Greetings.
I've learned Latex at a rudimentary level and use it to create all my documentation. It does the job well and I enjoy the feeling of expert status that comes with arcane knowledge.
What I wonder about Tex/Latex is - does it have to be so hard? There are THOUSANDS of commands! It reminds me of learning Chinese! While the default settings are fine for most things, when I want to adjust page layout, I have to do a lot of trial and error, and looking up the reference documentation which is time consuming.
I like the C programming language partly because its set of commands is short. While I wouldn't criticize Donald Knuth, I wonder isn't there an easier way to do great typesetting?
General ⇒ Something bothers me about TeX
Something bothers me about TeX
Last edited by Leadfree on Fri Nov 19, 2010 10:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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west.logan
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Re: Something bothers me about TeX
I have been teaching myself LaTeX over the past couple of months, reading the Short Guide to LaTeX, the Not So Short Guide, and Lamport's book.
I think the problem is not with TeX itself, but with the myriads of other people who have defined their own classes, packages, etc. Now when I go to use a package, there are hundreds of user-defined commands that "make things easier" if you know them. Add a few packages and that number grows pretty rapidly (this is not a bad thing, by the way).
I've been going back to The TeXbook, by Knuth and it's a bit refreshing to look back at the very beginning, before there were more than a couple of hundred simple commands. You would then define your own commands based on them. Now, lots of other people have done that work to do some pretty amazing stuff and have shared it, so we get to reap the benefit. I'm thankful for this but I think that's where the problem also arises. Those who wrote the packages have a better understanding of what is going on. Those of us who are trying to read the (sometimes) unclear documentation, find it frustrating. Still, they've done the legwork and one could always re-define it themselves if they wanted to.
I think the problem is not with TeX itself, but with the myriads of other people who have defined their own classes, packages, etc. Now when I go to use a package, there are hundreds of user-defined commands that "make things easier" if you know them. Add a few packages and that number grows pretty rapidly (this is not a bad thing, by the way).
I've been going back to The TeXbook, by Knuth and it's a bit refreshing to look back at the very beginning, before there were more than a couple of hundred simple commands. You would then define your own commands based on them. Now, lots of other people have done that work to do some pretty amazing stuff and have shared it, so we get to reap the benefit. I'm thankful for this but I think that's where the problem also arises. Those who wrote the packages have a better understanding of what is going on. Those of us who are trying to read the (sometimes) unclear documentation, find it frustrating. Still, they've done the legwork and one could always re-define it themselves if they wanted to.