LaTeX anyone?

Who here still uses the LaTeX typesetting system?

LaTeX is pretty much still the defacto standard for writing papers at University. Some teachers even require you to use it.

Sven Groot wrote:

LaTeX is pretty much still the defacto standard for writing papers at University. Some teachers even require you to use it.

What about PDF or some SGML-derivative?

I do.
And I usually use LyX as a graphical interface.

I do use Latex for complex documents.

W3bbo wrote:

Sven Groot wrote: LaTeX is pretty much still the defacto standard for writing papers at University. Some teachers even require you to use it.

What about PDF or some SGML-derivative?

You don't write stuff in PDF. PDF is just a way to distribute it, and there are many ways to get from TeX to PDF, although postscript is used more often than PDF.

I've never seen any SGML based language (I assume you're talking about (X)HTML) used for papers meant for print.

Sven Groot wrote:

I've never seen any SGML based language (I assume you're talking about (X)HTML) used for papers meant for print.

No, IIRC, there are a few SGML-derivatives used for marking up "ordinary" (i.e. non-hypertext) documents.

For instance, the Oxford English Dictionary is authored in SGML.

I dated a girl once with a LaTeX fetish....fun times...fun times....

I tried sooo refraining myself from posting that joke...

LaTeX is a great tool that produces really professional looking results, it's not exactly easy to use though and googling for help can return, um, interesting results...
:O

I do. LaTeX produces beautiful math IMO.

I use LaTeX too, especially for university reports and stuff. I know Microsoft is pushing Word, but it would be really nice to see a LaTeX addin for Visual Studio (just an idea ). VS is has the a very powerful text editor and is a highly customazable and extendable IDE, so it is not a big deal to write a LaTeX addin.

The only reason I haven't written myself one is because I'm not much into the MiKTeX interface and VS extensibility, but this could save a lot of effort spent in struggling with all these awful LaTeX front-ends for Windows out there.

P.S. Why, on Earth, isn't there a good LaTeX IDE for Windows? All available are either ugly, or pretty limited as editors. I miss VS when TeX-ing....

ingenious wrote:

P.S. Why, on Earth, isn't there a good LaTeX IDE for Windows? All available are either ugly, or pretty limited as editors. I miss VS when TeX-ing....

Best I've ever found is TeXnicCenter, it's not great but it does a pretty good job on the whole. It was certainly the best of a bad bunch last I looked.

I've learned few bits in university. Enough that I could say I hate it. Latex should get XML-fied... (but then it would not be latex anymore, would it? )

with Lyx... but... (nothing)

RoyalSchrubber wrote:

I've learned few bits in university. Enough that I could say I hate it. Latex should get XML-fied... (but then it would not be latex anymore, would it? )

I know, it just screams XML to us doesn't it.  I think it's testament to Knuth's abilities that he came up with all this in the late 70's, only 20 or 30 years before the rest of the IT industry grasped the idea of separating content from style ....


Herbie

Dr Herbie wrote:

I think it's testament to Knuth's abilities that he came up with all this in the late 70's, only 20 or 30 years before the rest of the IT industry grasped the idea of separating content from style ....

It's always amusing how the pendulum continues to swing.  When UNIX started to catch on in the early 1970s, one of the main selling points was that it included troff (and nroff, for daisy-wheel and typeball printers), a word-processing program that used embedded markup commands.  Later on, when WYSIWYG-type programs such as Wordperfect and MS Word came along, people couldn't imagine doing thing any other way than on-screen editing with the markup hidden.  Now everyone is refactoring everything to reflect a "separation of concerns", so that all you need to do to change a document's look and feel is swap XSLT stylesheets.  I wonder what's next?