The LaTeX typesetting system

Sun, 16 Jan 2022 23:00:00 +0100

Recently I’ve been picking up interest in LaTeX again because of the amount of documenting I’ve been doing for my hobby projects. As a programmer and more technical person I do not want to bother with design or layout of my documentation (mostly), I just want it to be readable and functional. The other problem is that when you use a traditional word processor you tend to be stuck with the format unless you explicitly export it to a PDF for example.

LaTeX is very useful because you’re essentially removing the WYSIWYG layer and “programming” the document directly, you can see it as typing the metadata manually intead of having it automatically generated by an editor. The pro’s of this is that you can define everything you need without having to define the document styling and setting up/figuring out how to create an index and set the correct margins. The cons of LaTeX is that it’s very DIY, it’s like Vi/Vim, but not that much of a learning curve. Once you get the idea behind it you see why people use it, and when you want to finally make your document look nice you can style it however you want.

And a final note on this is that LaTeX is useful for moments when multiple people are working or updating it, since it’s all just text at it’s core you can easily check it into a repo and merge changes. When it’s ready you can generate a PDF, HTML, or whatever you want and publish it.

I might post some more stuff about LaTeX in the future as I learn more about it and have used it more.

latex on Kevin Heruer

The LaTeX typesetting system