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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.
The reason is that you're reading TeX, not LaTeX. The latter has abstracted away the fundamental building blocks so few people know how an hbox is set anymore. So, an hbox is a box where the content is in horizontal mode. Between the things is glue. Glue can stretch and shrink. Depending on how you have set your tolerance and penalties, there's a maximum percentage of stretch allowed. If the glue stretches more, it becomes bad, this is called badness and can effectively be up to 10000 bad. So why not just put more things into the box? Well, (La)TeX probably tried to do that, but came up with worse badness. TeX always chooses the least bad option on a paragraph level. In practice, the usual suspect is often that you have something else that can't fit the last part of a line, like a really long word. If you can look at it and manually hyphenate it, things might be better.
Most probably a narrow column with a word near the end that TeX had problems hyphenating.
A line of text is basically a hbox. The words in this line are fixed in their lenght, so TeX distributes the space between them as evenly as possible to fill this hbox. It has a certain range for the length of a space, and tries to move words or parts of words with hyphenation around to stay in the OK range for the space width. If it can't, it complains about under- or overfull hboxes.
BTW I wrote my thesis in LibreOffice. Thatβs its own can of worms, but at least I knew how to wrestle it into submission β other than LaTeX. Set the font to Latin Modern Roman and no-one will know the difference.
LaTeX writes the same fonts better, at least compared to MS Office. I notice it when a papers been written in word with the Journal template with the same fonts and style. LaTeX kerns and splits new lines nicer.
I am curious just how many people would notice that (or the usage of the microtype package vs without).
I know of one professor in my college who dabbled in typography and was usually spot on when it came to something like this but I've never heard the others talk about it.
In my research group we could tell instantly and it would usually act as a mark against the paper (ie read this one later).
If you're reading a lot of papers it becomes apparent.
The secret is just ignore it.
bullish on typst
I recently wrote my thesis in typst, best choice i could make
TIL my thesis could have been easier if Typst would have been available years earlier.
yeah, I still wrote my dissertation last year on latex because that was the template they had and I didn't feel like reading all formatting rules and writing a Typst version for that. That said, creating a Typst template is a far more straightforward than any other format.
honestly LaTeX isn't too bad once you have it all set up. An environment with the correct packages, a collection of templates for common document types, a set of macros for often-used constructions, and and editor with good snippets and syntax highlighting. Once you have all of that, LaTeX becomes a breeze. At one point, I was even taking notes with LaTeX in real-time during lectures.
But that's the beauty of typst -- it's like a fully beefed out LaTeX setup, but straight out of the box. No need for snippets, because the syntax is lean enough as it is. No need for templates, because there is no boilerplate needed for a document. No need to waste half an hour setting up an environment and looking for dependencies -- all of typst is just two executables (compiler and LSP), and package management is automatic.
LaTeX is soo great! You donβt have to worry about formatting ever again.
Puts image Iβm talking about 8 pages away from the section that talks about the image
Writes not only over the margin, but over the goddamn page boundary because adding a page was not fashionable that day
Moves a table left by 1 cm on every other compilation, moves it back in the other compilations (happened to a colleague)
So instead of worrying about formatting you worry about learning the incantations that force LaTeX at gunpoint not to fuck up the formatting.
If you're trying to do something on LaTeX and you find yourself wrestling with the software or writing TeX commands. Take a step back and reconsider. The reason the software is fighting you is because you are trying to make it do something it is not meant for or you're actively asking it to do the opposite of what you stated earlier you wanted to achieve. Thus creating a contradiction of intent.
Obvious examples are using the article template to write a book, or using the book template to write a letter. It is akin to using Excel as a game engine, possible, but not easily. You're trying to use a hammer to unscrew a bolt. Of course the tool is gonna fight you.
As long as you let TeX do it's job, you usually don't get such issues. But there are many people who mistake TeX as a "Word for Scientists", and just make the same mistakes they make in Word because they do not grok TeX.
I feel personally attacked. Brb, making presentation slides in beamer and compiling 1000 times to get the figure to the exact right pixel.
I definitely won't make any changes to the figure later that will make me have to adjust the position again. Why yes, this is better than PowerPoint, why do you ask?
If you're trying to do pixel adjustments of figure position and changing it breaks something, you missed the point of the software package and/or are doing something horribly wrong and unsupported.
Sheesh, now I feel actually attacked a little. I was being mostly hyperbolic, but you can do really useful things with complex figures in presentations. For example: revealing elements sequentially to build up to the final figure or altering opacity of different elements to bring the audience's attention to specific parts of the figure.
This sequencing can sometimes very subtly alter the size of the figure as you change elements, so the default positioning will slightly change from one slide to the next. Most people won't care or notice when a figure slightly drifts by a pixel or two during these sequences, but it bothers me tremendously so I add adjustments to keep every variation of the figure aligned on the slides.
For the image one there is an option to control if the image is immediate, or when if finds space to insert. Trouble is I have to look these up all the time...so what starts as an attempt at creating a cleanly formatted document often takes more time than messing around with a shitty editor like Word
If you don't want an image to float, don't put it in a float environment.
Exactly my point.
Its always bothered me that a language meant to get rid of formatting there seems to be a lot of fucking formatting. There's no way to change the way things look outside of explicit formatting (like themes). It's basically all formatting.
And it's a fucking mess. How in the fuck do I make titles? What about subtitles? Why is there no paragraph spacing? What's the point of \title if it's completely indistinguishable from other text?
I want a markdown editor that supports math LaTeX and a ton of plugins. Markdown is dead simple for a reason.
I've used LyX with good results, it's a GUI that abstracts away many of the complexities of latex.
I believe Joplin has latex math support, check it out.
Your editor shoul show you \title as another colour
And subtitle would be \large after title line
It is all formatting rules. But eliminates formatting the body text.
At least you know output will be same, not like MS Word
Oh thank goodness, body text is notoriously the hardest thing to format in a document
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...
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.)
Lmao the hits keep coming
Compiler:
Could not find "tikz.sty"
Me: So you want me to install the package called "tikz"?
Compiler:
no, there's no package called tikz. I need the file called "tikz.sty"
Me: Okay then, so which package provides the "tikz.sty" file?
Compiler:
fuck if I know, go google it or something Β―\_(γ)_/Β―
Switched to typst a few months ago, enjoying it much more than LaTeX so far. Really excited to see how it will grow in the future
Yeees, I forgot all about the non-existent module system.
β Professor: Hereβs the template for your thesis.
β There are, like, 50 lines of macro imports here. Which modules does this need?
β Fuck if I know. You want my installation? Itβs only 50GB.