this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2024
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Its always bothered me that a language meant to get rid of formatting there seems to be a lot of fucking formatting. There's no way to change the way things look outside of explicit formatting (like themes). It's basically all formatting.
And it's a fucking mess. How in the fuck do I make titles? What about subtitles? Why is there no paragraph spacing? What's the point of \title if it's completely indistinguishable from other text?
I want a markdown editor that supports math LaTeX and a ton of plugins. Markdown is dead simple for a reason.
Your editor shoul show you \title as another colour
And subtitle would be \large after title line
It is all formatting rules. But eliminates formatting the body text.
At least you know output will be same, not like MS Word
Oh thank goodness, body text is notoriously the hardest thing to format in a document
If you had seen some of the Word documents I have, you would not joke about that. People can really f-up text bodies.
Example: one guy wanted to keep two paragraphs together. He did not know about the necessary formatting option, but he knew that chapter titles did what he wanted. So he made the first paragraph a title and just reset font, size, etc to resemble a normal text. F-ed up quite some things...
Okay now what would happen if you made him use LaTeX?
I don't know if that person would have the intellectual capacity to actually understand the very concept of TeX: Writing a source and compiling it into a document. That idea would probably fry his mind.
That's just an effect of shitty software that does too much (and yes I'm advocating for a simpler Word or something. Markdown is fine for 95% of use cases.)
Guess what? I have moved my large text layouts over to HTML. Creating printed TOCs in a PDF takes some effort, but once I got that under control, it worked. Takes a makefile, though, and a bit of discipline in the HTML file, but the result is surprisingly good.
Anything you put that amount of effort into should be good, as long as you actually care about it.
I’ve come to that conclusion, too. If only printing support were better, I wouldn’t write anything but HTML.
Have you tried weasyprint? It turns .html into .pdf. Then I use a script with pdfinfo with the -dests option to get the page numbers of the chapters, mixes it with chapter titles from the .html file to create a ToC, which, in turn, gets included into the .html file again - just like TeX does it.
This is helpful in an environment where inputs are either HTML or EPUB files, and output is PDF for printing, HTML for the web site, and/or EPUB-formate.
I haven’t. Thanks for the tip. This might come in handy when we need to create automated documents again.
Lmao the hits keep coming
I see a lot of strange takes around here, and honestly cannot understand where you are coming from. Like really: I've written several 100+ page documents with everything from basic tables, figures and equations, to various custom-formatted environments and programmatically generated sections, and I've never encountered even a third of these formatting issues people are talking about.
You literally just \documentclass[whatever]{my doc type}, \usepackage{stuff} and fire away. To be honest, I've seen some absolutely horrifying preambles and unnecessary style sheets, and feel the need to ask: How are you people making latex so hard?
I've used LyX with good results, it's a GUI that abstracts away many of the complexities of latex.
I believe Joplin has latex math support, check it out.