this post was submitted on 22 May 2024

987 points (98.0% liked)

Science Memes

11223 readers

3015 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.

Rules

Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
Keep it rooted (on topic).
No spam.
Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.

Research Committee

[email protected]

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

987

LPT Do it. (mander.xyz)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

193 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 26 points 6 months ago (4 children)

What's a good way to learn about Latex and Git. I've tried learning on my own but it's very overwhelming.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 6 months ago

Overleaf is easy to use and has tutorials for LaTeX

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Never heard of latex but I can help you with Git.

What you want to know?

[+] [email protected] 13 points 6 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (3 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{soul}
\begin{document}
I'm 19 and I know how to use \LaTeX, \LaTeX is more used in academia, they taught me \LaTeX in Uni, but a lot of other people just won't ever heard of it because is rare to find in other places, most technical degrees and even a lot of uni ones won't use it \st{even if it's vastly superior to word}.

\huge \LaTeX rules
\end{document}

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

}

I think you dropped this.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

You have to excuse me, texstudio adds automatically the closing one.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Same except that I taught myself. Written two essays for uni already with it and knew from the start that I wouldn't touch word if I didn't absolutely need it.

Latex is confusing, the errors are often even less clear than Python or Java tracebacks, some packages have weird API or don't work together, and I had to make a build script to work with it, but besides that, I have a good language and environment now to create pretty good PDFs with, including VCS with git and not having to use an editor that is not neovim.

If you want to look deeper, there are a few more typesetting languages, some with more modern syntax. Markdown is surely the easiest, but not quite as powerful.

Btw, is soul a real package?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Yes, the \LaTeX code I wrote is 100% compilable.

I also learned most \LaTeX myself, school just taught me the basic sintaxis, but is widely used amongst students and academics.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I’m 40 if that helps.

[+] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I become a software developer later in life and never had the privilege to go to university, so sometimes I’m out of the loop on older tech.

How did Latex compare to modern Git?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Latex is no versioning tool but a textsetting language. It outputs perfectly formatted Documents after building and takes care of aranging images, quotes and all the tedious stuff so after setting up your template you only have to care about content. It works well with git.

Not like word where adding an image fucks the whole formatting.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Interesting.

Yeah word sucks. I’m a software developer now and have to deal with Word and Excel more than I ever thought I would.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

I'm a softwaredev too, we use this for our manual. Its writen in markdown, which we convert with pandoc to latex. We can use git for versioning and merging and the manuals always look very nice.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

As a software developer, LaTeX makes writing documents feel elegant in the way good code is elegant. No more manually going back and saying things like "as shown in diagram 4" and updating the number when the number of diagrams changes; LaTeX can do that for you by referencing the object. Citations and bibliography are an absolute breeze to generate. It can generate various kinds of plots and diagrams themselves for you, making it much easier when you then need to make changes to it later.

With the right packages (think: code libraries) you can do all sorts of things. I like the acrodef and ac commands which lets you specify a bunch of acronyms, and then the first time you use them in a document it automatically expands it to the full version, but uses the acronym on all subsequent uses. When writing code snippets, you can have it automatically apply the correct syntax highlighting for the language you specify; though this is admittedly a feature many markdown implementations also have.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Everyone still uses LaTeX for CS/Math at my school. It's not an age thing. Just different circles. I don't think anything similar even comes close to LaTeX yet.

[–] kogasa 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Typst is pretty functional

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Ooh, that looks cool. Thanks for the recommendation.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

Fuck, I’m ~~old~~ privileged.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Well in this thread people were saying you can set up your own local git repository? What's a newbie friendly way of doing that. I've watched videos and understand that git version control system but I can't quite seem to grasp more than that.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

I will answer this, I am sick right now but will return.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

You can just create a local repo with git init, and then never push to a (non existent) remote repository. Git is decentralized, meaning that you always have a functional and complete repo when you're working with it.

Depending on your tooling, you probably have a GUI for git if you're a noob, which can usually "initialize a git repo" for you. I use the cli/lagygit tui, so I can't help with that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Thank you, this clears some things up for none the less.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It is a pity that Markdown does not have the possibilities of Latex.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago

Typst is Markdown-ish with the possibilities of LaTeX.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I learned latex by doing my engineering homework in it. I quit using latex because I kept doing my engineering homework in it and it turns out it sucks to do

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I'm doing my math homework with latex this semester, I'm probably slower but it looks good and is more maintainable.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

The issue I had was if it was big enough to need maintainability it was a group project and that meant Google docs or it was math and that meant scrawled on paper. Or technical writing which is the prof that told us to try latex in the first place but I was too busy that semester to learn it

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

You can do maths in LaTeX and I have used Overleaf for group projects before.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Fair, but this was 10 years ago, we were engineers, and it was hard enough explaining the work I did and the work I needed other people to do to them in a way these people understood.

Also I can’t do math on computers. Like arithmetic sure, but real math, that requires actually writing it down. Idk that’s probably my old lady trait these days

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Presumably you do the work on paper and then type it up. I doubt professors would accept paper work nowadays.