Latex

[vadsamoht]

Just a quick question -

Has anybody successfully used LaTeX on the Pandora? I have searched the various resources that are available but have found no indication either way (although a google search did tell me that the Angstrom OS did not work well with it back in '07). Any information at all would be welcome, as I do not yet have my unit.

 

[Trickyhero]

You will probally be able to install it to NAND, but that's not the best thing to do. Until someone makes a PND of it, (could be you!) no one will really be able to mess with it much.

 

[hosant]

Fuck, thats what I want the keyboard for. \cancels...

 

[skeezix]

Hosant.. What? So theres essentiall a 'yes' you could nand it from existing packages, or someone (you!) could pnd it. Whats the problem ?

Jeffphone

 

[Spirit]

I am very sure it would be a piece of cake with Debian. Check out snuckie's extends.

 

[mali]

Stuckie is really a Schnucki :lol:

 

[Trickyhero]

Don't worry once I get my Pandora I'll PND it.

 

[cosurgi]

I'll switch to debian ASAP. then latex will come, and all other stuff.

 

[Fzero]

This is all alien to me. Is Debian a good OS then, worth having? Are the repos that it comes with not bundled with other OS's then?

what are extends?

And what's good about LaTex?
Just looking at their website 'about' page, I get it's a text editor that you don't worry about the formatting, saving time, but seeing as any editor can do that anyway... Even Word for example, you don't 'have' to faff about formatting.
In the example they show it looks almost like .XML with the start of each line, \author
..are those specific tags that other programs can format with?

I'm not knocking it, I'm sure it's good, i just don't really understand 'why'

 

[vadsamoht]

And what's good about LaTex?
<snip>

I'm not knocking it, I'm sure it's good, i just don't really understand 'why'

There are many reasons, but I'll just stick to the ones that appeal the most to me.
1. The ability to output to .dvi and.pdf is very useful for a range of reasons. I realise that this is a feature of OpenOffice and some others, but still.
2. The formatting will stay _exactly_ the same when you move from computer to computer (or even program to program) - something that always bugged me about transferring documents even between versions of Microsoft Word at home and Uni (and don't even get me started about OO.)
3. It can automate cross-referencing, tables of contents, etc. etc.
4. Related to number 2, when you submit the same document to somewhere that uses a different formatting or referencing system (or submitting to multiple places with different systems), changing the formatting is little more than editing a few lines (usually < 5) at the start of the code, whereas in a WYSIWYG editor, you have to do everything manually, which in some cases takes hours or for particularly long theses, sometimes a whole day or more.
5. Some scientific (and other) journals specifically request .tex files, although this is becoming less common for whatever reason.
6. it can do crazy-cool 3d plots (even though I've never used it)

I must say that when I started using it about a year ago, I didn't really see the point myself, especially when confronted with the farce of DEBUGGING YOUR OWN DOCUMENT but I'm certainly glad I have pushed through.

EDIT: A `standard' editor is probably just as quick or slightly quicker for a general memo, etc. but the main use comes in situations (mostly academia) where you are forced to used particular formatting, referencing, and other styles.

This is all alien to me. Is Debian a good OS then, worth having? Are the repos that it comes with not bundled with other OS's then?

I'm certainly not the best person to answer this, but Debian is certainly a `full' OS, and is also the one which many other Linux distributions (notably Ubuntu) are based on. most of the software in the Debian repos can be made to run on (for example Ubuntu) with little required tweaking. Angstrom, as far as I know, is not debian-based, and so most applications would need to be ported to the specifics of the OS. Problem is getting Debian onto the Pandora, which, although making good progress, is not (ever) going to be a process for the faint-hearted.

 

[cosurgi]

... myself, especially when confronted with the farce of DEBUGGING YOUR OWN DOCUMENT but I'm certainly glad I have pushed through....

on the contrary I like debugging my latex documents, for no apparent reason. Maybe its just me, that I just like debugging stuff.

 

[j6cubic]

First of all, of course, LaTeX is not a text editor, it's a typesetting system. Test editors are for entering text; typesetting systems are for formatting it. Office software tries to do both at the same time and it's good enough for, well, office use but I wouldn't try to write a book in Word.

The big advantage with LaTeX is that formatting and content are essentially separate, making reformatting the entire document a cinch. Also, you get all the power of includes and custom macros, which can make your work even easier. (Have a phrase that's commonly used but that often changes between document revisions, such as a name or version number? Just make a macro out of it so you can change all instances of it by changing one line.)

Also, LaTeX is Turing-complete. If a computer can do it, LaTeX can calculate it – even if it may not be the best language for the job the ability to do some fairly complex computations in-document can be fairly helpful. Plus, LaTeX has support for arbitrarily complex mathematical formulas.

Plus, all input files you give it (well, except if you include images or PDFs) are bog-standard text files with code in them so it's easy to have a program or even shell script generate a .tex file, have LaTeX process it and generate beautiful PDF output. Or you can put those complex computations from the last paragraph into an external program, have that generate a .tex file and just include it. Try that with Office!

Oh, and if you use XeLaTeX (XeTeX and LaTeX are both extensions of the basic TeX system; combining them yields XeLaTeX) you get all of that with full OpenType/Apple Advanced Typography support so you can use virtually every font out there with full support for alternative forms, ligatures etc.


Best of all, it's not some kind of Office software that thinks it's smarter than you and reformats your text while you type it. In sections of the document completely unrelated to where you currently are. That you spent half an hour getting to look right. LaTeX can be aggravating but at least it's in a consistent manner.


LaTeX is not easy to get into but I do think it's quite worth it.