TeX users...thoughts?

[CrAz3D]

A buddy (working on PhD in...something computery at Purdue) uses LaTeX, and always suggests it to me when I have document-editing Qs.  I hit him up w/Qs because he is super software-literate, and does presentations. 

My most recent problem was inserting PDF files into a Word doc - I had to submit one Word doc, but I had six PDF attachments and three Excel attachments.  My solution was convert all the PDF pages into images (PDFile PDF Tools, or something, was used), then insert each IMG.  Lame sauce.

My bud says LaTeX is supa eezee once you get a grasp of its capabilities.  I DL'd LyX, and have started to play.

QUESTION:  Do yall use it to compile lengthy reports that include graphics, misc attachments, etc?  Is it useful?  Is it easy enough to learn?  Do you prefer LaTeX, or the LyX interface?

*hugs & kisses*

[deadly7]

Windows 7 I use MiKTeX. TeX is incredibly frustrating. It's great for mathematical type and general typesetting, but dealing with alignment and sizing of tables, images, etc causes many headaches.

[CrAz3D]

I installed LyX, which also installed MikTeX and TeX editor for me....*shrug* I dunt know the difference between all this crap yet.

Have you used LyX, which I understand to be more of a UI-oriented TeX editor?

[Sidoh]

LaTeX is awesome. It is a bit of a headache at times, but I'm always comforted by the fact that if it's a headache in LaTeX, it'd be an order of magnitude worse in anything like MS word.

I've used LyX a little bit, but I always end up going back to vim + command-line.

It's definitely worth learning if you need to write technical reports.

[nslay]

Use TeX Live on Windows, OS X and Unix. MiKTeX SUCKS! All I know is that it is constantly missing packages that even obsolete TeTeX has. It also often compiles documents incorrectly! TeX Live is the defacto standard TeX distribution anyway ... accept no substitute!

The best way to familiarize yourself with LaTeX is by looking at someone's old math homework. I have mastered LaTeX (I use it for papers, posters, slide shows, reports, automated reports, etc... even with fancy stuff like animation) and have yet to read a tutorial on it.

[deadly7]

MiKTeX comes with many packages and asks if you want it to find the others you need to compile. I went through that process just under a month ago.

[CrAz3D]

hmm....wonder if its even worth it considering that any group project I do pretty much has to be in Word since no one else knows of/uses TeX stuff.  hummm.

I guess it could be fun, though

[Sidoh]

MiKTeX comes with many packages and asks if you want it to find the others you need to compile. I went through that process just under a month ago.

Maybe, but I don't know why you wouldn't use the standard compiler ;p

[deadly7]

Maybe, but I don't know why you wouldn't use the standard compiler ;p

I use vim (well, gvim since I'm on Win7) to write it up and then compile with miktex. The standard latex libraries don't exist for windows afaik.

[Falcon]

Omg just use MS word you nerds!

[Sidoh]

Omg just use MS word you nerds!

Fuck that.
Fuck that.
Fuck that.
Fuck that.
Fuck that.
Fuck that.
Fuck that.
Fuck that.
Fuck that.
Fuck that.
Fuck that.
Fuck that.

Seriously. I've done this a few times. I felt too lazy to start a LaTeX project, and dreaded the twiddling, compiling, twiddling some more ad nauseum. What a pain in the ass. no thanks, I'll do it in word.

Then I realize that doing it in word is much worse. It's still twiddling ad nauseum, but I have much less control over what I twiddle and by how much. THIS BULLET'S INDENTATION IS OFF, FUCK! This figure isn't in the position I want it to be. FUCK!

Seriously, fuck writing anything much more complicated than an essay in word.

[CrAz3D]

I 'unno...I've pulled off some impressive crap in word.  That said, the only problem with my recent doc was formatting page numbers (I had to insert approx 60 pages of images, and I changed margin to 0" so it'd have the image over the whole page, but then the placement of pg #s got fucked).

http://dailycrazed.net/personal/Paper.docx (previous version - oops)
http://dailycrazed.net/personal/final.draft.docx

[Falcon]

Omg just use MS word you nerds!

Fuck that.
Fuck that.
Fuck that.
Fuck that.
Fuck that.
Fuck that.
Fuck that.
Fuck that.
Fuck that.
Fuck that.
Fuck that.
Fuck that.

Seriously. I've done this a few times. I felt too lazy to start a LaTeX project, and dreaded the twiddling, compiling, twiddling some more ad nauseum. What a pain in the ass. no thanks, I'll do it in word.

Then I realize that doing it in word is much worse. It's still twiddling ad nauseum, but I have much less control over what I twiddle and by how much. THIS BULLET'S INDENTATION IS OFF, FUCK! This figure isn't in the position I want it to be. FUCK!

Seriously, fuck writing anything much more complicated than an essay in word.

Bullet indentation is off? Fix it. Figure not in right place? Drag it somewhere else/resize it. Its called not being lazy.

[nslay]

Bullet indentation is off? Fix it. Figure not in right place? Drag it somewhere else/resize it. Its called not being lazy.

That's not how TeX works. In TeX, someone decides how a professional document of a particular type (e.g. reports, papers, etc...) should be formatted. All you do is fill in the blanks. Unfortunately, it is also a little more time consuming than Microsoft Word, but it also gives you a more professional formatting for your time.

[CrAz3D]

sounds like little flexibility.

[nslay]

sounds like little flexibility.

What kind of flexibility do you want? TeX allows you to focus almost completely on the content and not the formatting. Content-wise, it is very flexible, having a plethora of packages for conveying your ideas in various ways. It is more difficult to violate the formatting ... but do you really want to do that?

Put it this way, either:

• Someone gives you a complex criteria for how a document should be formatted for submission. You do this formatting yourself.
• Someone gives you a style file and you just fill in the blanks with no loss of flexibility for content. You don't care about the formatting.

Which would you rather?

[CrAz3D]

the most complex formatting I'll ever receive is typeface, page numbers, and spacing --- I think

[Sidoh]

Omg just use MS word you nerds!

Fuck that.
Fuck that.
Fuck that.
Fuck that.
Fuck that.
Fuck that.
Fuck that.
Fuck that.
Fuck that.
Fuck that.
Fuck that.
Fuck that.

Seriously. I've done this a few times. I felt too lazy to start a LaTeX project, and dreaded the twiddling, compiling, twiddling some more ad nauseum. What a pain in the ass. no thanks, I'll do it in word.

Then I realize that doing it in word is much worse. It's still twiddling ad nauseum, but I have much less control over what I twiddle and by how much. THIS BULLET'S INDENTATION IS OFF, FUCK! This figure isn't in the position I want it to be. FUCK!

Seriously, fuck writing anything much more complicated than an essay in word.

Bullet indentation is off? Fix it. Figure not in right place? Drag it somewhere else/resize it. Its called not being lazy.

No, it's called not spending time doing shit I don't have to do and instead spend it doing something productive.

Instead of fiddlefucking my way around a stupid piece of shit software, I can just type away knowing exactly what the result is going to look like.

Fuck word.

There's a good reason the majority of technical papers are done in a typesetting package that most of the world hasn't heard of.

[Sidoh]

It should be noted that LaTeX gives you more control over things than Word ever could. For some things, you might have to work a little harder to get it that way, but as long as you're not doing something sort of goofy, chances are someone has already done the work for you.

[CrAz3D]

I do like the concept of ... not having to deal with Word's bullshit.  I hate having to figure out why it's autoformatting something and how to undo that.

[nslay]

I do like the concept of ... not having to deal with Word's bullshit.  I hate having to figure out why it's autoformatting something and how to undo that.

Bibliographies are also simple. You just tell TeX (BibTeX) the simple things like the title, author, etc ... and the kind of source and it formats it the way it's supposed to look. It also handles the citations for you, automatically numbering and labeling them where cited. TeX does everything you shouldn't have to do.

[CrAz3D]

http://dailycrazed.net/personal/law/appbrief.pdf

like so?  Word did that easily for me.

[Sidoh]

The thing about BibTeX is you don't have to fumble around with a clumsy UI, enter each of the fields individually, etc.

You just find the BibTeX for the appropriate source (http://manas.tungare.name/software/isbn-to-bibtex/ for books, can find papers on citeseer/similar sites), paste it in a file, and you can reference it by saying \cite{label for reference}. It's lovely.

[deadly7]

The thing about BibTeX is you don't have to fumble around with a clumsy UI, enter each of the fields individually, etc.

You just find the BibTeX for the appropriate source (http://manas.tungare.name/software/isbn-to-bibtex/ for books, can find papers on citeseer/similar sites), paste it in a file, and you can reference it by saying \cite{label for reference}. It's lovely.

Who does that? "Export to Refworks" ftw.

[Sidoh]

Nice

[deadly7]

Refworks has probably revolutionized my essay-writing. It supports every style manual and every journal format I've ever needed, and it's almost universally functional with every publication or database I've encountered. The few that don't directly support it still have different export functions, that refworks can then import from.

My only complaint is that, since it's a standalone platform, it can't interoperate with your paper. So if you need aphabetically organized sources, it's great. If you write mathematics/scientific papers and have a numbered list of sources, you have to reorganize a bit.

[CrAz3D]

http://sourceforge.net/projects/lawtex/

when Ig et back to my desktop, I'm looking into this shit.  If for srs, this could've saved me HOURS digging through the fucking Bluebook (our citation manual)

[Newby]

I started using Word to take notes in class (Math AutoCorrect + 150wpm = I can keep up with the professor's lecture)... all this talk about LaTeX has me thinking perhaps I should just spend my time learning TeX while taking notes. Thoughts on that?

[CrAz3D]

Code: [Select]

\@ifundefined{SuppressClass}{
\NeedsTeXFormat{LaTeX2e}
\ProvidesClass{trialbrief}
\LoadClassWithOptions{lawbrief}
}{}%

\newcommand*{\hishercounsel}[1]{\def\@hishercounsel{#1}}
\def\@hishercounsel{\@latex@warning@no@line{No \noexpand\hishercounsel given}}

\newcommand*{\opposingcounsel}[1]{\def\@opposingcounsel{#1}}
\def\@opposingcounsel{\@latex@warning@no@line{No \noexpand\opposingcounsel given}}

\newenvironment{tightbox}{
%Start a new group to contain the def of the testbox and newline
\bgroup
%Change newline so that each line is an hbox
\def\\{\unskip\egroup\hbox\bgroup\ignorespaces}
%Start vbox{hbox{ ...
\vbox\bgroup\hbox\bgroup\ignorespaces}
%End the last hbox and the vbox
{\unskip\egroup\egroup \egroup}
%Output a fill, then the box
%\hskip 0pt plus 1.0fill \box\testbox \egroup }
%}

\newcommand{\headerblock}{
\noindent \@docket \par \noindent
\begin{tabular}{@{}p{.55\textwidth}@{:\hspace{.03\textwidth}}p{.38\textwidth}}
{\@firstparty, \textit{Plaintiff,}} & { Superior Court Housing Session } \\
{\hfil v.\hfil} & { Judicial District of New Haven at New Haven } \\
{\@secondparty, \textit{Defendant}.} & { \@date }
\end{tabular} \vspace{8pt}
}


\newcommand{\underscore}[1]{\raisebox{-.15em}{\rule{#1}{1pt}}}

\newcommand{\footerblock}{
\noindent
\begin{tabular}{p{.4\textwidth}p{.55\textwidth}}
{~} & { THE DEFENDANT \par ~ \par By \underscore{15em}~\par } \\
{ On The Pleading: \par Christopher DeCoro \par Yale Law School Class of 2012 \par christopher.decoro@yale.edu \par Law Student Intern } &
{ \@supervisor \par \@address \par \@hishercounsel }
\end{tabular}
}

\newcommand{\makecertification}{
\newpage
\begin{center}CERTIFICATION\end{center}

This is to certify that on \@date, a copy of the
foregoing was mailed, first-class mail, postage pre-paid, to \@opposingcounsel

\vskip 1in
\begin{rightbox}
\underscore{2in}\\
\@supervisor
\end{rightbox}
}

\newcommand{\testimonyrequired}{\begin{figure}[b]{\bf Oral Argument Requested \\~ \\ Testimony Required}\end{figure}}
\newcommand{\testimonynotrequired}{\begin{figure}[b]{\bf Oral Argument Requested \\~ \\ Testimony Not Required}\end{figure}}

%Set some default formatting
\parindent=2em
\setlength{\parskip}{1.25ex plus 2ex minus .5ex}
\thispagestyle{empty}

% vim: set syntax=tex :

That's the TeX file for a trial brief (sans actual content).  FUCK.  THAT.  I could never read it well enough to ever want to edit my own writing (w/o PDFing it and printing on hard paper).

[Sidoh]

You don't edit the TeX directly. That'd be goofy.

[CrAz3D]

...how would I edit the TeX(t) then?

/I'm horribly ignorant on this, obviously.

LyX is a UI to edit text, yeah?  Use that to edit the actual text/content of the doc?

[nslay]

...how would I edit the TeX(t) then?

/I'm horribly ignorant on this, obviously.

LyX is a UI to edit text, yeah?  Use that to edit the actual text/content of the doc?

That's raw TeX (EDIT: Your previous example). Look up LaTeX instead. Should be as simple as:

Code: [Select]

\documentclass{article}
\title{Chickens and Their Role in Science}
\author{Bubble Gum Joe}

\begin{document}
\maketitle

\section{Introduction}
Chickens play a vital role in science somehow.

\subsection{Subsections Work Too!}
\textbf{Bold} and \textit{Italic text}.

\end{document}

LaTeX is a markup language like, for example, HTML. You just need a text editor really.