Comment by dmitriid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmitriid | Hacker News Reader

LaTeX is only good for one thing, and one thing only: create same-looking two-column PDFs for research/scholarly publications. And it's barely good at that.

Things may have changed slightly since I last used it (cca 2008), but: combining several languages in one document (Turkish + Russian, anyone?), tables that properly span several pages, inline images, a different layout (that doesn't break languages, or tables, or images, or even works, or doesn't look like shit)? All that is nigh impossible unless you're willing to spend countless hours digging through obscure error messages and arcane setup rules.

I managed to produce this in the end: https://www.scribd.com/doc/31019289/Система-полуавтоматическ...

My verdict: LaTeX? Never again.

> combining several languages in one document (Turkish + Russian

what's the problem with this ? just encode as UTF-8 and type however you like.

The hyphenation algorithm, I guess, needs some knowledge of the language. Probably a lot more issues as well.

Currently works perfectly for me with English and German where I place \selectlanguage{UKenglish} and \selectlanguage{ngerman} in front of the appropriate paragraphs. Hyphenation then simply works.

> Currently works perfectly for me with English and German

Both fit neatly into the same codepage, latin-1, so no possible conflicts there

> I place \selectlanguage{UKenglish} and \selectlanguage{ngerman} in front of the appropriate paragraphs

What about mixing two languages within the same paragraph? \selectlanguage before and after each word?

"Things may have changed slightly since I last used it " :)

It's a good thing it finally got to understand Unicode. It was a pain previously

You've got a pretty unique use-case. What's an alternative you would recommend for this kind of work?

There's nothing really unique for that document. It's just an outline of a document for an international company.

We also tried to use latex to generate price reports, and that's where we ran into Russian + Turkish issue :)

For simple documents like the one at the link, I'd go with Word/Pages. For generating pdfs though... I still have no idea :)

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