenation points, and overcoming the the mouth/stomach separation. Modern engines such as pdfTeX, XeTeX and LuaTeX are considered with regard to solutions of important problems in typesetting." Note: When TeX was first released, Jimmy Carter was president.
Couple of good reads regarding LaTeX. 50 Shades of LaTeX: The Pain the Pleasure http://airminded.org/2005/11/18/latex-the-pain-the-pleasure/ http://crookedtimber.org/2005/04/27/fetishizing-the-text/
Beware of those who profit off the docile and persecute the unbelievers.
There's always TeXLive.js, if you actually need full (La)TeX environment in your browser.
Ezekiel 23:20
Modern LaTeX is quite a bit better at giving good error messages, unless you try to do very complex things. Combining lots of packages for heavy customization is the prime example; I once spent half a day setting up custom chapter titles with a side-by-side miniature table-of-contents and epigraph below a title where the chapter number extruded into the margin, and drop caps at the start of the first paragraph. But the end result was beautiful.
for i in `facebook friends "=bday" 2>/dev/null | cut -d " " -f 3-`; do facebook wallpost $i "Happy birthday!"; done
I just gave a talk for management. One fellow remarked on the quality of my slides and didn't think they were done using PP. Yep, I said, they are Latex (Beamer), and I can cut and paste from my papers. Using PP for math will make you go blind.
When all your writing is text, the whole point of Tex is lost, and you might as well use word.
No it isn't. Apart from the ease of writing equations, one major point for LaTeX is that you can just write the damn text and you don't have to worry about how it looks. The final result is going to be beautiful. In Word, you can choose the font and size of all levels of headings, the line spacing and the margins, and even when you have spent time doing that, it still doesn't look as good as LaTeX does out of the box.