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by fallintothis
6038 days ago
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I'm surprised there seems to be so much LaTeX hatred floating around the comments. I don't really know anything about typography, but typesetting my documents using markup is a pleasure. While I often fall into the trap of designing as I type, as soon as I get the styling right, it's consistent. Once I get BibTeX references to compile correctly, I can just \cite (even \possessivecite or \citeasnoun) and not have to worry about dangling bibliography sources that aren't used anywhere in the paper, citation style inconsistencies (where does the volume number go again?), making typos in separate references to the identical source, and so on. Did I change the order of some figures? \ref will still refer to the correct number. I could highlight some word and chord a shortcut to italicize something, then have the processor try to be smarter than me about what should and should not be italicized after that, etc. But I'd rather \emph a word and be done with it (and be able to do things like \usepackage{ulem} to change emphasis to underlines instead). Rather than tabbing back and forth to try to get the proper list structure when the processor gets confused about line breaks, I can textually mark where I want the list to begin/end, where it should nest, etc. Instead of wading through menus and searching for a picture of an A with an umlaut, I can just type H\"{a}agen-Dazs directly. I can do all of this in Vim, where I have productive text-editing commands and even spell-checking. Not to mention typesetting math! The post's tone is objectionable, I suppose. I'm sure LaTeX is not for everyone. The learning curve's too high for your standard high-school kid writing an English paper, and the payoff is minimal in such cases since word processors have many of the same features for managing bibliographies, header formats, etc. But compared to just typing it in plain text, using a word processor feels horrifically obtuse to me. |
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I just press the รค key.