I love LaTeX. I hate LaTeX

• publisher

  8 286 9.3 Lua

  speedata Publisher - a professional database Publishing system

  

I have a related feeling about TeX. It has superb output quality but the programming is awful. When LuaTeX finally arrived a few years ago, it was possible to do almost everything you have done before in the TeX language (starting with \backslashes) in Lua.

See http://wiki.luatex.org/index.php/TeX_without_TeX for an introduction.

I have (shameless plug) created a database publishing software using this technique (https://github.com/speedata/publisher/). Once in a while I have to use LaTeX and it feels a bit old school to do the macro programming.

My next project is to rewrite the TeX algorithms in Go - see https://github.com/speedata/boxesandglue. Already usable but not TeX like in any way (this is just a library, not a frontend software like TeX)

• boxesandglue

  4 186 7.4 Go

  PDF rendering library for Go using TeX algorithms.

  

I have a related feeling about TeX. It has superb output quality but the programming is awful. When LuaTeX finally arrived a few years ago, it was possible to do almost everything you have done before in the TeX language (starting with \backslashes) in Lua.

See http://wiki.luatex.org/index.php/TeX_without_TeX for an introduction.

I have (shameless plug) created a database publishing software using this technique (https://github.com/speedata/publisher/). Once in a while I have to use LaTeX and it feels a bit old school to do the macro programming.

My next project is to rewrite the TeX algorithms in Go - see https://github.com/speedata/boxesandglue. Already usable but not TeX like in any way (this is just a library, not a frontend software like TeX)

• WorkOS

  workos.com sponsored

  The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  

• pmt

  1 2 0.0 JavaScript

  A robust solution for creating PDF media with Pug.

I also have a love & hate relationship with LaTeX. I think it really boils down to the following:

LaTeX will work excellently for you, so long as your use case was envisioned by the original authors.

I can't say that the original authors of LaTeX didn't envision using it for creating slideshows/presentations, but I can say that making a beamer theme is uniquely complicated. I wish that LaTeX had something as flexible as CSS for styling documents rather than the awkward commands, etc. used now—so much so that I attempted to replace LaTeX with a HTML & CSS -> PDF workflow in the past [0]. It is still an idea I want to revisit someday when I have more time.

[0] https://github.com/jonpalmisc/pmt

• TeX-my-math

  1 27 4.9 Haskell

  Convenient Haskell syntax for writing in LaTeX math expressions

There must be a solution similar to this: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/TeX-my-math

I don't understand why they encode these expressions f^{(2)}(x) like so. They should be written like a regular function: f 2 x. Then you apply your styling depending on eg. the domain definitions. Eg. for f : N x R -> R, then the first argument is sub/super-scripted... etc.

• resume

  1 4 1.1 TeX

  Stéphane Travostino's resume (by 1player)

Same, I just did my resume in LaTeX, it's such an obtuse and painful tool, yet nothing even comes close to the control it gives you, short of using desktop publishing software.

Hey btw, I'm looking for work! https://github.com/1player/resume/blob/master/resume.pdf

• realhats

  1 96 4.1 TeX

  realhats LaTeX package

> There is never a keyword that does what you want

Clearly you haven't seen https://github.com/mscroggs/realhats

• SympyTeX

  1 35 10.0 TeX

  A LaTeX package that incorporates sympy code, and it's output into your LaTeX documents

You can embed CAS-generated equations and computations in LaTeX[1]. This came in handy for undergraduate linear algebra homework that combined proofs (where I could use my existing LaTeX macros) and computations (where we were expected to use a CAS). Mathematica or Jupyter notebooks would also work, but I prefer Emacs over the notebook UI (and Jupyter didn't actually exist at the time).

[1] See, e.g., https://github.com/tmolteno/SympyTeX/

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• rpg_module

  1 37 4.7 TeX

  rpg-mod­ule: a LaTeX class for type­set­ting RPG adventure modules in the style of D&D mod­ules from the 1980s

• asciimathml

  11 948 0.0 JavaScript

  A new home for asciimathml

  

There's this:

http://asciimath.org/

I wish someone would integrate this into pandoc so I could use it in rmarkdown.

Suggest a related project