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LPT Do it. (mander.xyz)

submitted 5 months ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to c/science_memes@mander.xyz

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[-] the_third@feddit.de 13 points 5 months ago

Never heard of latex

Fuck, I'm old.

[-] A_Chilean_Cyborg@feddit.cl 8 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{soul}
\begin{document}
I'm 19 and I know how to use \LaTeX, \LaTeX is more used in academia, they taught me \LaTeX in Uni, but a lot of other people just won't ever heard of it because is rare to find in other places, most technical degrees and even a lot of uni ones won't use it \st{even if it's vastly superior to word}.

\huge \LaTeX rules
\end{document}

[-] thehatfox@lemmy.world 3 points 5 months ago

}

I think you dropped this.

[-] A_Chilean_Cyborg@feddit.cl 3 points 5 months ago

You have to excuse me, texstudio adds automatically the closing one.

[-] PlexSheep@infosec.pub 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Same except that I taught myself. Written two essays for uni already with it and knew from the start that I wouldn't touch word if I didn't absolutely need it.

Latex is confusing, the errors are often even less clear than Python or Java tracebacks, some packages have weird API or don't work together, and I had to make a build script to work with it, but besides that, I have a good language and environment now to create pretty good PDFs with, including VCS with git and not having to use an editor that is not neovim.

If you want to look deeper, there are a few more typesetting languages, some with more modern syntax. Markdown is surely the easiest, but not quite as powerful.

Btw, is soul a real package?

[-] A_Chilean_Cyborg@feddit.cl 1 points 5 months ago

Yes, the \LaTeX code I wrote is 100% compilable.

I also learned most \LaTeX myself, school just taught me the basic sintaxis, but is widely used amongst students and academics.

[-] dependencyinjection@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 5 months ago

I’m 40 if that helps.

[-] the_third@feddit.de 6 points 5 months ago

I'm in that that as well. I'm my age™ everybody wrote their bachelor and master thesis in LaTeX 🤷

[-] dependencyinjection@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 5 months ago

I become a software developer later in life and never had the privilege to go to university, so sometimes I’m out of the loop on older tech.

How did Latex compare to modern Git?

[-] derGottesknecht@feddit.de 6 points 5 months ago

Latex is no versioning tool but a textsetting language. It outputs perfectly formatted Documents after building and takes care of aranging images, quotes and all the tedious stuff so after setting up your template you only have to care about content. It works well with git.

Not like word where adding an image fucks the whole formatting.

[-] dependencyinjection@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 5 months ago

Interesting.

Yeah word sucks. I’m a software developer now and have to deal with Word and Excel more than I ever thought I would.

[-] derGottesknecht@feddit.de 4 points 5 months ago

I'm a softwaredev too, we use this for our manual. Its writen in markdown, which we convert with pandoc to latex. We can use git for versioning and merging and the manuals always look very nice.

[-] Zagorath@aussie.zone 2 points 5 months ago

As a software developer, LaTeX makes writing documents feel elegant in the way good code is elegant. No more manually going back and saying things like "as shown in diagram 4" and updating the number when the number of diagrams changes; LaTeX can do that for you by referencing the object. Citations and bibliography are an absolute breeze to generate. It can generate various kinds of plots and diagrams themselves for you, making it much easier when you then need to make changes to it later.

With the right packages (think: code libraries) you can do all sorts of things. I like the acrodef and ac commands which lets you specify a bunch of acronyms, and then the first time you use them in a document it automatically expands it to the full version, but uses the acronym on all subsequent uses. When writing code snippets, you can have it automatically apply the correct syntax highlighting for the language you specify; though this is admittedly a feature many markdown implementations also have.

[-] howrar@lemmy.ca 3 points 5 months ago

Everyone still uses LaTeX for CS/Math at my school. It's not an age thing. Just different circles. I don't think anything similar even comes close to LaTeX yet.