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Re:Linux Productivity Tools (2019) [pdf] by qu83rt on Monday May 18, 2020 @08:46PM (#23230120)
I'd be using LaTeX for professional looking documents.
Re:Linux Productivity Tools (2019) [pdf] by JadeNB on Monday May 18, 2020 @09:10PM (#23230269)
LaTeX is great for professional-looking typesetting, and it has the power to do just about any layout tricks you want, but, in practice, you'll be fighting an uphill battle if you try to trick it into doing something that someone out there hasn't already written a package for.

(I say this as a professional mathematician, who lives his life in LaTeX. It's fantastic for writing math, and trusting that all the kerning etc. will be handled properly. However, when I want any formatting tricks, even after 25 years I still have to turn to my local TeX guru, who more often than not says "you don't really want to do that with TeX.")

Re:Linux Productivity Tools (2019) [pdf] by yesenadam on Tuesday May 19, 2020 @02:31AM (#23231880)
Not sure what formatting tricks you mean, but that doesn't seem quite fair. When I want to do anything unusual, I google my problem and almost always there's a question on Tex stack exchange (which is blessed with the participation of most of the experts in the subject) with answers giving several easy ways to do it, using packages I already have on my computer! And it's easy to make your own commands when existing ones don't do the job.
Re:Linux Productivity Tools (2019) [pdf] by maccard on Tuesday May 19, 2020 @03:56AM (#23232417)
The canonical one is forcing image placements. Sure you can Google and get a result, but all of them are prefixed with "if you _realy_ wany to do this here's my preferred workaround, but you should let Tex do the type setting".
Re:Linux Productivity Tools (2019) [pdf] by JadeNB on Tuesday May 19, 2020 @10:50AM (#23235474)
> When I want to do anything unusual, I google my problem and almost always there's a question on Tex stack exchange (which is blessed with the participation of most of the experts in the subject) with answers giving several easy ways to do it, using packages I already have on my computer!

Yes, exactly! As I said:

> if you try to trick it into doing something that someone out there hasn't already written a package for.

There's an incredible package library out there, rivalling CPAN, and I love TeX and won't speak against it; but, if you try to step outside the package library (or even if you try to compose packages in sensible-seeming ways), as is very easy to do if you try to view TeX as a general-purpose typesetter, it rapidly becomes clear that there's a lot of magic going on that those packages hide away (more or less neatly, depending on their maturity), and that is hard to reproduce on your own, or add to.

Re:Linux Productivity Tools (2019) [pdf] by rietta on Monday May 18, 2020 @09:25PM (#23230369)
I would say the vast majority of business documents, proposals, contracts, etc are collaborative editing with others. I didn't mention it but basically Google Docs and Sheets rules the world with these given we have a 50 user grandfathered account. For contracts, end result is exported to PDF and signed with Xournal and sent to the client for countersignature.
Re:Linux Productivity Tools (2019) [pdf] by ketanmaheshwari on Tuesday May 19, 2020 @09:06AM (#23234420)
I meant to use LaTeX beamer to build these slides but couldn't figure an easy way to make the "Anatomy" figures eg. on slides 8,14,15 etc.
Re:Linux Productivity Tools (2019) [pdf] by tapia on Wednesday May 20, 2020 @09:00AM (#23246330)
Tikz maybe?