![]() ![]() However, once the outline of the proof was clear and I needed to clean up details and to write technical proofs then working directly on the PC helped a lotĪnother fantastic feature of TeXmacs is the "preview on hover" package. ![]() I personally believe that "thinking on paper" is still better for me at the starting stage of mathematical research. When doing things in LaTeX I always found myself thinking on paper and then writing down in TeX. ![]() The WYSIWYG aspect of TeXmacs was crucial for me because I was able to "think about math" while working on the PC. I did it because I was constantly getting lost in the minutiae of proofs of a large paper I was working on I recently converted myself to using TeXmacs. I don't use markdown because it has the same problem as LaTeX: There's really no such thing as "markdown" and the vanilla Daring Fireball version isn't facile enough for real work. I tend to use org-mode for everything now. The one thing LaTeX does well is math if I had to write math papers I'd probably force myself to learn it, but fortunately I don't. I hate LaTeX with the heat of a thousand suns and I'm embarrassed for my profession when I find it still in use. There's Joe's LaTeX and Sally's LaTeX and Jennifer's LaTeX but nobody uses "vanilla LaTeX." So even after I download "LaTeX" (which is itself multiple gigabytes in size), I still have very little hope of compiling documentation that comes in LaTeX form. The second point means that every author writes their document with their own particular suite of LaTeX add-ons, and if you don't have all of them you have no hope of compiling the document. The offensively inelegant point is purely a matter of taste so I won't belabor it. I despise LaTeX for two reasons: It's offensively inelegant, and there's no such thing as "LaTeX". LaTeX will no longer run on a Knuth TeX executable but requires eTeX extensions to run. I’m debating between errors being PDF annotations so users would click on an error or warning icon in the PDF to see the message and indication of where the issue was found, or just making it a big blot of overprinting (so many times on tex.stackexchange there are so many issues where a user-usually on Overleaf-ignored the error messages being output.ġ. One of the things I’m doing with finl is (a) assuming that there won’t be an attempt to fix errors mid-run (one of those 1982-era decisions that no longer makes sense) so a comprehensive list of errors can be presented to the user (or revealed programmatically) and (2) Adding indications in the output (which can be disabled) of errors in the input. The noisy output from LaTeX is also not so great. The other problem was the questionable decision by the LaTeX core team to, rather than release LaTeX3, they instead decided to evolve LaTeX2e which means that they are encumbered by backwards compatibility issues. The macro expansion paradigm behind LaTeX made sense in 1982 but there are a lot of decisions underlying the executable and TeX-the-language that were dictated by the computing technology of the 1970s (forget Unicode, standard ASCII wasn’t universally available when Knuth wrote TeX). There are two big challenges: One is that TeX, the underlying executable behind LaTeX, is pushed to its limits¹ to run. It's still easy to go down the wrong rabbit hole - last time it happened to me it was because I got obsessed with wondering if I could create nomographs in LaTeX, but luckily I discovered pynomo instead. For LaTeX, it's whether to wrestle with custom commands or just search its stack exchange or hunt for a package. In programming, it's the choice of whether to write custom or hunt for a library, or at a higher level, the build-vs-buy question. Over time, you just have to develop that sense of radar that tells you when you are over-implementing. Ultimately, I think wrestling with LaTeX is kind of like wrestling with programming. ![]() I write music scores of my composition in lilypond and one of my next projects is to combine it with LaTeX to print out books I can have on my piano. I write silly scripts for my friends to do table reads from, using a LaTeX package. I wrote a book in markdown and used pandoc to output LaTeX and publish it through Amazon. I found a LaTeX package that lays things out in the same style as old TSR D&D modules and I use that to write new dungeons. I write mathematical papers to myself, despite not being a mathematician. I never learned Word in college and wrote all my papers in LaTeX as an undergrad, just using its default styles. ![]()
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