20
zeters
4y

Not exactly dev stuff, but LaTeX low-key makes me nervous.

In writing my thesis it seems that through some keyboard-fuckery I managed to slip in some weird unicode bullshit character somewhere, so that it doesn't compile. Alright, I just do \DeclareUnicodeCharacter{0301}{ASDF} so that it gets replaced by ASDF. Searching for ASDF in the output pdf file does not yield results, so I can't even find the location of the fuckery in the text. It seems that unicode character is somewhere in my .bib-file and I guess my citation style doesn't even render the part of the data that character is in after all. So the above hack works, but still there is some weird-ass character in my bibliography file that I can't find.

On another note: I get that modularity is cool and all, but who thought that it is a good idea to give people zero transparency over what macro stems from which included package? No namespaces etc. I end up including a whole lot of packages that are needed for exactly one macro. That bloats up the file and you have no way to trace back which macro came from which of the quazillion included packages.

...then again maybe I'm just a lazy piece of shit whose google searches end before success and all of the above has some easy fix.

Comments
  • 4
    And then there are people who legitimately wonder why Word, etc. are so popular.
  • 2
    As for the bib file, just use a hex editor, then you have raw binary data search available.
  • 4
    @pk76 A very non-technical friend of mine started to use LaTeX just for his master's thesis because someone told him to do so. Imagine that kinda pain in the ass. In general I like it a lot, but I guess the commitment just isn't worth it for most people who just want to write text anyway.
  • 5
    @zeters I used to be big on it until I realized the things that make it good, Word has anyways. Just because the occasional idiot manually formats everything instead of assigning styles, it gets a bad, undeserved rap.

    Formula and diagrams are immensely easier in it, too.

    That being said I get to write a research paper in markdown and that's wonderful.
  • 3
  • 6
    @pk76 Word is fine for letters and small manuals, but the whole point of TeX was to replace typographers for setting whole real books, and Word is not suited for that. It's not a matter of Word styles, it's that typography used to be a fully qualified job with a lot of knowledge.
  • 2
    @Fast-Nop "In writing my thesis"

    Yeah I was talking about for papers. Books have their own requirements with specialized software (like saving chapters in separate files and compiling them all together).
  • 0
    It's the first time for me trying to write a larger document in troff instead of latex. It works fine for now. I'm also using the plan9 version, so utf8 everywhere
  • 0
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