LaTeX is a trap. First time you write a formula and see it typeset beautifully from a plain text file with some basic syntax, you feel like a superhero flying over all those poor mortals using Word to edit formulas that never turn out right when you reload the document. Then you find yourself writing a thesis in LaTeX and can't figure out a way to meet the style constraints without writing tons of custom code that almost works and requires manual hardcoding.
The thing with LaTeX is that it had a huge amount of work put into it to make the output look nice with all the spacing, alignment, typography, etc. I imagine it's not simple at all to even come close to the quality of LaTeX output and at least for me that would be the deal breaker. If you look at, say, the way groff typesets math equations, it just looks horrible. So in many cases converting something to LaTeX turns out to be the best way to get nice looking output without re-implementing a ton of complexity.
I am actually really torn, especially on Latex. On much of the software I agree that it is too bloated and has too many features for it's own good. In Latex however I feel that it is justified. I feel that for the GB installtion of Latex you actually get that amount of good features. Most of it are packages anyways for various applications, be they writing books, thesis or even writing down music is possible. If you want to continue to use Latex I guess it's just your responsibility to pick the packages that you actually need and avoid bloat this way. I am currently writing my PhD thesis in physics and for a long I was convinced that Latex is the only way to go. Upon closer inspection however, I get increasingly curious whether or not Latex is actually required. At the end of the day, I am writing text, formulas, images and references. That's it. There should be in theory nothing that can't be done easily in groff as well. So I will certainly check out the possibility to use it in the future. The main problem holding me back is usually other people. My coworkers or supervisors will happily complain when I can't provide them with a Word or Powerpoint file. They can not really force me, but I can understand that it's a problem when there is a de-facto standard in a work environment and then one person begins to go against that standard. No matter how broken or unnecessary that standard is. /endrant
yeah yeah, I agree about the advantages of minimalist software, but I don't think switching from a bloated software where you can't use a feature, to a minimalist one where there isn't even the support for it, is any better at "getting things done".
@Of the Clouds PDF is fucking bloated, the format supports embedded JavaScript man! Time to embrace DOCX (kekeke I know but it's actually not a bad format)
@@0M9H4X_Neckbeard Yhyh, but DOCX is just XML, which in-a-way supports javascript, that plus DOCX's famously bad compatibility issues. RTF was the best format MS ever made. DjVu is designed for scanned documents because it has high image compression, it's not as good for new documents. In any case, PostScript is all you ever need document-wise. Just zip it if you need it a little smaller.
@@zZGzHD a lackluster reader has nothing to do with the format. Exporting object models to XAML is not rocket science and many programs do it. And that's all there is to docx.
Building stuff on top of stuff is literally the most efficient way to build things. Tcp/ip stack, os and libraries, games etc all created in such way. I would always prefer something built atop of ubiquitous and robust foundation than 'rewrite-it-from-scratch-with-no-bloat' unicorn that gets abandoned in a year and gets you fucked.
this is exactly why this cynical saying exists: "every problem in computer science can be solved by another layer of indirection" btw i use asciidoc (acceptable tradeoff between minimalism and featuritis)
I printed a fiction novel using LaTeX. I made my own converter from HTML/CSS to LaTeX so I keep the source text in HTML to have the ebook in sync whenever I update it. Pandoc just wasn't customizable enough. Also, what is your take on ConTeXt?
I like ConTeXt, but I don't like Lua scripting that much. It's not terrible but every time I use an array, I forget it starts at 1, not 0. I'm getting annoyed just thinking about it.
I meant to ask, have you ever tried Sile? It's a LaTeX-like typesetter that also uses Lua. It describes itself as being a bit like a modern rewrite of TeX with cool things such as a box model. It also happens to be a lot smaller than LaTeX.
@@finndriver1063 I did try Sile, but gave up pretty quickly. While the novel class requires the LuaLaTeX compiler, I don't write any Lua code myself. It's mostly to support OTF fonts with fontspec. novel uses Lua code very lightly internally.
Minimalism IS a meme with modern hardware. Use the tools that are best, not most minimal. Groff isn't even in the same league as LaTeX when it comes to output (just look at how ugly formulas are, lmao) and there's a good reason why it has pretty much faded into obscurity by now. Unless there's a good reason to use something, a real advantage (and no, saving 900 MB of hard disk space on a 1 TB modern desktop is not a sufficient reason), I won't use a tool that lacks features or is more tedious to use.
Layers of conversion are not bad if they are handled well. Example is compiling a C program. First the source is run through the preprocessor, then the preprocessed source is compiled into an assembly language file, then the assembly source is converted to an object file, then multiple object files are linked together to form an executable. The compiler and build tools make these layers invisible, though, so you don't complain.
Well all of those stages (except the actual compilation and maybe Linking) are kinda trivial. Macro preprocessing is nothing fancy, converting markdown to latex and then to postscript and then to pdf are very big, nontrivial things.
Another thing is well, there's no way around compilation. Every step is absolutely necessary. You can't run a c source file directly, you can't run a .S file, and you cannot run unlinked object code. But you don't actually NEED a huge stack of document processing software layers
Latex is only bloated because the package management is so bad that everybody installs the complete texlive or miktek, etc. If people only installed what they needed a latex install wouldn't be that much larger than groff.
You need to watch Rich Hickey's talk on Easy and Simple. The two are not the same. People prioritize ease at the cost of simplicity. For example, having a requirements.txt or gemfile that is five pages long might make your life easy, but it sure ain't making it simple. This BTW is a recent trend across all software engineering. The entire success of Rails as a framework was because it gave you everything and the kitchen sink, but now people are discovering (1) that upgrading from Rails 4 to Rails 5 for example is nigh on impossible to do without badly breaking stuff, and (2) doing basic things like optimizing your code for db access is painful because (a) it is years since developers hand crafted their sql, and (b) ActiveRecord (as opposed to DataMapper) implies that your model classes also handle db access. The good thing is your classes and tables look identical. The bad thing is your classes and tables look identical
Did you try gimli? I believe it was written in ruby, uses a CSS style to format the text defined by a file, and worked well for me so far. Not the right tool for complicated documents with citations, formulas or anything more than images. I love the Georgia weather and background by the way :).
There's just one thing I don't understand... Is Emacs suckless? I mean sure it does a lot of things (arguably way too many things) but at it's core it's just an elisp interpreter that doesn't to a shit... Then you expand it with scripts... Very basic tool with much expandibility... Isn't that the sl philosophy? Idk anymore I think I just started an editor flame war... But I'm serious tho, I'm deciding what will be my daily driver editor and feedback will be much appreciated!
Not really, Emacs has a lot of builtins and old backwards compat. stuff that suckless doesn't agree with. It's config options are also decided at runtime rather than compile time, whereas I assume the suckless version would have you write your options in C and recompile the whole editor. I think that it's also worth remembering that while Emacs is bigger than Vim, it's nowadays pretty small compared to other editors. After editor-hopping around for a while, I settled on Emacs and I've never looked back, I'd highly recommend it. You might want to try using a modal editing package. The defaults aren't as terrible as some say, but they are far from optimal. I'd recommend using viper (which is built-in), or use xah-fly-keys. Good luck! I hope you choose Emacs!
@MJS I've tried Spacemacs, but it wasn't really to my liking, xah-fly-keys are more efficient and ergonomic (at least for what I do). I only really use terminal Emacs, with the daemon and client. Spacemacs is a very interesting project, but I personally end up changing so much stuff, that it's easier for me to use vanilla Emacs. I try and keep the amount of packages that I install to a minimum anyway.
R markdown is not only about turning it into latex but also about running R syntax directly to the document and no need to leave R to do the recompilation.
I've always preferred plain text and then a few years ago I took a shine to DokuWiki. Haven't used it in a quite a while but that's about as markdowny/uppy as I ever get.
How do you feel about the readability of latex documents? When I am editing my own work, the commands dispersed with my text still look like clutter to me. I've been using Latex for quite a few months for my thesis now, but I still find it difficult to read/edit and navigate through my .tex file because of blocks of commands (images, tables). I've been told I'll "get over it" and the editor highlighting/colours will help. But I am skeptical, I try to buy in on the "content over formatting" ideology- but mostly I find myself scrolling and getting lost in my tex files. Sometimes I get files from colleagues with mathematical notation written directly (not via commands) and the files are just hellish to read. The rich text editor in Overleaf is incredible, but I am really trying to find something offline to work with. Lyx and TeXmacs seem interesting, but I know that the former doesn't work with native tex files.
Labels may help you with that. With VS code, labels are highlighted like sections, so you could have a overview of the entire document, beyond simply sections or subsections.
Jokes aside, I can't agree with you Luke, most of current software (mostly bad but also good) is built using old software, this is how we abstracted from programming using confusing numbers that meant instructions to programming languages (and that is just an example, many things behave in this way) and we can do that very efficiently if we want to. The reality is that bloated software is so because it is poorly designed and written, which is commonly the case for a lot of software, but not inherent to it's layered behavior.
My first reaction was: "if you wanted me to say 'tek', why use an X?" Then I learned TeX is actually tau-epsilon-chi, rather than latin letters. So, I put these Greek letters into Google Translate's Greek input and had its text-to-speech pronounce it. She came back with "teks"! The "e" sound was different from English, and the "s" on the "ks" was softer than English, but it was definitely "ks" and not "k". So, now I feel justified pronouncing it as -teks and not -tek.
@@atsdroid you've done something wrong. τɛχ isn't pronounced as /teks/, there is no any ks, there is /x/ in the end, sound which was lost in English, it still there is written in `light` as `gh`, but doesn't pronounced. It sounds like `j` in Spanish, `х` in Ukrainian or Bulgarian, `h` in Polish, `ch` in Czech. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_velar_fricative
Markdown gets converted to HTML. You can convert HTML to PDF through any browser. I've used Macdown for Mac, it converts Markdown to PDF or HTML directly. And its 20MB for complete installation! But it's not as extensive as LaTeX. It's just basic markdown.
I was looking into typography/typesetting writing software and I found Latex and Rmarkdown. And I got tired just looking into them. MS Word fucking sucks. But I doubt Latex will be much "easier". Markdown or Rmarkdown... maybe?
groff -k for utf-8 support. Along with the correct font you can in fact insert emojis. Otherwise you can still implement it in a pre-processor that would embedd the image of the emoji in a (e)ps/pdf file and output a .PSPIC or .PDFPIC command!
You can use groff as pdf backend of pandoc. Nevertheless, pandoc is of course still bloat. A problem with markdown is that there is no standard how a markdown document shoud look and how a converter should interpret it. Because pandoc is the most popular tool for handling markdown it in a way sets the standard. Another problem is that markdown is not intended to be converted to anything else than html. A minimalist alternative to markdown is to use smu (one of the suckless tools) to convert markdown to html and pipe the result into html2ms (a program that comes with plan9) and then into groff.
I agree, the biggest problem with Markdown is that there's no standard or style guide, which creates a huge amount of fragmentation within it's community.
The emoji problem may be a Unicode one. Same for multilingual input. For correct formatting you should be able to use multiple fonts for different ranges and so on. Markdown to LaTeX is trivial, CSS to LaTeX is not. Also, although LaTeX is "bloated", it has almost no outside dependencies.
I was hoping to see someone say this. If you don't want to use some of the more niche features, but you like stability and ease-of-use coming from a LaTeX background, then TeX is a great option.
I've been meaning to give Lout a try, it looks really interesting. Frankly I think it's a testament to it's design philosophy that it is so stable with so many features but produced in such a small amount of time compared to Groff or (La)TeX
I use markdown for school, doing my scripts in that format. You won't like it, but Atom + Markdown works well. Later I can convert it to HTML and I am alright. HTML IS bloated, no question. But having that abstraction brings some benefits. HTML usually works. JS is cross platform. And also I dont really care how long it takes to compile my stuff. I probably wouldnt even feel a difference between a c markdown to HTML compiler and a js markdown compiler. Heck, even Python is probably fast enough. The advantage of Python: No nodejs needed.
Is there a suckless or minimlaist or at least open source tool for handwritten notes (graphic tablet)? After I got sick of OneNote I switched to StylusLab Write but it's closed source..
@@SaHaRaSquad Biggest problem I have with that is that it doesn't support endless pages and that it can't export as svg. But yeah it's Open Source so I may be able to implement things that I need.
@@l.h.503 Yeah seems like that it has some cool things. I looked up a video about it and tried it a bit but I consider it not really practical for taking notes. I may find use in it for some rare events.
What do you think about the paper about the efficiency comparison in writing research texts in both word and latex? (plot twist: even word novices were more efficient that expert latex users)
Honestly depends what they’re doing. Word really becomes a pain when doing large documents or in particular when multiple people are working on the same documents and you have to stitch it together. Not to mention formatting pictures to fit on the same page, that stuff is soul crushing. And referencing in word needs to use bib files instead imo, it’s easier to standardise Word really shines when writing just plain old text, like contracts and forms. It really starts to become annoying once you start doing stuff like math formulas and you wanna collaborate with others on a 70+ page report and when you have too many pictures that you want to format. Latex and rmarkdown really shines at doing the stuff 2% of the population focus on like showing software documentation, research papers and advanced math but word is really good at doing the trivial stuff with no experience and is tolerable for anything up to 5 pages.
You can include emoji in Groff documents: Add -k flag to groff, or preprocess with preconv (but you knew already). The issue is that you need a font that has emojis, I don't know of one for Groff. Have you heard of Lout? It's a typesetting system similar to Groff/LaTeX, but it's based on it's own programming language rather than a macro language.
This appendix to the -mom documentation shows how to convert Type1 (.pfb) and TrueType (.ttf) fonts, and install them into Groff. www.schaffter.ca/mom/momdoc/appendices.html#fonts
Hmm.. this rant is kind of like bloated software with a few bugs. Layers does work. Programming libraries are a great thing, for example. It's the same concept as the unix shell really, ala "convert x | to y | to z > to.pdf". Modules, libraries, it works, it's just inside the language instead of exposed on the command line. And the emoji example kind of fell flat. :-\ The _real_ problem is when the houses are built on sand. Bugs, version mismatches etc. You probably wouldn't have liked unix much back before the 90s. The same tools then weren't as polished and slick as they are now. Version improvements _coupled with_ standards compliance yields great results. I think that's more important than minimalism. Although.. it is true, yet it didn't come out very clearly, the more software there is, the more code there is to swim through to find bugs. And, it is really cool to be able to be lean, no doubt. Running powerful tools on a tiny Raspberry Pi for example is such a rush I'm sure.
groff is more minimal but latex's rendering is much much better, especially for math formulae. man, are groff equations ugly as hell! i just use the texlive-core package; not texlive-most and that's all that i need as a base and anything else i need can be downloaded later. isn't texlive-core more minimal than pandoc?
Arch i3 Vim ...and a Google fucking Chrome for everything else, when I think about it I don;t even need the VIM ... I am pretty much on make shift ChromeOS... :D
A converter that goes from Markdown (and maybe some dialects like R markdown, or github flavored markdown) straight to html/pdf/whatever would be really neat do we have enough autism in this comment section to open up a git repository?
has anyone tried groff_mom? how it compares to groff_ms? I currently use ReStructured Text but build PDF can be painful rst2pdf sometimes fights to install, maybe not well ported to Python3; Sphinx is overkill for most of my usecases and have to install LaTeX is too much.
The Mom macros are truly excellent, they are a little bit easier to use, especially for longer documents. The documentation is available online and it's incredibly user-friendly, but well-detailed. In short, they are very nice to use; I'd highly recommend trying them.
I absolutely hate R. I don’t know this R Markdown thing, but if it’s based around the R language I’m sure I hate it too. Used it a lot for statistics, and ew. As for LaTeX, I never really had speed issues with it locally, but Overleaf is slow. On the other hand Overleaf is part of what makes LaTeX great. That collaboration tool just makes things so lovely when you’re writing a paper with your teammates for a quick weekly assignment thing. LaTeX being so universal also helps it a lot. If you know LaTeX you can use it many places; Like Apple’s word processor, Pages, can take LaTeX for math formatting.
Yep, I think so. I tried writing stuff in polish and only some accented characters could be displayed. I found no way of converting it properly and I tried various recommended solutions, nothing worked. Heirloom Troff supposedly supports UTF-8 locale but I still couldn't get a desired result with it.. not sure if my fault somethow but.. LaTeX gets things done much more easily.
Groff technically isn't, sort-of. To avoid potential bugs from a major rewrite, they added a new preprocesser called `preconv'. So if you want to transparently use UTF-8 chars in a document then you just give Groff the -k flag when compiling, or pipe it through preconv beforehand. Do note, however, that you do need a font that supports the right characters installed. As it stands, pretty much the only non-unicode characters that I know aren't included are emojis. It's pretty simple to install one if you'd like to, though.
I use groff with UTF-8 to write in Swedish and Russian, and it works with no problems, as long as the font supports it. Some characters I’ve had to insert manually with \[u...] though
JohnAJ that’s weird... I have reinstalled my pc quite recently, so I haven’t fixed the layout yet so “alt gr” doesn’t work yet, I haven’t looked too deeply into it anyway so that might help...
@@johnandaway it comes back with: refer:/home/jeremy/lol.ms:5: invalid input character code 130 /home/jeremy/lol.ms:6: warning: can't find special character `uFFFD' (i'm using a compiler script btw... so this is what vim outputs when I press the compile button with the euro sign)
It's ok to use minimalist software but the whole message has problem in its root. 1. MD is still based on HTML so full MarkDown isn't minimalist by definition. 2. LaTeX is just a set of scripts over TeX. It's as bloated as VIM with scripts/plugins. TeX is typesetting system, it can't be as simple as just text. There is no bloating it just solves its task. 3. Converting MD → TeX kinda flawed by design: they solves different tasks.
Boomer cries innawoods for not being able to include emojis in his thesis
I would have spit my coffee but I wasn't drinking coffee.
lol...sounds like it sums up this post
LaTeX is a trap. First time you write a formula and see it typeset beautifully from a plain text file with some basic syntax, you feel like a superhero flying over all those poor mortals using Word to edit formulas that never turn out right when you reload the document.
Then you find yourself writing a thesis in LaTeX and can't figure out a way to meet the style constraints without writing tons of custom code that almost works and requires manual hardcoding.
DO YOU THINK MINIMALISM IS A JOKE?! DO I LOOK LIKE I'M LAUGHING?! DO YOU THINK IT'S A MEME??
AM I A JOKE TO YOU?
Your profile pic is smiling and I cant see you real face you idiotic clod.
Reliable Midget clod
>i3
>X
>Linux
Yes, very minimalistic.
> Back on systemd
Dont forget PulseAudio
What do you suggest?
OpenBSD + dwm
I will think of it but why you chosen OpenBSD instead of FreeBSD @@douwehuysmans5959
10+ minutes is too much bloat
>Varg if he was a linux user
underrated
dude that is hilarious
The thing with LaTeX is that it had a huge amount of work put into it to make the output look nice with all the spacing, alignment, typography, etc. I imagine it's not simple at all to even come close to the quality of LaTeX output and at least for me that would be the deal breaker. If you look at, say, the way groff typesets math equations, it just looks horrible. So in many cases converting something to LaTeX turns out to be the best way to get nice looking output without re-implementing a ton of complexity.
Amen
Word
Write?
There come's the Boomer with our daily red pill...
A red pill a day keeps the doctor away
writing documents is bloat, send them with telepathy instead.
Window managers are bloat. This post was made by tmux in tty gang
TTYs are bloat. This post was made by pen and paper gang
jakbyte pen and paper is bloat. This post ead made by grey matter gang
jakbyte Pen and paper are bloat. This is coming from my imagination.
I am actually really torn, especially on Latex. On much of the software I agree that it is too bloated and has too many features for it's own good. In Latex however I feel that it is justified. I feel that for the GB installtion of Latex you actually get that amount of good features. Most of it are packages anyways for various applications, be they writing books, thesis or even writing down music is possible. If you want to continue to use Latex I guess it's just your responsibility to pick the packages that you actually need and avoid bloat this way.
I am currently writing my PhD thesis in physics and for a long I was convinced that Latex is the only way to go. Upon closer inspection however, I get increasingly curious whether or not Latex is actually required. At the end of the day, I am writing text, formulas, images and references. That's it. There should be in theory nothing that can't be done easily in groff as well. So I will certainly check out the possibility to use it in the future.
The main problem holding me back is usually other people. My coworkers or supervisors will happily complain when I can't provide them with a Word or Powerpoint file. They can not really force me, but I can understand that it's a problem when there is a de-facto standard in a work environment and then one person begins to go against that standard. No matter how broken or unnecessary that standard is. /endrant
yeah yeah, I agree about the advantages of minimalist software, but I don't think switching from a bloated software where you can't use a feature, to a minimalist one where there isn't even the support for it, is any better at "getting things done".
Yes not being able to put emojis in researchpapers is unforgivable
GNU/lukesmith
@@maxv3286 🤣
"Monday, my favourite day..."
eww gross
I'd love to see Luke attempt to configure a modern frontend web framework like React.
Such a pain to get into React Native because you have to fight the IDE before you can get anything done
it's all fun and games until people send you Word documents
PDFs were a mistake. Use DjVu.
@Of the Clouds PDF is fucking bloated, the format supports embedded JavaScript man! Time to embrace DOCX (kekeke I know but it's actually not a bad format)
@@0M9H4X_Neckbeard its not a bad format until you need it to look the same on other systems
DjVu is great - death to Adobe!
@@0M9H4X_Neckbeard Yhyh, but DOCX is just XML, which in-a-way supports javascript, that plus DOCX's famously bad compatibility issues. RTF was the best format MS ever made.
DjVu is designed for scanned documents because it has high image compression, it's not as good for new documents.
In any case, PostScript is all you ever need document-wise. Just zip it if you need it a little smaller.
@@zZGzHD a lackluster reader has nothing to do with the format. Exporting object models to XAML is not rocket science and many programs do it. And that's all there is to docx.
Building stuff on top of stuff is literally the most efficient way to build things. Tcp/ip stack, os and libraries, games etc all created in such way. I would always prefer something built atop of ubiquitous and robust foundation than 'rewrite-it-from-scratch-with-no-bloat' unicorn that gets abandoned in a year and gets you fucked.
Got an ad for R before even starting haha
Unix is amazing because minimalism was the foundation of their design.
org-mode, surprised u did not mention it
this is exactly why this cynical saying exists: "every problem in computer science can be solved by another layer of indirection"
btw i use asciidoc (acceptable tradeoff between minimalism and featuritis)
I highly recommend you try groff using the mom macros set. That's a truly full-fledged alternative to LaTeX.
I printed a fiction novel using LaTeX. I made my own converter from HTML/CSS to LaTeX so I keep the source text in HTML to have the ebook in sync whenever I update it. Pandoc just wasn't customizable enough.
Also, what is your take on ConTeXt?
I like ConTeXt, but I don't like Lua scripting that much. It's not terrible but every time I use an array, I forget it starts at 1, not 0. I'm getting annoyed just thinking about it.
I meant to ask, have you ever tried Sile? It's a LaTeX-like typesetter that also uses Lua. It describes itself as being a bit like a modern rewrite of TeX with cool things such as a box model. It also happens to be a lot smaller than LaTeX.
@@finndriver1063 I did try Sile, but gave up pretty quickly. While the novel class requires the LuaLaTeX compiler, I don't write any Lua code myself. It's mostly to support OTF fonts with fontspec. novel uses Lua code very lightly internally.
Minimalism IS a meme with modern hardware. Use the tools that are best, not most minimal. Groff isn't even in the same league as LaTeX when it comes to output (just look at how ugly formulas are, lmao) and there's a good reason why it has pretty much faded into obscurity by now. Unless there's a good reason to use something, a real advantage (and no, saving 900 MB of hard disk space on a 1 TB modern desktop is not a sufficient reason), I won't use a tool that lacks features or is more tedious to use.
Doesn't Reddit compile markdown into text without using latex?
But I would still be rather writing something Markdown since I can convert it to both HTML AND PDF.
>Still not using emacs/org
Def. Stranger
> using tab indentation instead of the chad manual space
imagine writing documents in an operating system instead of a text editor lmao
With wkhtmltopdf, you don't need to install LaTeX to convert markdown to pdf.
Yayy!
Layers of conversion are not bad if they are handled well. Example is compiling a C program. First the source is run through the preprocessor, then the preprocessed source is compiled into an assembly language file, then the assembly source is converted to an object file, then multiple object files are linked together to form an executable. The compiler and build tools make these layers invisible, though, so you don't complain.
Well all of those stages (except the actual compilation and maybe Linking) are kinda trivial. Macro preprocessing is nothing fancy, converting markdown to latex and then to postscript and then to pdf are very big, nontrivial things.
Another thing is well, there's no way around compilation. Every step is absolutely necessary. You can't run a c source file directly, you can't run a .S file, and you cannot run unlinked object code. But you don't actually NEED a huge stack of document processing software layers
Latex is only bloated because the package management is so bad that everybody installs the complete texlive or miktek, etc. If people only installed what they needed a latex install wouldn't be that much larger than groff.
You need to watch Rich Hickey's talk on Easy and Simple. The two are not the same. People prioritize ease at the cost of simplicity. For example, having a requirements.txt or gemfile that is five pages long might make your life easy, but it sure ain't making it simple. This BTW is a recent trend across all software engineering. The entire success of Rails as a framework was because it gave you everything and the kitchen sink, but now people are discovering (1) that upgrading from Rails 4 to Rails 5 for example is nigh on impossible to do without badly breaking stuff, and (2) doing basic things like optimizing your code for db access is painful because (a) it is years since developers hand crafted their sql, and (b) ActiveRecord (as opposed to DataMapper) implies that your model classes also handle db access. The good thing is your classes and tables look identical. The bad thing is your classes and tables look identical
Did you try gimli? I believe it was written in ruby, uses a CSS style to format the text defined by a file, and worked well for me so far. Not the right tool for complicated documents with citations, formulas or anything more than images. I love the Georgia weather and background by the way :).
There's just one thing I don't understand...
Is Emacs suckless? I mean sure it does a lot of things (arguably way too many things) but at it's core it's just an elisp interpreter that doesn't to a shit... Then you expand it with scripts... Very basic tool with much expandibility... Isn't that the sl philosophy? Idk anymore I think I just started an editor flame war... But I'm serious tho, I'm deciding what will be my daily driver editor and feedback will be much appreciated!
install gentoo
Not really, Emacs has a lot of builtins and old backwards compat. stuff that suckless doesn't agree with. It's config options are also decided at runtime rather than compile time, whereas I assume the suckless version would have you write your options in C and recompile the whole editor.
I think that it's also worth remembering that while Emacs is bigger than Vim, it's nowadays pretty small compared to other editors. After editor-hopping around for a while, I settled on Emacs and I've never looked back, I'd highly recommend it.
You might want to try using a modal editing package. The defaults aren't as terrible as some say, but they are far from optimal. I'd recommend using viper (which is built-in), or use xah-fly-keys.
Good luck! I hope you choose Emacs!
@MJS I've tried Spacemacs, but it wasn't really to my liking, xah-fly-keys are more efficient and ergonomic (at least for what I do). I only really use terminal Emacs, with the daemon and client.
Spacemacs is a very interesting project, but I personally end up changing so much stuff, that it's easier for me to use vanilla Emacs. I try and keep the amount of packages that I install to a minimum anyway.
Seems fairly rational to me!
R markdown is not only about turning it into latex but also about running R syntax directly to the document and no need to leave R to do the recompilation.
I've always preferred plain text and then a few years ago I took a shine to DokuWiki. Haven't used it in a quite a while but that's about as markdowny/uppy as I ever get.
How do you feel about the readability of latex documents? When I am editing my own work, the commands dispersed with my text still look like clutter to me. I've been using Latex for quite a few months for my thesis now, but I still find it difficult to read/edit and navigate through my .tex file because of blocks of commands (images, tables). I've been told I'll "get over it" and the editor highlighting/colours will help. But I am skeptical, I try to buy in on the "content over formatting" ideology- but mostly I find myself scrolling and getting lost in my tex files. Sometimes I get files from colleagues with mathematical notation written directly (not via commands) and the files are just hellish to read.
The rich text editor in Overleaf is incredible, but I am really trying to find something offline to work with. Lyx and TeXmacs seem interesting, but I know that the former doesn't work with native tex files.
Labels may help you with that. With VS code, labels are highlighted like sections, so you could have a overview of the entire document, beyond simply sections or subsections.
>not using a meme typesetter like lout
Jokes aside, I can't agree with you Luke, most of current software (mostly bad but also good) is built using old software, this is how we abstracted from programming using confusing numbers that meant instructions to programming languages (and that is just an example, many things behave in this way) and we can do that very efficiently if we want to. The reality is that bloated software is so because it is poorly designed and written, which is commonly the case for a lot of software, but not inherent to it's layered behavior.
Thanks!
Ok, well now I'm going to tell myself that I'm going to go learn the PDF format, and then write a markdown -> PDF compiler.
Emoji is bloat, use kaomoji
emoji and kaomoji are bloated use dwarf fortress tileset. I'm using arch btw
still bloated, just use colons and brackets :)
I prefer pronouncing LaTeX as la·tex (lā′tĕks′)
but that scares girls off
My first reaction was: "if you wanted me to say 'tek', why use an X?" Then I learned TeX is actually tau-epsilon-chi, rather than latin letters. So, I put these Greek letters into Google Translate's Greek input and had its text-to-speech pronounce it. She came back with "teks"! The "e" sound was different from English, and the "s" on the "ks" was softer than English, but it was definitely "ks" and not "k". So, now I feel justified pronouncing it as -teks and not -tek.
@@atsdroid you've done something wrong. τɛχ isn't pronounced as /teks/, there is no any ks, there is /x/ in the end, sound which was lost in English, it still there is written in `light` as `gh`, but doesn't pronounced. It sounds like `j` in Spanish, `х` in Ukrainian or Bulgarian, `h` in Polish, `ch` in Czech.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_velar_fricative
@@w01dnick Cool! Well I defer to your explanation then, even if my brain may never get used to it.
@@atsdroid lol Google Translate
Sounds like the problem of "leaky abstractions."
Markdown gets converted to HTML. You can convert HTML to PDF through any browser. I've used Macdown for Mac, it converts Markdown to PDF or HTML directly. And its 20MB for complete installation! But it's not as extensive as LaTeX. It's just basic markdown.
I just export my Markdown to HTML and use a web browser to convert to PDF. I don't have to install any extra software and it just werks
I was looking into typography/typesetting writing software and I found Latex and Rmarkdown. And I got tired just looking into them.
MS Word fucking sucks. But I doubt Latex will be much "easier". Markdown or Rmarkdown... maybe?
Laughs in GNU/Emacs+org-mode
Just use evil+org mode and read a tutorial or pirate a book?
I use Groff BTW
groff -k for utf-8 support. Along with the correct font you can in fact insert emojis. Otherwise you can still implement it in a pre-processor that would embedd the image of the emoji in a (e)ps/pdf file and output a .PSPIC or .PDFPIC command!
You can use groff as pdf backend of pandoc. Nevertheless, pandoc is of course still bloat.
A problem with markdown is that there is no standard how a markdown document shoud look and how a converter should interpret it. Because pandoc is the most popular tool for handling markdown it in a way sets the standard. Another problem is that markdown is not intended to be converted to anything else than html. A minimalist alternative to markdown is to use smu (one of the suckless tools) to convert markdown to html and pipe the result into html2ms (a program that comes with plan9) and then into groff.
I agree, the biggest problem with Markdown is that there's no standard or style guide, which creates a huge amount of fragmentation within it's community.
I would like to see the faces of the developers of such tools when I just pipe the output of an existing converter to a pdf converter
The emoji problem may be a Unicode one. Same for multilingual input. For correct formatting you should be able to use multiple fonts for different ranges and so on. Markdown to LaTeX is trivial, CSS to LaTeX is not. Also, although LaTeX is "bloated", it has almost no outside dependencies.
This guy is not a boomer, he's not good enough to be one.
This morning walk is very inspirational
I miss the lisp machines.
Plain TeX is very much an option!
Try it!
I was hoping to see someone say this. If you don't want to use some of the more niche features, but you like stability and ease-of-use coming from a LaTeX background, then TeX is a great option.
Luke, check out Lout. It is minimal AND more capable than groff
I've been meaning to give Lout a try, it looks really interesting. Frankly I think it's a testament to it's design philosophy that it is so stable with so many features but produced in such a small amount of time compared to Groff or (La)TeX
Aaaah! I am not alone.
I use markdown for school, doing my scripts in that format. You won't like it, but Atom + Markdown works well. Later I can convert it to HTML and I am alright. HTML IS bloated, no question. But having that abstraction brings some benefits. HTML usually works. JS is cross platform. And also I dont really care how long it takes to compile my stuff. I probably wouldnt even feel a difference between a c markdown to HTML compiler and a js markdown compiler. Heck, even Python is probably fast enough. The advantage of Python: No nodejs needed.
You think HTML is bloated, take a look at SGML
@@finndriver1063 interesting. I see what you mean.
I love minimalism and vim mindset. But ORG MODE is really cool
Can't agree more.
Why don't you DWM?
Is there a suckless or minimlaist or at least open source tool for handwritten notes (graphic tablet)? After I got sick of OneNote I switched to StylusLab Write but it's closed source..
@@SaHaRaSquad Biggest problem I have with that is that it doesn't support endless pages and that it can't export as svg. But yeah it's Open Source so I may be able to implement things that I need.
Openboard could be interesting for you too.
@@l.h.503 Yeah seems like that it has some cool things. I looked up a video about it and tried it a bit but I consider it not really practical for taking notes.
I may find use in it for some rare events.
What do you think about the paper about the efficiency comparison in writing research texts in both word and latex? (plot twist: even word novices were more efficient that expert latex users)
Honestly depends what they’re doing. Word really becomes a pain when doing large documents or in particular when multiple people are working on the same documents and you have to stitch it together. Not to mention formatting pictures to fit on the same page, that stuff is soul crushing. And referencing in word needs to use bib files instead imo, it’s easier to standardise
Word really shines when writing just plain old text, like contracts and forms. It really starts to become annoying once you start doing stuff like math formulas and you wanna collaborate with others on a 70+ page report and when you have too many pictures that you want to format. Latex and rmarkdown really shines at doing the stuff 2% of the population focus on like showing software documentation, research papers and advanced math but word is really good at doing the trivial stuff with no experience and is tolerable for anything up to 5 pages.
You can include emoji in Groff documents: Add -k flag to groff, or preprocess with preconv (but you knew already). The issue is that you need a font that has emojis, I don't know of one for Groff.
Have you heard of Lout? It's a typesetting system similar to Groff/LaTeX, but it's based on it's own programming language rather than a macro language.
This appendix to the -mom documentation shows how to convert Type1 (.pfb) and TrueType (.ttf) fonts, and install them into Groff.
www.schaffter.ca/mom/momdoc/appendices.html#fonts
Here's the savannah page for Lout. Unzipped, Lout's only about 11M before install.
savannah.nongnu.org/projects/lout
another day, another dollar
Hey man ! Make sure you take a hat if ur gonna be under the sun a lot ! Great vid btw.
Hmm.. this rant is kind of like bloated software with a few bugs. Layers does work. Programming libraries are a great thing, for example. It's the same concept as the unix shell really, ala "convert x | to y | to z > to.pdf". Modules, libraries, it works, it's just inside the language instead of exposed on the command line. And the emoji example kind of fell flat. :-\ The _real_ problem is when the houses are built on sand. Bugs, version mismatches etc. You probably wouldn't have liked unix much back before the 90s. The same tools then weren't as polished and slick as they are now. Version improvements _coupled with_ standards compliance yields great results. I think that's more important than minimalism. Although.. it is true, yet it didn't come out very clearly, the more software there is, the more code there is to swim through to find bugs. And, it is really cool to be able to be lean, no doubt. Running powerful tools on a tiny Raspberry Pi for example is such a rush I'm sure.
more like a bloomer : D
Is Markdown =(markdown.pl or Pandoc)=> HTML =(Pandoc)=> PDF really that bad?
Maybe you like reStructuredText via Docutils (99 MB on my operating system). It's a pretty lightweight markup language.
Use stones and wood to survive
groff is more minimal but latex's rendering is much much better, especially for math formulae. man, are groff equations ugly as hell!
i just use the texlive-core package; not texlive-most and that's all that i need as a base and anything else i need can be downloaded later. isn't texlive-core more minimal than pandoc?
Heirloom doctools: heirloom.sourceforge.net/doctools.html
Neatroff: litcave.rudi.ir / github.com/aligrudi/neatroff
Is there cyrillic support in groff?
4:47 *bzzzzt*
Arch i3 Vim ...and a Google fucking Chrome for everything else, when I think about it I don;t even need the VIM ... I am pretty much on make shift ChromeOS... :D
A converter that goes from Markdown (and maybe some dialects like R markdown, or github flavored markdown) straight to html/pdf/whatever would be really neat
do we have enough autism in this comment section to open up a git repository?
Next step, systemd gtfo
you only need to change pdf-engine to xelatex and change the font
Be minimalist and use ASCII emojis or better, don't use them at all.
has anyone tried groff_mom? how it compares to groff_ms? I currently use ReStructured Text but build PDF can be painful rst2pdf sometimes fights to install, maybe not well ported to Python3; Sphinx is overkill for most of my usecases and have to install LaTeX is too much.
The Mom macros are truly excellent, they are a little bit easier to use, especially for longer documents.
The documentation is available online and it's incredibly user-friendly, but well-detailed.
In short, they are very nice to use; I'd highly recommend trying them.
What about asciidoctor?
It’s negative 10 outside by me.
I absolutely hate R. I don’t know this R Markdown thing, but if it’s based around the R language I’m sure I hate it too. Used it a lot for statistics, and ew.
As for LaTeX, I never really had speed issues with it locally, but Overleaf is slow. On the other hand Overleaf is part of what makes LaTeX great. That collaboration tool just makes things so lovely when you’re writing a paper with your teammates for a quick weekly assignment thing.
LaTeX being so universal also helps it a lot. If you know LaTeX you can use it many places; Like Apple’s word processor, Pages, can take LaTeX for math formatting.
Wait, groff isn't utf-8 compliant?
Yep, I think so. I tried writing stuff in polish and only some accented characters could be displayed. I found no way of converting it properly and I tried various recommended solutions, nothing worked. Heirloom Troff supposedly supports UTF-8 locale but I still couldn't get a desired result with it.. not sure if my fault somethow but.. LaTeX gets things done much more easily.
Groff technically isn't, sort-of. To avoid potential bugs from a major rewrite, they added a new preprocesser called `preconv'.
So if you want to transparently use UTF-8 chars in a document then you just give Groff the -k flag when compiling, or pipe it through preconv beforehand.
Do note, however, that you do need a font that supports the right characters installed. As it stands, pretty much the only non-unicode characters that I know aren't included are emojis. It's pretty simple to install one if you'd like to, though.
It is going to fail like UNIX.
I had problem with groff specifically with unicode utf-8
Jakub Janek yeah, I can’t even easily use a “€” to mark the euro we have over here... which is pretty frustrating
I use groff with UTF-8 to write in Swedish and Russian, and it works with no problems, as long as the font supports it. Some characters I’ve had to insert manually with \[u...] though
JohnAJ that’s weird... I have reinstalled my pc quite recently, so I haven’t fixed the layout yet so “alt gr” doesn’t work yet, I haven’t looked too deeply into it anyway so that might help...
I Don't Know Javascript Does troff’s -K utf8 option help?
@@johnandaway
it comes back with:
refer:/home/jeremy/lol.ms:5: invalid input character code 130
/home/jeremy/lol.ms:6: warning: can't find special character `uFFFD'
(i'm using a compiler script btw... so this is what vim outputs when I press the compile button with the euro sign)
My name is Groff
Where is this? Looks nice.
For compsi stuff : use asciidoc!
I keep meaning to try using asciidoc, it's a very cool project. How does it handle mathematical typesetting? Is it LaTeX-style?
Nano, abiword, notepad or Microsoft Word is about as much as I know. Not that I have written an essay in 10 years.
I think perhaps you might enjoy wordgrinder :-)
4:46 Was that a cellphone vibration?!?
eMacs is bloat because Mac is bloat
It's ok to use minimalist software but the whole message has problem in its root.
1. MD is still based on HTML so full MarkDown isn't minimalist by definition.
2. LaTeX is just a set of scripts over TeX. It's as bloated as VIM with scripts/plugins. TeX is typesetting system, it can't be as simple as just text. There is no bloating it just solves its task.
3. Converting MD → TeX kinda flawed by design: they solves different tasks.
Use ASCII Art
What are you referring to?
GNU+
daddy?
Systemd