From: maus@mail.com
On 2023-03-12, Javier wrote:
> maus wrote:
>> Lamport's book on latex is all you will ever need.
I repeat, lamport's book is all you will ever need, standard tools..
>
> It would be good if the books criticized the design of TeX,
> but regrettably nobody dares to criticize what they teach to newbies.
> One of the issues is that TeX does not come from the UNIX world,
> but from TOPS-20, and that makes the design of TeX quite monolythic.
> Over the time people have written tools to interact with TeX
> and LaTeX in a UNIX-like way.
There is a lady who used to post on folklore.computers. She admired
TOPS, forget which. BAH. In ways, she was a PITA about it. I have used
Linux since it was first proposed. Main problem is the people who want
to turn into Windows, mostly assholes ("Why should I not work as `root'
is typical.)
I use Latex for letters, which, since I returned from hospital, I seldom
write.
>
> I would not rely on the default tools latex or pdflatex (which is
> what the tutorials tell newbies to do), but instead would use
> latexmk which is part of the official TeXlive distribution).
Texlive is bloated. Tex, Latex is all you need.
>
> latexmk makes compiling documents much nicer. I really hate being
> thrown into interactive mode each time there is an error in the
> document (and when you are a newbie you make a lot of errors).
>
Its part of learning. If you never sat on a potty, you will find life
difficult.
> Also, another way TeX deviates from the UNIX way of doing things is
> that there is no independent preprocessor like cpp or ratfor.
> People had to write additional tools in perl and python to do
> things like substituting macros or include files (latexpand).
perl, regrettably, is fading into the path. I use ruby. I find the
problem with python is the versions. Debian has moved to 3.0+
>
> Another thing that will piss off somebody from the UNIX world is how
> poor the manpage documentation is. There is an info manual.
> It does document the language quite well, but does not say much about
> the CLI tools. In emacs you should see it with
>
> M-: (info "(latex2e) Top")
Mein Gott, someone still uses emacs!
>
> Part of the reason for such a poor documention of the CLI tools is
> that many users of LaTeX do not use CLI tools but an IDE-like
> integrated editor like texworks.
those IDE tools are the signs that someone wants to use Windows, but is
ashamed to admit it.
>
> In fact, TeX is not very popular among UNIX programmers, and software
> documentation is seldom written in LaTeX (with the exception of people
> doing maths and physics).
I agree. For some purposes, markdown tools are easier. I use
asciidoctor. I still dont know how to enter some things.
>
> I began using both LaTeX and UNIX almost at the same time, so I was
> not really questioning the design of TeX when I was learning, but the
> OP, who has been using UNIX for decades, will be shocked by the design
> of the TeX tools.
>
> For the OP, I would think twice before diving into LaTeX. It has many
> pitfalls, error reporting is not always clear and takes long time to learn.
> If the OP has a simpler way of writing letters, I would put LaTeX aside.
the less I use a mouse, the better I like it. When I was in hospital,
a doctor arrived one day to propose an operation to remove a pain in
my right arm. ("Only 1% die during the operation.")
I got home, avoided computer games and the mouse,, and the pain
diappeared.
--
greymausg@mail.com
where is our money gone, Dude?
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
|
