Context: LaTeX is a typesetting system. When compiling a document, a lot of really in-depth debugging information is printed, which can be borderline incomprehensible to anyone but LaTeX experts. It can also be a visual hindrance when looking for important information like errors.

  • Kairos
    7•5 months ago

    Oh thank goodness, body text is notoriously the hardest thing to format in a document

    • @Treczoks
      10•5 months ago

      If you had seen some of the Word documents I have, you would not joke about that. People can really f-up text bodies.

      Example: one guy wanted to keep two paragraphs together. He did not know about the necessary formatting option, but he knew that chapter titles did what he wanted. So he made the first paragraph a title and just reset font, size, etc to resemble a normal text. F-ed up quite some things…

      • Kairos
        1•5 months ago

        Okay now what would happen if you made him use LaTeX?

        • @Treczoks
          1•5 months ago

          I don’t know if that person would have the intellectual capacity to actually understand the very concept of TeX: Writing a source and compiling it into a document. That idea would probably fry his mind.

      • Kairos
        1•5 months ago

        That’s just an effect of shitty software that does too much (and yes I’m advocating for a simpler Word or something. Markdown is fine for 95% of use cases.)

        • @Treczoks
          2•5 months ago

          Guess what? I have moved my large text layouts over to HTML. Creating printed TOCs in a PDF takes some effort, but once I got that under control, it worked. Takes a makefile, though, and a bit of discipline in the HTML file, but the result is surprisingly good.

          • Kairos
            2•5 months ago

            Anything you put that amount of effort into should be good, as long as you actually care about it.

          • @[email protected]English
            2•5 months ago

            I’ve come to that conclusion, too. If only printing support were better, I wouldn’t write anything but HTML.

            • @Treczoks
              1•5 months ago

              Have you tried weasyprint? It turns .html into .pdf. Then I use a script with pdfinfo with the -dests option to get the page numbers of the chapters, mixes it with chapter titles from the .html file to create a ToC, which, in turn, gets included into the .html file again - just like TeX does it.

              This is helpful in an environment where inputs are either HTML or EPUB files, and output is PDF for printing, HTML for the web site, and/or EPUB-formate.

              • @[email protected]English
                2•5 months ago

                I haven’t. Thanks for the tip. This might come in handy when we need to create automated documents again.