[kyboren]

AKA what CS PhD students have been doing ~forever.

I guess this is like medical researchers "discovering" basic calculus or an office worker discovering that SFTP, sshfs, and git work fine and they don't need Dropbox after all.

What's common knowledge in one field can apparently still be alien to people outside the field, even in the age of LLMs.

Just wait until the author finds out about Overleaf...

[macintux]

I hope the negative reactions here are to the truncated title (HN drops the “How” from titles). The author doesn’t seem to be claiming anything revolutionary, just describing how they created their pipeline.

Good grief.

> Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

[dustin1114]

Author here. You're exactly right. All of my pre-grad education was liberal arts. I had never once heard of LaTeX until I entered the software world years later, and even then only from a coworker with a CS PhD.

[KPGv2]

> what CS PhD students have been doing ~forever.

Or what every researcher has been doing for literally decades (except with other versioning systems, but still typesetting without Word or Adobe).

No need for techbros to pat themselves on the back as innovators.

I typeset my novels in LaTeX and use GIT. I even just clone a base repo whenever I'm going to release another.

[kyboren]

Considering LaTeX came from legendary CS PhD and Turing award winner Leslie Lamport's need to typeset a book, and was built on the shoulders of legendary CS PhD and Turing award winner Donald Knuth's work on TeX, I think "techbros" can safely pat themselves on the back as innovators in this case.

[KPGv2]

It doesn't seem you know what "techbro" means.

[kyboren]

Please explain what you think it means.

I said CS PhD students have been doing this forever, and you dismissed that as techbros patting themselves on the back. But once I pointed out that LaTeX was created by Serious People, apparently CS PhDs aren't techbros any more.

So which is it? And who exactly do you think is a self-congratulatory techbro here?

[skydhash]

I don’t have anything to publish, but one of these days, I’d like to try the troff suite (with eqn, pic, and tbl).

[dghf]

I keep on meaning to try these out: https://www.schaffter.ca/mom/