Comment on ISO 26300
thebestaquaman@lemmy.world 1 day agoDo you actually write all the headers and stuff
I’ve used Latex as my go-to tool for writing anything that needs formatting for years, and I’m not quite sure I understand what you mean?
I start off my document with a documentclass
statement, which is one line…? And then I will sometimes usepackage
a couple things for further document-wide formatting, but we’re still talking about a small handful of lines (like 5-10 at most).
The preamble can grow quite large for big documents with a lot of specific formatting, but I have some boilerplate preambles with the most common packages lying around that I can copy-paste in. Usually however, the preamble grows as you’re writing the document and you add things dynamically as you need them.
I would love to give you a better answer to your question, since my impression is that pretty much no one that swaps to Latex ever looks back, and I would love to help you learn. Feel free to expand on what you mean by “all the headers and stuff” and I’ll try to give a better answer :)
Allero@lemmy.today 23 hours ago
Oh, this is based on my first impression I had a while back when I noped out of it :D
This is less of a detailed problem description and more like a scream over perceived complexity of something that should be so simple, especially for someone who’s very far from programming or advanced computing overall.
Outside of documentclass, there are all the paragraph, section, title, there are all the packages introducing all sorts of things (like, why there’s a need for external PACKAGES to do the very basics?!) etc.
Tables are straight up scary to write in LaTeX, you insert all the parameters and then write it out like some sort of matrix but without any decent sctructure; and plotting - I didn’t even try to comprehend it.
Overall, it feels like some unnecessarily nerdy way to edit docs. Probably powerful, but same sort of powerful as editing configs to customize things. Please, make it any sort of user-friendly!
thebestaquaman@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
Ahh, now I understand! I’ll try my best to make it less scary :)
To start off
There usually isn’t, as long as you only want a simple document. The most basic thinkable document would be
However, you’ll likely want a title and author, so you can start off with
You have your “Super basic document”, with at title and author. You can make simple formatting changes by modifying the
documentclass
statement at the top. My recommendation with all the external packages (usepackage
) is to look them up one-by-one as you need them. You’ll typically find a small handfull of packages that you need very often, and then you’ll probably end up copy-pasting those declarations over whenever you create a new document. For most basic documents I’m using like 2-5 packages at most (fancy math fonts, hyperlinks, pretty bibliography, etc.)I’ve held some latex-courses for beginners, so if you want, I could send you the “basic starting file” that the people taking the course have completed writing (with help) after about two hours :) I’ve been told that most of them feel pretty comfortable learning on their own once they have that.
Allero@lemmy.today 21 hours ago
Wow, I appreciate the time and effort you put into this, and yes, it sounds a bit reassuring :)
I probably feel the way computer noobs feel when someone here enthusiastically calls them to join Linux lol (I already did, no need to advocate here! :D)
And yes, with that in mind, I’ll give it another spin. I’d like to have that basic file example!