Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”

Re:Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done b... by AlexandrB on Thursday May 28, 2020 @12:55PM (#23339553)

Considering what "modernizing" other parts of the tech stack has meant, I would expect a 21st century LaTeX to be hundreds of megabytes, require running a buggy, slow electron app, and phone home to a variety of SaaS providers when you use it.

Edit: Someone beat me to it by suggesting VSCode as an IDE.

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Re:Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done b... by rimunroe on Thursday May 28, 2020 @12:57PM (#23339593)

Hundreds of megabytes would be a considerable improvement for me. I think my last installation of LaTeX and the few packages I depended on was around two gigabytes.

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Re:Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done b... by ajmurmann on Thursday May 28, 2020 @01:04PM (#23339681)

And it's already slow and needs to run multiple times to generate a table of contents and bibtex

Edit: phone autocomplete typo

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Re:Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done b... by godelski on Thursday May 28, 2020 @06:21PM (#23343569)

Generally I use a Makefile that looks like this

```

SRC :=$(wildcard .tex .bib)

Paper.pdf: $(SRC)

pdflatex Paper

bibtex Paper.aux

pdflatex Paper

short: $(SRC)

pdflatex Paper

clean:

rm -f .glo .log .dvi .gls .toc .aux .ist .out .glg .pdf .bbl .blg .lof .brf *.sta

.PHONY: clean

```

I hate that you have to run things multiple times to get references right. Really it should just be `pdflatex Paper` and you should be done.

Every once in awhile I just get references that don't want to stick. Same with images. [ht!] and floatbarriers only go so far. As much as tikz is a pain (and beautiful), I'd definitely invest more time into making image placement and references easier for the average user.

EDIT: code has a lot of wildcards before every extension but I'm not sure how to escape those on HN

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Re:Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done b... by lokedhs on Friday May 29, 2020 @03:55AM (#23347407)

Isn't this what latexmk does for you?

I don't use things like bibtext so I don't know how it handles that, but latexmk works perfectly for normal use cases, and ensures that you never have to run it more times than you need to.

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Re:Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done b... by godelski on Friday May 29, 2020 @02:31PM (#23353740)

I didn't know about this before so I can't answer, but it looks like yes. Thanks!

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Re:Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done b... by ploxiln on Thursday May 28, 2020 @02:29PM (#23340648)

I've enjoyed using TinyTex, which is sort of the Arch Linux of TeX distributions: https://yihui.org/tinytex/

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Re:Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done b... by shuckles on Thursday May 28, 2020 @01:03PM (#23339678)

I think you are confusing RAM with storage.

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Re:Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done b... by rimunroe on Thursday May 28, 2020 @01:09PM (#23339758)

I suppose they could have meant that, but I think it's pretty reasonable to interpret that as having meant size on disk

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Re:Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done b... by shuckles on Thursday May 28, 2020 @03:30PM (#23341450)

You’re right. The original post was not clear.

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