LaTeX?
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- Fizik
I just had an argument with some engineers about whether that 'scientific' document language 'LaTeX' was really that good.
I don't know much about it, but it seems to me that it's not the easiest, greatest thing to use.
Can anyone give me some pros / cons of it if you've used it and stuff? Everytime I see it I think of XML...........
hmmm...
- chl0
No, it's a pain in the ass to use. It is philosophically the same idea as XML. You have content that gets surrounded by special markup tags that tell an interpreter how to display the resulting output. Honestly, without a pretty nerdy text editor like the one I use (http://www.xemacs.corg) it's very hard to deal with.
Having said that, if you're trying to display complicated mathematical things, then it can't be beat. It looks beautiful and is still faster than trying to do it any other way that I know of.
- chl0
Sorry. I mistyped that link. My editor of choice is XEmacs. Link is
- 19770
Wow, a document language called latex? What's it for? S&M sites?
- tfsmag0
no it's for scientific documents... i work for an agricultural science management service and all of our published articles are converted to LaTeX. It's better than XML for that type of work because of the way it can display complicated math.
- Fizik0
so...........if it's like XML, couldn't someone just make up a 'math' specific DTD and then we'd have what LaTeX is?........
now my question is if XML is just building on the latex idea, possibly stealing/re-framing it....... or is LaTeX just an 'old' good idea........