5/15/2023 0 Comments Texshop autosaveWhile he does have a point that (La)TeX Users fetishize their tool of use, most of his arguments can be used on Word or any WISIWYG tool, too. Even if they are things you probably won't need in the future and are seemingly obsolete. You particularly go to college or university to learn NEW things. It's the same students in school tell all the time, when they question why they should learn math, though they are set to become an artist or editor or anything that seemingly does not involve math. I'm sorry, but this is a bad argument and the worst life advice in the article. ", but for now it is enough to observe that people who don’t know how to use a particular tool very well are being told to throw that tool away and learn to use an entirely new one on the grounds that it will enable them to do things that they could have done at least as well with the old one – which is (when you think about it) a little peculiar if the aim is really to help people with their writing, and not (heaven forbid!) simply to evangelise for a community’s preferred way of doing things." While I did eventually manage it, it took a long time and was very frustrating – and what was most frustrating was that when I looked for help online, the advice I found basically amounted to ‘install TeX Live everybody else does’. ![]() He mentions XeTeX in the following: "I only needed XeTeX and XeLaTeX, which are quite small. So difficult that most people seem to give up on installing individual packages and instead install the whole of something called TeX Live."Īgain, that implies that not all LaTex documents are in Computer Modern. And anything other than vanilla TeX and LaTeX is really, really difficult to install. On the same topic, "if you want to do anything really wild and crazy – like using a typeface other than Computer Modern – then plain vanilla TeX and LaTeX won’t do. The relevant quote is "everything is (typically) printed in this weird, old-fashioned-looking typeface called Computer Modern." The "(typically)" implies that there are cases where the result is not in Computer Modern. He does not imply they are "always typeset in Computer Modern". And plain text wins because it is ubiquitous. Markup wins because it is just plain text. Or go back and try to touch up a previous one. Which is ultimately just a markup language.Īnd heaven help you if you decide to upgrade word processor mid paper. But the first time you find yourself unable to change the bold of one section of text (or centering/whatever), you will really wish you could just drop into a view that showed you why it was doing what it was doing. You just can't necessarily see them.Īnd this might sound like not a big deal. ![]() Note that in both cases, all of those special instructions are still there. In the other, you only see what the computer is letting you see. Instead, the advantage is that in the one you are only writing text and you are indicating special instructions to the computer. ![]() That a graphical editor is superior because it is more readable. I think the reality is nobody really tries writing TeX.īut, ultimately my beef is the straw man that markup is bad because it is harder to read. I had a few things about TeX versus LaTeX.
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