I don't get it. Say I already know that I'll need some formulae in my document. Then the use case here seems to be, essentially, that I can write
# Section Name
instead of
\section{Section Name}
and that I can write
*important stuff*
instead of
\emph{important stuff}.
I can see that the markdown version is a little nicer on the eyes and keyboard, but only by a small margin.
Now, if I write a document in latex I need to understand exactly
* latex.
Latex is a beast, but there are no serious alternatives to typeset formulae.
If I want to write markdown with some latex in it, I need to understand
* markdown
* latex
* how pandoc interleaves the two.
What if, as will inevitably be the case, something breaks? There will not even be close to as much documentation for the markdown+latex+pandoc stack as for the latex-only stack out there. Is there even a standard for markdown+latex, the pandoc way?
Then there's the issue of packages needed to compile. Tex suites are already huge pieces of software. Now I also need to have pandoc. Pandoc is written in haskell, and the haskell stack on arch is a complete clusterfuck. I will not have saved time if I need to understand how to fix pandoc if it breaks after an update. Granted, this is mostly an arch issue, but the point is that the more software you use, the more likely it is that something breaks.
The bottom line is that you replace an already complicated piece of software with the exact same piece of software and then something. I find it hard to justify it in this case where there is so little benefit.
> Latex is a beast, but there are no serious alternatives to typeset formulae.
People keep repeating this like it's true, but MS Word has had an excellent formula editor for a decade now (the one they shipped before Word 2007 was terribly shitty though).
It's wysiwyg (which is fantastic if you're editing a big formula), it supports all math notation I've ever needed, and it has surprisingly decent UX. It even supports LaTeX-like input, eg if you type e^2 it gets autocorrected to e².
This makes entering formulas as fast, if not faster, than LaTeX and editing formulas an order of magnitude easier because you don't need to re-parse that backslash-curly-mess that you entered a week ago. Just point and click and edit.
It's nowhere near as nice in my, and lots of other people's, opinion. Just because people don't like it doesn't mean they haven't used it. Also, word's actual typesetting can't touch latex. I wouldn't want to use word for anything, let alone something that requires a large equation.
Ah, and to add, if one wants to try re-formatting a Word document in LaTeX: One can import the word format to AbiWord, and export it to LaTeX. It will probably need a bit of clean-up, but it is easier to add things like footnotes, section references, a bibliography, or an index. So, for learning LaTeX, it might be a nice strategy to take a modestly-sized Word homework document and re-format it based on Leslie Lamport's "LaTeX: A document preparation System" (which is in my opinion still one of the best software documentations ever, worth a read alone because of that).
Agreed, there's a great formula editor which is very nice if you want to create math presentations in powerpoint instead of in beamer (and I wouldn't blame you, especially if you're in a hurry).
But could you really imagine writing a serious mathematical document (paper, book, thesis) in Word? No Git, no vim/emacs, no plain text? Abandoning the digital lingua franca of mathematical communication? Abandoning the packages written by the sum total of anyone who has worked on anything close to mathematics in recent years? For what?
> But could you really imagine writing a serious mathematical document (paper, book, thesis) in Word?
Yes I could, and I did. My Master's thesis is written in Word and it was pretty heavy on the theory and the formulas. If you're interested it's online on http://e.teeselink.nl/thesis_et.pdf. It's not a particularly stunning thesis in terms of content, but in my humble opinion it's a pretty document, definitely no worse than the average LaTeX-produced thesis.
See eg page 58 (the 70th page of the PDF) for some large formulas. It's not arithmetic but Structured Operational Semantics, but I doubt that matters for this argument. (in hindsight I hate that page and the ones like it - the sheer overload of single-character variables makes it totally impossible to understand)
By the way you said "no git" but Word files can be version controlled just fine - particularly when you're working solo which I was. I used Subversion (hey, 2007) but ok.
I used Word because I noticed in earlier years that LaTeX made my mind drop down into "programmer mode" every time I wanted to accomplish something that was non-trivial. This nerd sniped me and it distracted me from writing the actual content. I ended up with super nice LaTeX themes and definitions and homecooked macros (excuse me for having forgotten the real names these things have in LaTeX, I last used it over 10 years ago), my content sources were super clean, but I spent at least as much time on setting up LaTeX as actually writing. Plus, I found editing large formulas frustrating because I had to find the right place in a fullscreen wall of backslashes and curlies.
Word forced me to focus on the content because everything layout-wise I wanted to accomplish was boring and, mostly, easy.
The only thing that was cumbersome was getting IEEE-style references (i.e. the ones that Bibtex generates by default) to work. It worked out in the end but wasn't as easy as it should be (I noticed that they fixed that since). Also I had zero problems with that thing where Word just doesn't want to do what you tell it to (indents jump, list items suddenly disappear etc, you know the drill) because I only used Word Styles (a bit like CSS classes) and never custom formatting. As long as you stick to that, Word sucks less.
Frankly, this PDF shows that it has been produced with Word. For example:
(a) Full justification without hyphenation;
(b) Chapter 6 ends at page 69, and the next 32 pages have wrong left header; and
(c) Section headers with fake small caps.
Using LaTeX would have resulted in a more beautifully typeset paper.
Your point that you might have spent more time preparing it is subjectively true, obviously, and it seems that in your case Word proved good enough.
LaTeX uses a different strategy where WYSIWYG is no advantage. The markup commands tell the computer about the logical structure of the text. This is not possible in a WYSIWYG system precisely because it displays the final result, and intermixing both is a mess. Word is a glorified typewriter, LaTeX is a diligent professional typesetter.
Apart from that: Microsoft Word /seems/ easy to use but this is not really true, by far. To typeset a minimal LaTeX document as for a homework assignment, very little learning and boilerplate is necessary. This can be done /quicker/ than in Word - an intelligent person will need half an afternoon to write a short presentable text in LaTeX, and the learned knowledge works forever. What you are assuming is that people are already used to write high-quality structured documents in Word, and this is, for most people, simply not true, as Words gets heavily in the way of writing in a structured approach. The ribbons UI has not really helped with that - I curse every time I have to search for a section formatting style in that terrible drop-down menu.
Now when it comes to writing seriously complex larger text documents, like a large software documentation, a piece of literate programming, or a PhD thesis, MS Word is far far behind. It is simply not up to the task.
You also say that Word has been getting better, but having occasionally been forced to work with Microsoft products in the last nine years, I really don't see that. The only thing that changes is the user interface. It is hardly believable that Microsoft will use office programs to try out new paradigms and software metaphors.
And to add, I am also pissed by the appearance that Microsoft - not specifically for this comment, but very much in general - seems to follow the strategy to make their commercial products mentioned as much as possible in the context of free and open source software, in forums and in places such as reddit. There may indeed be a few people which use .NET or c# or the Linux subsystem or which give up the power of UNIX shells for an inferior solution, but I just can't get rid of the strong impression that the huge majority of such comments are just product marketing done by some PR company. It is annoying. And completely hollow. As here, somebody who really has medium knowledge on how to use LaTeX will rarely suggest to use Word instead.
I didn't say that. Like, not even close, where did you get that from? In fact I haven't noticed a single improvement in Word since 2007 except the installer.
> And to add, I am also pissed by the appearance that Microsoft - not specifically for this comment, but very much in general - seems to follow the strategy to make their commercial products mentioned as much as possible in the context of free and open source software,
I'm seriously bothered that you're accusing me of being a talking head for some multinational corporation. I'm a moderately happy customer, that's all. Our financial relationship is 12 euros a month, from me to them.
If you really can't discuss the merits of software alternatives separately from some big "everybody who disagrees with me is on the enemy's payroll" conspiracy theory, the IMO you already lost the argument.
> As here, somebody who really has medium knowledge on how to use LaTeX will rarely suggest to use Word instead.
I used LaTeX in anger, then noticed that getting comfortably good at it doesn't make it a less shitty experience, and I decided that I preferred Word. Please note that I think that both Word and LaTeX are pieces of shit, I simply think that Word is slightly less shit (or, well, shit in a way that bothers me less and you're free to disagree).
I think the fact that you can't imagine anyone knowledgeable could prefer Word over LaTeX shows a severe lack of empathy and imagination on your part.
> I didn't say that. Like, not even close, where did you get that from? In fact I haven't noticed a single improvement in Word since 2007 except the installer.
I have /taught/ MS Word 5.0 in 1997 or so, and written large documents (technical translations) in Word 6.0. Given that I had deadlines and I needed to pay our rent, I had really nerve-wrecking experiences when the whole system failed to work in the early morning hours before our dead-line. Well, Windows is more stable today, but usability of MS Word has not improved. All over all, I am saying that the WYSIWYG or "glorified typwriter methaphor" is just plain wrong if you want a consistently formatted large document. Consistency matters, and it is only achievable if standardized styles are applied to pieces of text. At the some time, enormous flexibility is needed, and this is where WYSIWYG fails. Some people here mentioned that formatting text for the web is different from optimum typesetting of paper documents, which have a fixed width. To some extend, this is true. But here is the rub: The fixed-length lines of paper documents, as well as the whole page layout, is optimized for easy reading - as well as everything else, for example the fonts. Of course you can have a web document with arbitrarily long lines. But there is no browser which formats it for good readbility on a 38 inch wide-screen display. It will make lines that are more than 120 characters long, when optimum readbility is at about 65. LaTeX takes care of the latter, that is why LaTeX documents are more readable.
> Please note that I think that both Word and LaTeX are pieces of shit, I simply think that Word is slightly less shit (or, well, shit in a way that bothers me less and you're free to disagree).
If you really know LaTeX well, it is excellent for formatting large technical documents with minimum efforts. You have to learn how to maintain and compile a biliography, and an index, but this is not really difficult with the tools which TeX and LaTeX provide. Admitted, some documents are not worth that effort, but everyone who has worked with a large software or API knows well that once documentation is longer than maybe 70 pages, finding information becomes the real issue. Again, Word is of no help here.
That has nothing to do with empathy. It is a technical question. Maybe word is useful for some rather limited uses, but even for a one-page letter, LaTeX is less fuss if you care about consistent formatting.
> I'm seriously bothered that you're accusing me of being a talking head for some multinational corporation. I'm a moderately happy customer, that's all. Our financial relationship is 12 euros a month, from me to them.
It would be totally dumb to accuse an individual of astroturfing for a company, because it is nearly impossible to prove. (However, actually I have managed to spot at least one paid shill who admitted it later - if you know German, you can read about it [here](https://www.gen-ethisches-netzwerk.de/agrobusiness/umkaempft...).
That said, it is totally obvious that Microsoft is taking influence here (probably by using various intermediate companies) , and the strategy is clearly to mention Microsoft products as often as possible in comments and contributions which appear to be, but are not, from unpaid users. Microsoft is even well-known to do that since a long time, so this is not a outlandish accusation but simply a fact. The desired effect is totally clear as well - if something is mentioned often enough, it becomes familiar, and what is familiar becomes unconsciously associated with "liked" or "proven", and if then people have to make a choice with limited information and under (possibly self-inflicted) time-pressure, they chose what they have heard or seen often. It is exactly how advertising works, and it should just be called as that.
Of course, the solution is not to accuse individual contributors of astroturfing which cannot be proven, but rather to lay out how the product which is promoted is really inferior and a really really bad choice for the task in question. Let's keep it at that level.
I wrote my dissertation and several papers for publication using mardown + pandoc + latex. On Arch. I have to say, you're far overstating the difficulty of this arrangement, and understating the benefits. As long as you're willing to accept the haskell package madness, which pacman takes care of for you, everything else works in a very straightforward manner. The trick is, you don't have pandoc generate straight through to PDF. You treat pandoc as a preprocessor, have it generate tex. Then your main LaTeX source file boils down to a bunch of \usepackages and \includes. I pulled it all together with a very simple makefile.
The markdown source is a great deal more readable -- all of those little substitutions that seem inconsequential individually add up to a lot less noise in your document source. Equations just pass through to LaTeX, so you write them the same. All of my floats started out using markdown syntax, which is really beneficial when drafting, since much harder to mess up a single line when cutting and pasting it around. In the end, I wanted finer control over how they looked, so I pasted the generated tex into my sources and worked from there.
My one caveat is, you absolutely must understand LaTeX first, or you will be in for a bad time. Pandoc + markdown + LaTeX is no substitute for understanding LaTeX, but it's a huge win if you're already familiar with LaTeX and you're tired of typing backslashes.
Finally, the recommendation to use article is unfortunate. Memoir will save you a lot of headaches.
I think it is worth the extra complexity to avoid having to write \section and \emph all the time, and to make your notes more readable as a .TXT files. Also I find it easier to just set up a basic document, for markdown you can just open a new text file and start writing, for Latex you have to do a lot of setup at the start of the document to define your margins and import packages. Its not going to work well if you want a perfectly formatted document, but if you want to write simple notes styled with CSS it is much nicer to work with.
Which is easy to write via emacs mode/vim plugin. Similar for code blocks. Plus this is extendable, I frequently use an extension that transforms DOT syntax into embedded graphs.
Tables are very complicated in LaTeX... but for a goodreason: tables are just hard. In your example:
- Should the table appear flushed to the left? Centered in the page? flushed to the right? Full-width or only content-width?
- What happens when Column 1 is long? Should the text wrap inside its own cell, overflow, or what?
- Which row/column lines should appear? None? All of them? Only those that separate headers?
These matters will only get more complicated once the table starts growing.
Of course, you could say that all these issues are presentational, and hence it's your theme's job to handle, not yours. That is fine until it breaks and you need to fix it though...
Code blocks are very easy in latex too. Install the "minted" [1] package and you can just:
About extensions, it depends I suppose. In your case I would use some rendering app like graphviz and just \includegraphics the resulting ps/pdf. All this can be easily scripted (if you are able to create an extension you should have no problem writing a script that rebuilds your ps/pdf files before building the latex file).
I do think that writing simple files in markdown feels better than doing it LaTeX. Unfortunately, as the document starts getting more complicated it's always been easier for me to just turn to "pure" LaTeX than to try and deal with it through pandoc extensions.
I think the author mentioned this elseware, but he wasn't suggesting to use .md for complicated documents, just for notes and simpler documents where you don't need the extra options like complex table formatting, you just want something quick that works.
Thing is, if you're already looking to use e.g., Emacs, you'll be better off using org-mode instead of markdown. Same lightness of syntax, tens of times the functionality (including much better tables, which you can use directly from a TeX document, as well, via radio tables).
Editing ascii tables with no editor support is painful.
There's also some org functionality in vim plugins, though I've never used them, so I don't know how much they cover.
> if you're already looking to use e.g., Emacs, you'll be better off using org-mode
I find that you should use org only if you use Emacs. Vim plugins for Org are very limited, and this is even more true for other editors.
Judging a technology only for its technical merits is unproductive. Markdown has "won", it's everywhere and everyone can learn to use it. Those are damn powerful advantages.
Using Markdown, I gain the ability to read and write on a smartphone or tablet in my phone or tablet, which for some notes is extremely convenient. Many times being able to access my notes on philosophy from my phone during a bus commute allowed me to develop and write down a thought, which would have been a pain to do with other technologies. Of course I could have done the same with other options, but this ubiquitous convenience and effortlessness is great.
What I'd love to see is a way to transition easy-to-write-everywhere to more powerful type-setting easily when needed. May be combining Markdown and Latex? Or converting Markdown to Latex before publishing?
I'm sure this exists already; I just haven't needed it enough yet :)
I don't doubt that using org outside Emacs may be problematic to some degree (in terms of expected functionalities, anyway), but I use Emacs for everything, so it's not really an issue.
If popularity alone were sufficient for technological choices, we wouldn't even be having this discussion (and we'd all be using Windows). I try to choose my tools according to how well they work for me. Markdown, in my opinion, is a poor choice compared to org, but I can use it to collaborate with others, no problem.
As for the transition from light markup to TeX, that's pretty much the point of the OP, isn't it? Maybe the break point is different for everybody. For me, LaTeX imposes no extra cognitive load, but then again, I've been using it extensively for many years. If I'm need for something lighter, it'll be org (but really, org usually wins for me because of how well it does all the other stuff, not just the markup part).
Yes it links them dynamically. Why is that a problem? How would that end in DLL Hell? (which is multiple versions of dlls around and different pieces of application using different versions at same time in same process and never being sure what is using what)
Now, if I write a document in latex I need to understand exactly
* latex.
Latex is a beast, but there are no serious alternatives to typeset formulae.
If I want to write markdown with some latex in it, I need to understand
* markdown
* latex
* how pandoc interleaves the two.
What if, as will inevitably be the case, something breaks? There will not even be close to as much documentation for the markdown+latex+pandoc stack as for the latex-only stack out there. Is there even a standard for markdown+latex, the pandoc way?
Then there's the issue of packages needed to compile. Tex suites are already huge pieces of software. Now I also need to have pandoc. Pandoc is written in haskell, and the haskell stack on arch is a complete clusterfuck. I will not have saved time if I need to understand how to fix pandoc if it breaks after an update. Granted, this is mostly an arch issue, but the point is that the more software you use, the more likely it is that something breaks.
The bottom line is that you replace an already complicated piece of software with the exact same piece of software and then something. I find it hard to justify it in this case where there is so little benefit.