The ways to make packages is, in my opinion, what makes LaTeX so great all my needs so far could be found within a google search, which led me to tex.sx and a nice answer involving a package that does exactly what I wanted. While some may see it as a hack on top of TeX, I see it as a development. Sure, the codebase is a mess, that's not a surprise. Most will do what it takes to get that done - which is probably where all those nightmarish packages come from. Remember, their responsibility isn't to work on typesetting projects, but to be able to typeset their research for publications. It is after all just a collection of contributions mostly from academics hacking to add some feature they need.Īs to 'people using LaTeX should know better', I would argue that they do know better - but contributing back to one of many tools they use that is already doing what they need is probably low on their priority list. I agree with the underlying problem - the package design can cause problems, but you can usually work around them. The publisher of your document should be doing that. Now, there are all sort of clever packages that do various things - however, rarely is that my job to source and apply. For my thesis, I applied my university's thesis style guide. I use the environments to write my text, include my maths, add my figures, and compile with the target journal's sty file. On the flip side, as a researcher I am so glad that LaTeX exists. Seen the prevalence of LaTeX in large institutions, it wouldn't be hard to get them to pay for a better solution if you could get the users on your side. I really think there is a market in providing a clean replacement to LaTeX by the way. This is made more tragic by the fact that the people using LaTeX (in many cases academics, not script kiddies) should know better. LaTeX lives off cut and paste more than PHP and Javascript ever did. Few people even know how LaTeX macros work (and I'll include myself in that). To top it off, almost no-one has an understanding of the underlying semantics of LaTeX. The environments offered by many package cannot be composed. Anything (package) can break anything else. The core pain of LaTeX may be summarized in only two words: poor composability. the error messages that makes a C++ template error read like Shakespeare in comparison. LaTeX is a horrid mess of language design, mostly due to not being a language, but rather a set of macros on top of TeX, with all the problems you can imagine, esp. "'m a PhD student, so I use LaTeX on a daily basis, and it makes me very sad that there's no viable alternative. "markdownConverter.DestinationPattern": "$"
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