Recent searches
Search options
@futurebird @mina @mattflor @nev @adriano Seriously? I have known math grad students and physics PhDs who refuse to learn LaTeX.
@degreesOfFreedom @mina @mattflor @nev @adriano
It takes like 12 min to learn LaTeX IDK what the big deal is. “I need to learn LaTeX” they say. “ok let’s do it right now at the bus stop” I say. Then the excuses start. My students can all use it and I just gave them an example to modify.
@futurebird @degreesOfFreedom @mina @mattflor @nev @adriano the tooling is a pita
Quarto 
@futurebird @degreesOfFreedom @mina @mattflor @nev @adriano I learned LaTeX in the early 1990s when I was editing scientific manuscripts. At a time when technology was not as present in our lives. It's. Not. That. Hard.
@degreesOfFreedom @mina @mattflor @nev @adriano
I will admit it is one of those “12 min to learn, a life time to master’ things — I’ve gotten into coding randomized diagrams with graphs and matching answer keys— the sky’s the limit! but it’s a markup it’s supposed to be pretty easy to follow.
@futurebird @degreesOfFreedom @mina @mattflor @nev @adriano I wrote my dissertation in LaTeX back in 2005 and NOBODY in my program knew what it was or why I was using it (MS Word failed me badly enough to motivate the switch).
In Math, Word® was a forbidden word.
@futurebird @degreesOfFreedom @mattflor @nev @adriano
@mina @mattfossen @futurebird @degreesOfFreedom @adriano why use LaTeX when you can simply use PowerPoint? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNjxe8ShM-8
@futurebird
I actually tried to learn LaTeX once, but it's like Vim : I got stuck at the step "choose which plugin to use among these fancy ones with weird names who claim to do nearly the same thing but not exactly"...
@lienrag @futurebird a surprisingly trappy trap that one.
@futurebird @degreesOfFreedom @mina @mattflor @nev @adriano I used to use LaTeX directly for things, until I got fed up with it and wrote a simple compiler to transform a sort of bare bones markdown into LaTeX (and later HTML as well). That works for most of my use cases.
@futurebird @degreesOfFreedom @mina @mattflor @nev @adriano It took a few minutes to learn how to format the equations I needed. It took several years for someone to let me know I didn't know how to pronounce it correctly.
@futurebird @degreesOfFreedom @mina @mattflor @nev @adriano Exactly. And that example can encode all the fiddly bits related to the correct presentation of the document. At work, we’ve found that a self hosted instance of Overleaf really helps with getting folks on board.
@futurebird @degreesOfFreedom @mina @mattflor @nev @adriano when I tried to learn LaTeX the first thing I tried to do was recreate the format I’d been using, which meant having headers and footers; trying to find out how to make headers and footers in LaTeX turned up about a dozen options, none of which worked
Not sure how many hours I wasted on that, but it was enough that I haven’t tried again