News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX by galangalalgol on Tuesday May 24, 2022 @10:06AM (#31492287)
Another poster just finished saying images and tables are hard. Why the disconnect do you think?
Re:I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX by krinchan on Tuesday May 31, 2022 @10:39AM (#31570026)
Very late but just in case: If you're referring to my post, it was the particular layout I was trying to achieve. The board wanted me to imitate the existing minutes title page layout from their Word "template." The image was inside a table cell, the table had a lot of column/row spans, and things got messy really fast. As with HTML, using tables for layout is just a bad idea all around.

Also, as pointed out deeper in other responses, the basic tabular environment is not terrific when you're not just presenting standard table data.

Breaking apart the image and table and letting LaTeX handle the layout Just Worked (TM) and looked better in my opinion. That said, LaTeX images and tables are pretty easy and look great by default when you're not doing something weird with them.

Edit: A better way to phrase this might actually be that a major principle for LaTeX is that I should be able to just drop in a new chapter in the middle of a large document and LaTeX will automatically reflow and typeset the entire document without any of the very specific fiddling necessary in WYSIWYG word processors.

A major example is for instance, figures/images/tables will move to new pages but will remain correctly placed between paragraph X and Y. Because I've marked it up as such, if paragraph Y is on the page following paragraph X, it will bring the figure along with it to the new page. In WYSIWYG word processors, that figure would likely just sit at the end of the page until I manually moved it myself.

When you try to micromanage the layout of a very specific page, even if it's just the title page, you're going to have a pretty bad time unless you've written your own \documentclass. :-)

Re:I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX by flenserboy on Tuesday May 24, 2022 @11:43AM (#31493561)
Basic LaTeX is easy; ramping up has a significant learning curve, but once that mount has been scaled, things level off quickly. Doing tables in straight LaTeX is miserable — CTAN, however, is filled with fantastic packages that make them easy. XeLaTeX makes inserting images pretty easy without packages. I will say that what may cause difficulty with images for people new to LaTeX are floats — tables, images, and the like may move page to page depending on how the document flows; if you're used to anchoring an image on a particular page in a WP, that may put one's mind a bit out of joint until it makes sense.
Re:I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX by kzrdude on Wednesday May 25, 2022 @09:54AM (#31504545)
What's an example of a good tables package? Thanks
Re:I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX by flenserboy on Wednesday May 25, 2022 @10:39PM (#31513689)
Calctab is interesting — https://ctan.math.illinois.edu/macros/latex/contrib/calctab/...

It's not what it's designed for, but Eledmac has some interesting tabular features — https://ctan.math.washington.edu/tex-archive/macros/latex/co...

There's a good list here — https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/12672/which-tabular-...

Also, with some care, the tabular environment can be made to work very well. Example —

% In the preamble:

\def\qfont{\usefont{T1}{AlegreyaSans-LF}{m}{}} % only here as used in example document

% In the body:

{\footnotesize

\begin{center}

\begin{tabular}[pos]{| >{\qfont}c | >{\qfont}c | >{\qfont}c || >{\qfont}c |}

\hline

{\textbf{YEAR}} & {\textbf{PLATE OFFERINGS}} & {\textbf{ENVELOPES}} & {\textbf{TOTAL}} \\ \hline

1915 & 1,904.86 & 4,587.50 & 6,492.36 \\ \hline

1916 & 2,165.21 & 5,091.24 & 7,256.45 \\ \hline

1917 & 2,259.34 & 5,441.92 & 7,701.35 \\ \hline

1918 & 2,325.87 & 6,877.40 & 9,203.27 \\ \hline

1919 & 2,848.31 & 8,842.37 & 11,690.68 \\ \hline

1920 & 3,188.90 & 10,785.15 & 13,974.05 \\ \hline

1921 & 3,404.60 & 11,069.74 & 14,474.42 \\ \hline

\end{tabular}

\end{center}

}

Re:I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX by leephillips on Tuesday May 24, 2022 @10:48AM (#31492833)
The other poster was wrong.