Can someone redpill or convince me to keep up using LaTeX?
I love it for simple stuff? But for other things it seems confusing and I get lost in trying to find out how to do a particular thing.
>>51259215
git gud scrub
Generally if doing a thing isn't simple, leave it and rethink what you want.
I love it for writing essays
I just use Notepad.
>>51259215
It's not really a general purpose thing. If you use it for more than a couple of weeks and still wonder why, then you probably don't need it. Do you write papers, essays, theses, journals, reports etc? Do you use a lot of mathematical/scientific notation? If you do, LaTeX might be the best way to get it done. If not, you are probably better off using something else.
what the fuck faggot how else are you going to write quality mathematical papers?
>>51259215
If you need to write some nice looking reports and do stuff that involves writing formulae, LaTeX is fucking great.
For more general purpose shit, just use a text editor or something.
if you need to call someone a "fucking faggot", do the rest of us a favor and don't try to evangelize. there are some very good, hopefully generalizable arguments for using latex, and I'll try to give them here:
- version control: any plaintext format offers this, but with latex you can commit your documents to something like a git repo, diff changes, etc... and that makes it a lot easier to track updates and changes. that makes tracking, backup, and agnostic collaboration much easier (though maybe not easier than google docs, these days).
- citations/references: this is less generalizable, but if you do anything with citations, latex and bibtex handle this for you so smoothly that it'll make you wonder how Word users can seriously tolerate that shit. no more manual parenthetical citations. no more figuring out the correct citation format, no more tracking which references you're using, etc... it just works.
- decomposition of style and content: this one is a little more complicated. first there's the decomposition of style, allowing you to put all the stylistic stuff at the top of the document (making it much easier to copy or make a generic document, and then just write till you're tired of writing, without worrying about layouts and whatnot.
The second part of this is that decomposing content allows you to write sections in their own documents and include them in a master document later. this is nice because you can copy a section if you want without having to rewrite or copy/paste it all. it *also* means you can have sections in their own manageable files rather than a single document that spans the whole length of your paper (this is a problem with longer documents).
if these don't seem compelling to you, then it's not a big deal. Microsoft Word isn't some big conspiratorial scam; it's a different product geared to different users (not worse users, just different users). anyone who tells you otherwise is a zealot and you should regard them with suspicion.
>>51259485
who knows? \overset{\overline{\phantom{I}}\backslash(\overset{\shortparallel}{\smile})/\overline{\phantom{I}}}{\bowtie}
>>51259649
Use newcommand, it exists for a reason.
It's trash for scientists to make them feel less worthless by compiling fucking text. Anyone who likes to get shit done uses Word or InDesign.
>>51261020
>Too stupid to use LaTeX
>Gets butthurt when other, less stupid people use it
>>51261050
>feeling superior for using inferior tools to get the job done
>>51259629
10/10 post of the month
>>51261020
Lol have fun typing out maths in Microsoft word.
>>51261020
Cool story. Don't you have circle to square or some prime number conjecture to rant about?
>>51263593
Word's equation editor works OK and is a hell of a lot easier to learn than tex
>>51259215
Does anyone have any recommendations on the best way to use citations in LaTeX? I'm starting to write my thesis today and it looks like there are a lot of different ways to go about it. I probably have 60-100 citations that are currently in EndNote in my Windows VM. Are there any cite-as-you-write type of things for latex?
>>51265404
Whenever you use a \cite, Latex looks up the reference in your Bibtex database, inserts an entry into the bibliography and adds a cross reference to that entry from your current position in the text.
>>51265401
Yeah, that's it, it works okay. But if you have to type countless formulas that get really long and complicated and require special care and some obscure notation, then okay is not enough. You want the real thing, which is LaTeX.
>>51265483
Nice. So should I use something like Zotero to gather citations? I would like to import all of my current EndNote data, I'm assuming I would go:
Export from Endnote
Import into Zotero
Create Bibtex database
Include bibtex database in my tex project
?
>>51263593
I learned Latex in highschool, and it is useful for writing mathematical equations.
Which is why is use
> https://www.codecogs.com/latex/eqneditor.php
And export what I need to an image, which I can embed inside a .doc
That's usually much faster for me, and I have a nice auto-citation + template set up for academic papers.
/$.02
>>51265970
That would probably work, yes. I think there are tools for the most common editors to sync the Bibtex database with Zotero, if you want to continue using it for gathering new citations, but I haven't looked at any, since I don't use Zotero myself.
>>51259629
/thread
which templates do you use for your lab reports/homeworks?
>>51266568
Just regular scrartcl with heading fonts changed back to computer modern.
>>51259215
i use latex when someone asks me to send them a report with but the last time i sent them a tar.gz with .txt and .pngs they complained.
>>51266025
Please kill yourself
>>51259215
I used to create circuits with latex back in freshman year when I was first learning it and it was pretty straightforward.
>>51266805
FUCKING AMAZING
How do I learn this?
>>51266990
>How do I learn this?
I googled "latex circuit library", found circuitikz, and then read the documentation on it at http://texdoc.net/texmf-dist/doc/latex/circuitikz/circuitikzmanual.pdf
Pic related is the latex for that first circuit. A bit messy and overly verbose. A lot of it can just be set as defaults but this was when I was new at it.
>>51266805
come on this is a blue board anon
>>51261103
>inferior tools
get out faggot
>>51259629
Good post. But that is actually it's only purpose. For cs students or maths professors.
No one with a non mathematical job needs it. Any other wysiwyg word processor no matter what company it's from is better for standard usage.
>>51267680
>better for standard usage.
More like easier for standard usage.
From an aesthetic point of view, LaTeX wins against wysiwyg word processors. I mean the resulting document obviously and not the programs themselves.
>>51266805
>freshman year
Was everyone else doing this shit in pencil or is my school just terrible?
>>51268021
Everyone else was writing by hand, yeah.
you can always write your documents in markdown and render it to pdf or whatever with pandoc. its a nice compromise, unless you need really advanced stuff i guess
>>51265970
if you're doing anything biological, give mendeley a try
it keeps track of papers really nicely and can export bibs
>>51259215
Super usefull for reports, thesis and so on for glossary, bibliography, charts..
Can really make something pro looking with it
>>51266805
the funny thing is, with tikz this isn't hard to do at all.
>>51259215
Try LyX to start if LaTeX intimidates you. Then, when you have the hang of it, you can move back to raw LaTeX.
