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Comment by alayne | Hacker News Reader

I think LaTeX is overprescribed. It's great for academic papers, but a lot of the output from canned styles I see is lacking. Don't expect to get perfect typography if you don't understand the desired proportions between type size and spacing (see for example Bringhurst). LaTex is difficult to use if you are new to it or trying to do something custom.

Personally, I'd much rather use commercial software like InDesign/QuarkXPress and never touch LaTeX again. With that software, you can manually and visually tweak things like word spacing for particular paragraphs to solve problems like rivers. Of course InDesign will not automatically make documents look nice either, but it's easier to do if you know what you're trying to achieve. This is the kind of software used for modern magazine layout.

edit: smalltalk below also posted a similar reply as I was typing this, but is hellbanned

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You are correct in stating that LaTeX is no silver bullet. The clear disadvantage of LaTeX is the tweak-recompile cycle, whereas graphical tools have instant feedback which is more suitable for design. But for automated typography (≠ design), it is still unsurpassed after all those years.

The default LaTeX styles are still way prettier and easier to read than the random muck (12pt Times, small margins) that would be more widespread otherwise. For scientific papers this is truly awesome, especially when the author does not care about typography. But you are right, LaTeX is not the correct tool for every job.

Now, if we can just get LaTex with instant feedback, we can approach the best of both worlds.

On Linux, inotify, pdflatex, and evince combine in the expected way. I edit with vim and :w and it does the work in the background. Strictly, I use a Makefile and make, but that's not a real difference.

I keep meaning to dig into this sort of write-based build trigger, and I'm going to grab this excuse. As I understand it, inotify is a syscall, right? Do you have custom C code to hook it and trigger your make? What are the standard options for command-line access to inotify? Rudimentary googling suggests incron or watcher (not watch). Any other advice?

Hmn, how the heck did I miss all these related google results the last few times I tried to research this. I start looking at things like libnotify and can't help but notice while such technologies seem to be focused on other kinds of events, they seem like they might work for this kind of file-watching thing.

[inotify-tools](https://github.com/rvoicilas/inotify-tools/wiki) is the stuff you want. There's a nice utility called inotifywait in there which will block until there's a change in a file or directory (it does recursive as well).

You can get results from as simple as this bash one-liner:

     while(true); do inotifywait --exclude '.*.swp' -e close_write dir; make; done

I wrote that off the top of my head so it may not work straight off, but you get the idea.

http://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/welcome.en.html

IIRC, isn't Lyx what you are looking for ?

I never used it so I might be wrong.

-- Edit: http://www.lyx.org/

LyX is halfway there. It is a visual editor for LaTeX, but it does not actually show the final result. Instead, it operates on an intermediate representation. Stuff like section headings, math environments and tables are shown correctly (unless you use non-standard features), but margins and spacings are not. Ergo it isn't suitable for designing, or nitpicky typography. It calls this approach WYSIWYM – what you see is what you mean.

The user experience is quite similar to your regular word processor, except that the “paper” metapher is removed.

I tried it out for a while, but I feel more productive (and more in control) when using a regular editor with nice syntax highlighting.

The IPython notebook almost does it, using LaTeX for math and markdown for text. There are still a few issues at the moment, particularly lack of references, that keep me from doing real technical articles entirely from within the notebook.

Give Gummi a try if you haven't. Its automatically updating preview pane might have what you are looking for.

http://dev.midnightcoding.org/projects/gummi

I use latexmk and coupled with a script which uses inotifywait. Evice automatically reloads the PDF on changes, so I get semi-instant feedback. Works okay for me.

On the off chance you're not aware of it,

  latexmk -pdf -pvc file.tex

does essentially that. If you like Unicode in your source (infinitely more readable and exactly the same keystrokes in Emacs)

  latexmk -xelatex -pvc source.tex

works.

> Now, if we can just get LaTex with instant feedback, we can approach the best of both worlds.

Okay, try this: http://arachnoid.com/latex

It's not ideal, but it's a start on something that could be much more powerful.

I've added

  map <F4> :!pdflatex %

to my tex.vim. It's on demand, but after the first compilation it's almost instant. :)

Edit: as mentioned in another comment, Evince updates automatically when the file changes.

LaTeX is a real tool, so naturally it takes quite some work for a beginner to be able to use it - the advantage is its raw power.

And yes you can definitely use it to do custom things, and yes it can be made to not move graphics around, which is usually the biggest complaint MS Word users has, but no you shouldn't do it.

I don't use LaTeX often at all, but I have found in the past that it was awesome for collaborative papers. Just check it in to version control, start taking advantage of include to break it up into logical parts and reduce the frequency of merges, and you're golden.

William Adams (http://mysite.verizon.net/william_franklin_adams/portfolio.h...) is a typographer who has extensively used both InDesign/Quark and TeX. He has often posted his experience with the two in different tex related mailing lists: http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Comparison_between_ConTeXt_and...

I think LaTeX is overprescribed.

I think it's underprescribed.

I've only just started using it (I've been aware of it and taken peaks from time to time). For both my own authoring and for marking up content from elsewhere (HTML or text dumps) it's quick, easy, and convenient. Some works take a while (lots of formatting and footnotes), others largely require only slapping on a prefix, an "\end{document}" at the end, and chapter headings.

Among the best aspects: once you've got marked-up Tex format, you can publish to pretty much any format you wish. The source can be managed under source control, you're free to use any editor you wish. Autoload / autobuild features make tracking minor tweaks easy (as others have noted, the evince PDF viewer will reload a file on change).

Styles can be modified. That's the brilliance of LaTeX. Write your text. Worry about the presentation side later. And the default styles _are_ good. Better by far than much of what goes on the Web these days.

And if you absolutely must, it's still possible to go to a specific layout tool to get pixel-perfect output.

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