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When I moved from teaching college to high school (best decision ever, by the way) I assumed everyone in the HS math department would use LaTeX and overleaf. And for some reason several people were intimidated by me (I think being in a college environment had caused me to project a certain ominous math aura as a matter of self preservation) so no one wanted to tell me they had no idea what LaTeX or overleaf was.
HS teachers math use word, and I have seen some horrors ... My god.
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myrmepropagandist
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •The math teachers at the HS had developed all of this wonderful material for teaching. But it's all in Word and Google docs. I've learned to work with it, and I've taught a few people a little LaTeX.
After the rough first months people stopped being intimidated and now we all get on great.
I still dream of getting all those documents converted, though...
someday...
myrmepropagandist
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •I'm remembering sending an email to another teacher with a possible set of problems with a calc test. I just sent the *.tex file with a little note "I compile them in overleaf, lazy I know" the teacher had no idea how to open it, or why I thought they might be lazy.
😆
I thought "of course they all have LaTeX installed on desktop and use the command line... I hope they don't look down on me for using a web app"
🤣
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Roger BW 😷
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •zrb
in reply to Roger BW 😷 • • •I was also just about to suggest typst as well but you beat me to it 😅
I'll add that something like typst is probably a bit more human readable than tex if you just open it as a text file (which some people might try to do if they don't know what it is and just double click on it)
maswan
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •@stevewfolds
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •LaTeX has come a long way in 40 years since I started with the 5th edition in ‘86. Lucky for me math.utah.edu needed help. I did part time remote work ‘91-‘03.
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myrmepropagandist
in reply to @stevewfolds • • •@stevewfolds
I love LaTeX so much and still want to win the world over. When I taught college everyone used it exclusively. It was just the culture.
Now I have a google doc, converted from word and the diagrams are from old scans of worksheets from the 80s.
It's wild!
I got into making LaTeX math problem sets that would automatically generate with unique numbers and diagrams and put the solutions at the end. That was so much fun, and they still use my system back at the college.
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@stevewfolds
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •Der Geist aus dem Gerät reshared this.
Phosphenes
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •@stevewfolds
Can you feed LaTeX to a program and have it spit out the equation as code?
Does LaTeX contain all the information needed to execute the formula or is it mainly a graphical representation?
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myrmepropagandist
in reply to Phosphenes • • •@Phosphenes @stevewfolds
With some exceptions LaTeX correctly encodes the mathematical meaning of expressions like limits and various equations. You can often paste it right into wolfram or desmos and many others.
Robotistry
in reply to Phosphenes • • •@Phosphenes @stevewfolds If you included all the necessary information in the file, you could write a program that would take a LaTeX file as input, parse the equations from the file, and compute the result. But I don't know why you'd want to.
The real benefits of LaTeX for me are
... Show more...- that it's format-agnostic (so I can change one line in the file and automatically reformat the document for a completely different style guide),
- that I don't have to worry about how the equations look, are numbered, are referenced, or are embedded into the text - I just use markup to define the equation and where I want the references to go and the compiler handles all the rest
- that bibtex handles all reference numbering, formatting, and organizing (so I don't ever have to know what how the references in the bibliography should be ordered, formatted, or referred to in the text
@Phosphenes @stevewfolds If you included all the necessary information in the file, you could write a program that would take a LaTeX file as input, parse the equations from the file, and compute the result. But I don't know why you'd want to.
The real benefits of LaTeX for me are
- that it's format-agnostic (so I can change one line in the file and automatically reformat the document for a completely different style guide),
- that I don't have to worry about how the equations look, are numbered, are referenced, or are embedded into the text - I just use markup to define the equation and where I want the references to go and the compiler handles all the rest
- that bibtex handles all reference numbering, formatting, and organizing (so I don't ever have to know what how the references in the bibliography should be ordered, formatted, or referred to in the text)
- that I have enormous control over spacing and style of just about everything if I need it - it can handle everything from multi-column annotation comparing languages to complex mathematical formulae with multiple super and subscripts (there are even packages that support musical notation and generate graph paper) [This is also a weakness - figuring out how to do these things can be non-trivial, but it generally *can be done* in LaTeX while keeping the automatic restyling features when WYSIWYG editors often allow only rigid or image-based options.]
Mans R
in reply to Phosphenes • • •Dan
in reply to Mans R • • •Not really, readers are smart & can deduce context in a way computers generally can't. Like the expression \frac{dy}{dx} might be a derivative or a regular division of number, depending on context. But that distinction doesn't affect how you render the formula.
@Phosphenes @futurebird @stevewfolds
Mans R
in reply to Dan • • •myrmepropagandist
in reply to Mans R • • •@mansr @danielittlewood @Phosphenes @stevewfolds
look who woke up and chose violence today. LAMO
myrmepropagandist
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •@mansr @danielittlewood @Phosphenes @stevewfolds
*boosts post and grabs popcorn*
Phosphenes
in reply to Mans R • • •@mansr @stevewfolds
Ideally it maps to code. But I have seen online equations which are basically just vector art, where meaning is implied from spatial relationships.
In any case good news if LaTeX can map to executable formulas, because that makes it easier translate online equations into code I am writing, without ambiguity.
Mans R
in reply to Phosphenes • • •@Phosphenes @stevewfolds True, and PostScript/PDF documents often drop characters randomly across a page, making it difficult to find even a single word programmatically.
LaTeX commands, however, tend to have a structure matching the mathematical meaning. After all, its purpose is to provide a translation from the high-level idea to the typeset form.
Jake
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •@stevewfolds I'm a huge fan of LaTeX as well (except for typing the name on a mobile keyboard). When I got to writing documentation in industry I also expected it to be ubiquitous. Imagine my horror when I discovered MathML was the standard. Look upon this and weep developer.mozilla.org/en-US/do…
Basically forced to use a WYSIWYG editor and then hand edits become gnarly. My company used their own internally developed editor and it was... not good.
Proving the Pythagorean theorem - MathML | MDN
developer.mozilla.orgEmily_S
in reply to Jake • • •tei
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •as a student, this was me transferring from a department with mostly research-oriented profs to engineering, which has mostly profs from industry. A GOOD NUMBER OF THEM USE FREAKING WORD TO TYPESET LAB DOCUMENTS. IT'S INSANE. The good news is I have successfully converted my lab partners from the last few years to latex (with overleaf, yeah...) latex documents just have that "trust me, I'm a professional" je ne sais quoi that TAs love to give high grades to regardless of the content 👍
(For stuff I don't need to collaborate on I like texstudio, though.)
Leonardo Fontenelle
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •As someone who needs to use LibreOffice and the like, what grates me the most is how people using it have no idea there's an underlying logic of invisible characters, formating styles etc.
I admit there must be software enabling people who don't know this stuff to produce acceptable documents, but I resent that these office suits don't tip people about there being a better way of formating documents.
David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •The big thing that made me prefer StarOffice (which later became OpenOffice) to MS Office was the equation editor. In MS Office, it was an entirely point-and-click thing. In StarOffice, it had this, but that also built up a plain-text serialisation, which was much easier to edit and enter quickly.
I later learned LaTeX and discovered that, aside from a different escape character, they both used the same AMS markup for equations, so everything I'd learned in StarOffice was immediately transferrable.
Flaming Cheeto
in reply to David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*) • • •0xC0DEC0DE07EA
in reply to David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*) • • •0xC0DEC0DE07EA
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •I feel like it would be nice in corporate environments as well. When branding comes out with a new template, you just drop it in source control and rebuild. Also, documents become more easily controlled, use whatever free SCM you like instead of paying for some enterprise document repository.
But I also admit that I just like converting problems into code/text because that’s what I like working with and if I can map problems into that space, well “when you’re a coder, every problem looks like code.”*
*this is not true. Not all problems are code; probably most are not. It takes practice to recognize when to back away from the technical bits of a sociotechnical problem and just say, “We will agree not to do this thing because it rapidly gets too complicated to maintain and still wouldn’t truly prevent someone who doesn’t care about the agreement.”
David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)
in reply to 0xC0DEC0DE07EA • • •@c0dec0dec0de
We're slowly moving to using AsciiDoc for this. The style is added externally, so we can be consistent in branding.
Both LaTeX and AsciiDoc have the same problem though. What I want is an easy-to-type, trivially extensible, semantic markup language that I can then feed into various publishing flows. I ended up writing my own from scratch.
AsciiDoc has a bewildering amount of syntax and a load of footguns (e.g. if you type 'c++', it prints c and italicises the rest of the paragraph, you need to remember to type '{cpp}' to avoid this.). The rendering flow doesn't have well-defined layering and so it's very hard to add a phase that produces something that another thing can consume as input (e.g. if you want something to pull code listings in from a source file but have the syntax highlighting colours match inline code snippets).
LaTeX is not a markup language at all, it's a set of macros on top of a typesetting engine, and this really shows in places, where you have to write things differently depending on what the state of the typesetter is.
Oblomov
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •swope
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •algernon.st
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •Radomír Žemlička
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •Oleastre
in reply to myrmepropagandist • •I remember the embarassed looks when i defended my specialty memoir at the faculty of medicine.
Latex, zotero, R 'bug in your head'.
Could not see why they preferred paying licence fees.
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Alejandro_P
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •@futurebird
Paul Chernoff
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •@SmudgeTheInsultCat As someone who supports designers and does layout work on my own, I consider Word to be an abomination when it comes to layout.
Yet my Italian friend Emanuel does wonderful things with it. I edited the rules for his most recent tabletop game and offered to do the layout in InDesign. Due to time constraints he declined my offer and did a pretty nice job in Word.
And it wasn't like he was afraid of complex software. He did the game's board in a CAD package.
AMS
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •swope
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •Moving a Photo in Microsoft Word
Jess and Quinn (YouTube)Anke
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •Goopadrew
in reply to myrmepropagandist • • •