Argh, just finished struggling through submitting a LaTeX document to a journal. And I think I still screwed up and will have to do some more fussing. My only hope (and a fading one at that) is that things will not devolve to the point where I just have to copy the whole damn thing into Google Docs, where you can actually spend your time on, you know, doing real work.
So I just Googled around and found the
following page, which has my new favorite quote about LaTeX:
Latex ("LaTeX" if you're pretentious as hell) is the biggest piece of shit in the history of both pieces and shit.
Yes.
(And yes, before you say it, I know what you are going to say.)
Latex is like Linux. Powerful and highly flexible, but there is a non-trivial learning curve.
ReplyDeleteTry WriteLatex or ShareLatex services. People say they take the pain out of writing LaTeX documents.
Hadn't heard of WriteLatex or ShareLatex–sounds cool. The problem with the learning curve is that it is both steep and seemingly endless. I have a lot of experience with Latex, and I'm still always Googling around to figure out how to do simple things. While it's useful for large documents like theses or documents with tons of math in them, it's otherwise mostly a complete waste of time for writing and sharing manuscripts. Actually, this is not really a knock on Latex. The thing is that it's the wrong tool for that job. Latex is excellent for typesetting text, especially mathematical. It's not really designed for *writing* text.
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