Typesetting General

Is Postscript not enough for you wretched fiends?

If you are not being forced to use LaTex, I strongly recommend staying with Mathematica, assuming you have good familiarity with it. I use Mathematica to type up all of my math notes/assignments because it allows very quick entry owing to the keyboard shortcuts, coupled with a sane syntax that can be turned into "traditional form" in place. It can also handle multiline equation alignments, although I think the UI for this part needs a bit of work. I especially like being able to stay in one environment, without having to work on the barely comprehensible latex file, and run the build cycle to view the pretty output in a pdf, plus you get the full power of Mathematica at your disposal if you need to run a calculation or include a chart etc.

It's not quite Latex quality as you say, but it's certainly good enough for many tasks. Pic related shows a homework question I typed in it last year. The downside is that Mathematica isn't free, so if that is a sticking point, perhaps the Sage folks have some alternatives you can look into.

Attached: notes.png (1212x426, 51.18K)

It's perfect, if you want something more braindead you can use R Markdown and still use some of your LaTeX knowledge

It is absolutely disgusting. I would almost go as far as to call it a write-only syntax, which makes sense as you're writing, but atrocious to read back at a later point in time.

mydocument.txt

Submission denied.

What if I was to | fmt > mydocument.txt?

He is right in that the representational notation is shit, but what is the alternative? Sooner or later you will have to put your math on display, and that's when you will have to deal with typography. Even if you were to make all the operators semantic, you will run into cases where even that is not enough.

Let's take an equation that needs to be broken up over several lines, something like a = b = c = d = e. Except of course each of these will be a large collection of formulas. Where do you make the break? What do you align on? There is no automatic solution, so eventually you will have to insert line breaks and alignment manually.

No shit. That's what typesetting means. That morons actually try to use an end product system for taking notes says more about how fucking dumb they are than anything about how bad TeX might be.

Is groff any better?

Have you ever looked at the source of a manpage? Because that's what roff looks like.

.\" DO NOT MODIFY THIS FILE! It was generated by help2man 1.47.3..TH LS "1" "January 2018" "GNU coreutils 8.28" "User Commands".SH NAMEls \- list directory contents.SH SYNOPSIS.B ls[\fI\,OPTION\/\fR]... [\fI\,FILE\/\fR]....SH DESCRIPTION.\" Add any additional description here.PPList information about the FILEs (the current directory by default).Sort entries alphabetically if none of \fB\-cftuvSUX\fR nor \fB\-\-sort\fR is specified..PPMandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short options too..TP\fB\-a\fR, \fB\-\-all\fRdo not ignore entries starting with ..TP\fB\-A\fR, \fB\-\-almost\-all\fRdo not list implied . and ...TP\fB\-\-author\fRwith \fB\-l\fR, print the author of each file.TP\fB\-b\fR, \fB\-\-escape\fRprint C\-style escapes for nongraphic characters.TP\fB\-\-block\-size\fR=\fI\,SIZE\/\fRscale sizes by SIZE before printing them; e.g.,\&'\-\-block\-size=M' prints sizes in units of1,048,576 bytes; see SIZE format below.TP\fB\-B\fR, \fB\-\-ignore\-backups\fRdo not list implied entries ending with ~.TP\fB\-c\fRwith \fB\-lt\fR: sort by, and show, ctime (time of lastmodification of file status information);with \fB\-l\fR: show ctime and sort by name;otherwise: sort by ctime, newest first.TP\fB\-C\fRlist entries by columns.TP\fB\-\-color\fR[=\fI\,WHEN\/\fR]colorize the output; WHEN can be 'always' (defaultif omitted), 'auto', or 'never'; more info below.TP\fB\-d\fR, \fB\-\-directory\fRlist directories themselves, not their contents.TP\fB\-D\fR, \fB\-\-dired\fRgenerate output designed for Emacs' dired mode.TP\fB\-f\fRdo not sort, enable \fB\-aU\fR, disable \fB\-ls\fR \fB\-\-color\fR.TP\fB\-F\fR, \fB\-\-classify\fRappend indicator (one of */=>@|) to entries.TP\fB\-\-file\-type\fRlikewise, except do not append '*'.TP\fB\-\-format\fR=\fI\,WORD\/\fRacross \fB\-x\fR, commas \fB\-m\fR, horizontal \fB\-x\fR, long \fB\-l\fR,single\-column \fB\-1\fR, verbose \fB\-l\fR, vertical \fB\-C\fR.TP\fB\-\-full\-time\fRlike \fB\-l\fR \fB\-\-time\-style\fR=\fI\,full\-iso\/\fR.TP\fB\-g\fRlike \fB\-l\fR, but do not list owner.TP\fB\-\-group\-directories\-first\fRgroup directories before files;.IPcan be augmented with a \fB\-\-sort\fR option, but anyuse of \fB\-\-sort\fR=\fI\,none\/\fR (\fB\-U\fR) disables grouping.TP\fB\-G\fR, \fB\-\-no\-group\fRin a long listing, don't print group names.TP\fB\-h\fR, \fB\-\-human\-readable\fRwith \fB\-l\fR and/or \fB\-s\fR, print human readable sizes(e.g., 1K 234M 2G).TP\fB\-\-si\fRlikewise, but use powers of 1000 not 1024.TP\fB\-H\fR, \fB\-\-dereference\-command\-line\fRfollow symbolic links listed on the command line.TP\fB\-\-dereference\-command\-line\-symlink\-to\-dir\fRfollow each command line symbolic link.IPthat points to a directory.TP\fB\-\-hide\fR=\fI\,PATTERN\/\fRdo not list implied entries matching shell PATTERN(overridden by \fB\-a\fR or \fB\-A\fR)

I guess you can't expect much better from both a GNU program and an autogenerator. The way troff is supposed to be used is by having macro directives starting in newlines.
Also m*doc is a pretty terrible choice for papers, use me or mom instead. That's what they're made for.

Attached: f5753870a40ccef114a6cb88e7f48531.jpg (740x740, 584.34K)

But that would be too easy to read.

What a strange comment.

I have now, so thanks. I just remembered it's widely available for typesetting, yet I rarely see it being mentioned - for good reason, it appears.
I don't think latex is that bad for inputting math, but then again I can't think of a reasonable hypothetical alternative within latex. I (also) use latex because I don't like WYSIWYG editing, so that one won't do me any good.

Attached: troff-books.png (334x471, 264.39K)

Total fagshit if you aren't printing it.

Justified text and all of those great styling abilities are all available in LibreOffice Writer by default, no extra addons/packages/whatever required.
SVG does vector graphics. No need for describing the vg specifically for your document language. It's called interoperability.
LibreOffice Math does all formulas (not just math, also chemistry, physics and so on) which you can also use in all other LibreOffice applications.
Utter bullshit. It's called preset and it's in the top left corner. You can assign presets to paragraphs and if you change the preset all paragraphs change.
It also supports subpresets/groups. Just like CSS or LATEX but with a window.
I know you faggots hate being productive.
It's bloatshit you don't have to clean up after. It does what it's supposed to.

It mostly doesn't look like that.
9p.io/7thEdMan/
This has some actual troff source.

...

The problem is that people cannot decide if LaTex is a typing setting tool, or a utility for generating nicely typeset documents. The solution to that long equation would ideally, be to let the layout engine choose a best fit, but allow the user to hint/force the line breaks. This is how LaTex handles hyphenation in paragraphs.

The selling point of LaTex to mathematicians, is that it can handle the minutiae of laying out your publications, allowing you to keep your focus on mathematics. Sadly, this isn't quite true, as you often spend time tweaking/fighting with the system to achieve your desired result. That seems to be where Xah has a problem, coupled with the nasty syntax.

Point and click is a big pain, it might be fine if you're adding the odd equation in your notes, but I cannot imagine doing a homework assignment in it.

I'm sure if it was possible TeX would have already implemented it.

It's in-between. If you are satisfied with vanilla presets you can write an entirely semantic document, but you rarely are. Even something like typesetting an honorific requires manual fiddling:% wrongHello Dr. Frankenstein% correctHello Dr.~Frankenstein

Of course you could define an "honorific" macro, but that makes the code ugly again:Hello \honorific{Dr.}{Frankenstein}.% If you need to address many doctors you can also define a special doctor command on top of the honorific commandHello \dr{Frankenstein}.

I guess the latter would be the most idiomatic solution.

I know. I had been taking lecture notes in LaTeX and wrote my thesis in it. I had to write a lot of math, so I know exactly how shit LaTeX is, but it's still the least bad thing we have. I yet have to see an alternative.

The best thing I was able to come up with is some s-expression tree-format which could then be converted to LaTeX code.
'((frac 1 (power '(2 π) (/ n 2))) (integral #:from (power ℝ n) #:d x '((apply f x) (pow e '(-i y x))))
This would then expand to \frac{1}{(2 π)^{n / 2}} \int_{ℝ^n} f(x) e^{-i y x} \dop{x}
This wouldn't even be hard to implement, but I cannot see many people actually liking this.

Well I for one like it already. I don't want to continuously shill Mathematica, but that s-expression approach is employed in that language, and you can use the same code for perform equations as for displaying them.

Since your code looks rather Rackety, that reminds me, there was definitely some work in the racket community for dealing with programmable typesetting, I need to take a look at that again.

docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/

Seems to be more for interactive html books, rather than math specifically. For that, it's just providing hooks for MathJax.

Pollen still uses LaTeX syntax for math:
docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/mini-tutorial.html#(part._.Math_typesetting_with_.Math.Jax)

Yes, Racket was what I was having in mind, although this particular idea would work with any Lisp. Once you get a taste of s-expressions you really don't want to use anything else.

I could see such a system working as a layer on top of TeX, but the most important thing would be to make it programmable. Part of the reason why LaTeX requires constant fiddling is because you simply cannot anticipate everything an author will need. A text markup system needs to be extensible to allow for custom domain-specific extensions. LaTeX gives you direct access to the underlying TeX, which is why LaTeX has been so successful for so long. As much as I love Pandoc, its static markup formats are simply not good enough for my needs.

Actually the -mom package is unironically the GOAT. Groff is so much better than faggy TeX is unbelievable why people dont use it more.
You can literally just run a plain text file through groff, with absolutely no markup, and it will at least produce sane output. Unlike TeX where its impossible to even get output without 10k of boilerplate bullshit.

For a math solver AND equation renderer S-expressions makes sense. But without actual solving functionality I dont get the point of S-expressions. Its easier to type LaTeX than that.

The idea is to have 100% semantic markup. A tree-like expression is the only sensible way of doing it because a math expression is a tree structure. People are just not used to thinking of an expression like "2 + 3 / 4" as a tree, they think "take two, add three, divide by four, except you have to take into account order of operations, so first read the division, then take two and add the result of the division". With a tree-syntax on the other hand the expression(+ 2 (/ 3 4)) reads as "the sum of two and the quotient of three and four". But since people are so used to infix notation they find it more intuitive and easier to read.

The point is that it's not point and click.

Attached: not point and click.png (550x646, 16.76K)

How does TeXmacs compare with it's abstraction to TeX or LaTeX?

PDF to those books?

Not those books, but something like them:
chuzzlewit.co.uk/utp_book-1.1.pdf

There is groff + mom

Anyone have some good documentation on groff/groff_ms?

Look at your post. Then angle your eyes a few cm upwards.

mom is a macro package for groff not documentation

Latex is a godsend for linguistics, it takes a bit to learn but as other anons have said the results are worth it.

Attached: latex linguistics.png (1274x897, 67.9K)

A few cm more...

i just wanna say im glad I came to this imageboard, 4chan is shit what thefuck it's only grug discussion everywhere. there's even a doctor who board and a containment board for ricing tards. this is too based

.do xflag 3
.so comment_macros

.TL
The best comment
.AU
user
.AI
8ch.net
.RT

.PP
\\comment{Heirloom-troff with some patches I've written is top comfy for writing stuff in humanities, idk how about more complex stuff, but surely more comfy then \\dobold{LaTeX}}.
.PP
You just have to write a Makefile with postprocessors and usually -ms macro set is just
.B
nice "."
.[
uriel smart book
.]

I really wish Framemaker had caught on, especially during the early days of the web when its separation of content and presentation still could've been saved as a concept. Even today, it's by far the most powerful and elegant GUI for what so many TeXfags labor under either the tedium of handcoding or the broken mess that is every graphical frontend for LATeX.

The software being discussed in this thread, document processors, isn't just "make pretty looking math", but the ability to automatically single-source large, complex documents using conditional logic. Word processors like LibreOffice are a different and strictly subsidiary type of software.

Attached: frame.png (35x38, 2.29K)

Groff

You could have searched the thread to see that was already suggested multiple times before posting your worthless one word answer? Do you have anything else to contribute to the discussion?

Do you?

Bump

...

What kind of packages do I need to do something like this?
I really like the footer and header and all that.

Attached: a.jpg (714x929, 139.09K)

Microsoft word is pretty good.

this but meta-ironically

genlib has "Document formatting and typesetting on the UNIX system [1st ed]" by Narain Gehani, doesn't have the second edition

"UNIX Text Processing System" by Kaara Christian isn't on genlib

troff Typesetting For UNIX Systems by Sandra L Emerson(?) and Karen Paulsell(?) isn't on there either

My guess is you should drop by IRC and see if anyone there is carrying a copy

Weren't GNU pushing for info pages instead?

Tried to get a Live Preview plugin for LaTeX bit it only updates when I manually save.
The chink who wrote it forgot to tell Vim to write to disk or something.

Attached: Neptop_2018_12_06_20-32-15-1920x1080.png (1920x1080, 5.94M)

Looks like troff is completely unreadable a d that LaTeX improved it in almost every way.
More people should use both though.

Info is for book-sized reference manuals, but manpages are still good for a short reference. Though GNU generally encourages to generate the manpage from the --help option. That is why the manpages look so ugly, they were not written by hand.
gnu.org/software/help2man/

how the fak did you learn LaTex? doesn't that take like a few months?

yes, because man wasn't muh free software.

Not him, but it doesn't. I learned it during a one-week workshop at university. You can also learn it by yourself in that time frame or even faster.

The key point is that learning LaTeX is very simple, but if you actually want to create your own packages you will have to learn TeX, and that shit is hard. But if you just want to use the standard classes you can pick up enough of the basics in one day. Usually though you will want to add packages for extra features, and those can get really complicated.

Manpages are really awful for long documents. It's called a manpage and not a manbook for a reason. Just look at the manpage of Rsync, it has almost 4000 lines of text. Info is much better for large manuals.

Agreed.

There's a version of roff with a varient of the Knuth-Plass algorithm to add support for microtypography, although I find the syntax a bit unappealing: n-t-roff.github.io/heirloom/doctools.html

Mathematica allows generating TeX files, doesn't it?

It does, you'll probably want to copy equations at a time, rather than exporting an entire document.

is better or synergistic with ? I use only the latter, but I've been looking for an excuse to learn Lua.

Holy shit LuaTex is cool, thanks user!!!

Why do you even care about ConTeXt? LuaTex seems way cooler imo

I don't think syntax is that bad, but it's obviously geared towards being very powerful and letting you get it just right. This is the one strength of Latex imo, which no other software has eclipsed: If you can write it with pencil and paper, Latex can do it, while preserving semantics (as opposed to say scanning the the page). But if when you don't care much about how it looks the syntax is overkill. While supposedly you can just omit the directives and let it fall back to defaults, some Latex defaults are very stupid (fuckhueg margins on every page).

Latex pays off when you have very strict formatting requirements (academic paper), need to write math and don't want to end up stuck because it happens to not support a certain symbol or expression you want, when you want the output to look very nice (resume) and when it's a complex document that will be edited a lot (paper, resume). In other situations it's not really worth it unless you've been using it so much you have godlike syntax knowledge.

My approach to notes is usually like this

This, markdown, pandoc, latex combo is a godsend. Especially with being able to export into docx and html so you can transparently interface with brainlets.

So I use latex through texstudio with tex-live/miktex currently. How easy is it to migrate to luatex? Will any Latex snippets I find online just werk? Is it compatible with all of CTAN? These alternate texes always seemed like special snowflakes that are more trouble than they're worth to me, but you make it sound nice.

Mathematica is nice but with the caveats you say. I accomplish a similar WYSIWYG thing by using a markdown editor that can automatically render latex math. Typora is my favorite, but there are many open source ones as well.

I literally just followed the wikibook on latex for a few chapters, and the basic syntax clicked in a few days. I also unwittingly knew the equation typesetting from sites that use markdown. Making a simple document in Latex is actually very easy and you need very little syntax. But getting the environment set up so you can compile at all may be confusing because of how archaic it is. Then you need some motivation to stick with it and google things to learn your way around slightly more advanced stuff like tables, images and macros. I still often copypaste snippets I find online and from my old latex files, learning all of latex syntax is a bit of a waste because you rarely use most of it.

The design and goals of LuaTeX and ConTeXt are completely independent of each other. I'll try to explain it with a drawing:

LaTeX ConTeXt LuaLaTeX ConTeXt (Mk IV) ^ ^ ^ ^ | | | | | | | | +----+----+ +------+----+ | | | | TeX -------------------> LuaTeX

LaTeX and ConTeXt Mk II are implemented on top to TeX, which is a typesetting systems. LuaTeX is a re-implementation of TeX with Lua scripting, and on top of it are LuaLaTeX and ConTeXt Mk IV. LuaTeX aims to expose the mechanisms of TeX in Lua, and ConTeXt aims to make typesetting more accessible. You can have botho of those independent of each other.

I don't know about any of the dedicated editors, I use Vim for writing and a (short) makefile for automating the compilation.

Probably yes to all of those. I use LuaLaTeX mostly for its unicode capabilities and everything worked just fine. Only doing custom fonts requires different packages, but I prefer to stick with the default fonts.

What alternate TeXes? There is really just pdfTeX (which you are most likely using), XeTeX (which is mostly superseded by LuaTeX) and of course LuaTeX. LuaTeX is like a successor to all previous TeX implementations. I think LuaTeX is the future, unless someone comes up with something better of course.

You should have a look at the unofficial LaTeX manual. There is a PDF and HTML version, but I personally prefer the info version. That way I can read and browse the info manual in Vim (or Emacs of course) right next to my source code and copy-paste parts without switching applications.
ctan.org/pkg/latex2e-help-texinfo?lang=en

Thanks for the drawing and explanation. So is it recommended to use LuaTeX directly (assuming a familiarity with programming), or are the front ends basically required? I think I'd rather use LuaTeX directly and get nasty with the internals.

Just asking because I do have to prepare a series of professional documents this week, and it'd be a great excuse to simultaneously learn Lua (which gives me much more zest for mundane paperwork).

Nevermind , I get it (I think). I don't want to typeset in LuaTeX for the same I don't want to do it TeX, but I'm definitely moving to ConTeXt (Mk IV) for this upcoming set of professional documents I have to create.

I don't know what the requirements for professional papers look like, I have only been using LaTeX (LuaLaTeX to be precise) for my Master's thesis, keeping lecture notes and writing some letters where I didn't feel like fiddling with Libre Office.

You won't need to use Lua unless you really want to get involved with the gritty details of typesetting (i.e. not the content itself but the appearance). LaTeX and ConTeXt are basically frameworks built on top of TeX; you could build your own framework on top of TeX, but that requires you to be very familiar with typesetting. For my purposes LaTeX has always been good enough.

Cool, let us know how it works out for you. I have never used ConTeXt myself, but it looks like a really interesting project. I have wanted to learn it, but in the end time forces me to just stick with LaTeX instead.

Why are you “forced” to use Latex?

Do you mean why I am forced to use the TeX family in general, or why am I forced to used LaTeX specifically. For the former, I have to write lots of math, and once you have the process down there is nothing that's as capable as the TeX family.

As for why LaTeX specifically, it comes down to lack of time to learn something new, and the fact that there is usually a package that's good enough for everything. Usually when I write I have to produce output in a reasonable amount of time (like my thesis), I don't have the time to learn something new first. There is no deeper reason.

It was the latter, thanks for writing both (much more efficient). I’ve also learned LaTeX for the same reasons, but have no thesis to write (just some shitty business docs) and am ok with killing some time using ConTeXt. I was worried there might be some sort incompatibility in academics if I used something other than LaTeX (other than socially, i.e can’t really use ConTeXt in collaboration).

I've been using groff a lot, and I like it for literature, although the documentation is sparse, especially because of the wide range of macrosets.

Rightnow I've been using mom, its really well supported, although ms is a vlose second(with html lexer support).
Please givegroff_mom ,or groff_ms a try. Its so pleasant to usr and you'll learn it in a fraction of the time it took to compile LaTeX. I'll post a few caps and sourcecode later today if you want.
Pic related was generated using groff_mom

Attached: sample-doc-hardcover.png (400x240, 58.27K)

I'm guessing you don't mean rendering the pdf in LaTeX, rather compiling LaTX itself. Because when the document is rendered every two minutes or takes too long, you didn't use the features right (e.g. dividing the document, so not everything gets rerendered, etc.).
I'd say LaTeX gets more "worth it" the longer you use it.

Well, if you are given a LaTeX template you will have to use LaTeX obviously. The same if people expect you to hand in LaTeX source so they can copy-paste it into their own textbase. And if you are working in a team where no one knows ConTeXt you will also either have to train everyone or just accept LaTeX. And of course it works the other way around as well, if everyone is using ConTeXt and you come in with LaTeX you will be laughed out of the building. It's really not the fault of ConTeXt or LaTeX, it's simply how working in a group works.

No I mean that groff is easier to learn than compiling your first LaTeX. The fact that it's faster is secondary.

I imagine LaTeX is vastly more popular than ConTeXt though, no? And yeah at any rate, at least I will know them both if I learn ConTeXt. I think I’ll prefer it too.

unironically just write everything in plaintext. That's how it was before word processors replaced typewriters and we did just fine.

Right, because typesetting mathematical documents was so much easier with a typewriter. Why don't you just suggest we go back to movable type letter pressing?

Attached: selectric_changing.jpg (639x407, 70.18K)

I decided to use LaTex for a bunch of reports I had to write. It was a fucking nightmare. Easily multiple times longer than using any office software.
enjoy manually resizing everything and still getting ass results
might as well use paint
ser-
iously

The results don't even look any better than modern office software can produce. Total waste of time.

I use \includegraphics[width=0.6\textwidtg] which works nicely. Not easy to decide what % of text width you want the image to be.

Tables are a drawback of LaTeX. I use booktabs which looks nicer. You should use a tool like tablegenerator.com or the wizard in TexStudio.

What's wrong with the word breaks?

Generally, yes, some things are easier in MS Word. If those things are what you want to do, why bother with Latex? The point of using it is to do things that are hard in other prorams.

nah you just set the width to the textwidth or whatever
I haeve never see one
fine by me.

LaTeX isn't useful for trying to make it pretty, it's easy to have it pretty by default since it has sane defaults.

\includefigure{faggot}[width=\linewidth]

\usepackage{booktabs}
\toprule
...
\midrule
...
\bottomrule

\usepackage{babel}[en]

Use a premade style like revtex41 and you will be fine fine. LaTeX has a steep learning curve yes, but eventually you will be 100x more efficient.

This is why Latex is so fucking cancerous, everyone just piles on styles and styles and styles that look nice while having no idea how they actually work. When you think about it, it's actually worse than the NPM garbage, because at least there's built in version checking. Latex niggers just find a random version of some package they like and never, ever update it again.

To be honest, I only use "academic" formats like revtex and other conference templates, these are typically well-documented d22izw7byeupn1.cloudfront.net/files/revtex/auguide4-1.pdf. Comparing these against npm garbage would be a bit dishonest, but in general I agree with you. Some of these are just a mess. I think an other interesting parallel with the JS world is in the Stackoverflow answers. Some answers are just completely wrong.

thanks man I never even knew about that

works for you? Shit I guess it is good then.
Yeah don't try to make it pretty but have it pretty by default. Now I get how it works.

mind blowing stuff where did you come up with this.

holy shit latex is based. Now words run over the right hand margin just like I always wanted.

yeah right.

Nigger, Babel does not do that ctan.org/pkg/babel?lang=en.

Enjoy Office pajeet.

lol how about no u

Enjoy abandonware.

Is there a cleaner way to write functions like in pic related? The code below is a mess.
$$\begin{array}[t]{@{}r@{}>{{}}l@{}} \\ f\space\colon\space{\rm I\!R} & \rightarrow & {\rm I\!R} \\ x & \mapsto & f(x) \\\end{array}$$

Attached: function.PNG (164x68, 1.75K)