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.
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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.
@david_chisnall @futurebird by at least Word 2013 they added the ability to type in some form of markup, but it’s not the same type and —my memories are hazy—may or may not have converted to objects or whatever pretty greedily, so that you were back to WYSIWYG if you wanted to make changes.
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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...
@futurebird 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.”
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@david_chisnall @futurebird by at least Word 2013 they added the ability to type in some form of markup, but it’s not the same type and —my memories are hazy—may or may not have converted to objects or whatever pretty greedily, so that you were back to WYSIWYG if you wanted to make changes.
@david_chisnall @futurebird oh, and if you went too far back in Word versions, it would revert to rendering the whole equation as an uneditable image, so ‘ware the student group using word to write a report with math.
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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.
@david_chisnall @futurebird in the early aughts, writing design docs when I wanted to throw in the occasional equation I started to use StarOffice. Drove my manager nuts.
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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"
@futurebird 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 said 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.)
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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"
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.
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RE: https://mas.to/@SmudgeTheInsultCat/116525530358581582
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.
@futurebird @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.
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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.
@futurebird @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 https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/MathML/Guides/Proving_the_Pythagorean_theorem
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.
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RE: https://mas.to/@SmudgeTheInsultCat/116525530358581582
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.
@futurebird Use LyX for a kinder gentler displacement of the GAFAM-wank.
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@futurebird 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.”
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.
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