💾 Archived View for lesogorov.site › glogs › 2309 › Learning-Loving-LaTeX.gmi captured on 2023-11-14 at 07:32:40. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-09-28)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
I'm sure if you're on gemini you've almost certainly heard of LaTeX.
I first used LaTeX last year for a final assignment for one of my computer science classes. It involved needing to put a long series of images (more than 30) in a specific order, in a document and after struggling immensely with the first five, I decided to reassess my approach. LibreOffice is both an excellent and poor example of free software. It serves as a great one to one competitor to the Microsoft Office suite, albeit not as polished or feature rich, but enabling you to at the very least view files from the rest of society. That being said it also comes with all the same upsides and downsides as Word and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Google Docs. Graphical word processors are great for less-than tech savvy people, because it gives you the "What you see is what you get" experience, which works great for easy-to-format text. Now try to insert an image and watch your document rip itself to shreds. This is the position I was in, trying to put four images on a page, with them all being equally sized and occupying the four quadrants of the page, unable to get it working for the life of me in either LibreOffice or Google Docs. Then I remembered hearing about LaTeX and how easy it made formatting documents. I had never tried it and so I watched a few video guides on how to use it. It seemed simple enough and so I gave it a shot and just about instantly fell in love. I was able to do the whole assignment in vim (and GIMP for creating the images) and properly insert the images the way I wanted in a matter of minutes!
I wanted to start using LaTeX for everything, but for the next 2 semesters, I didn't have any real writing assignments or assignments that required making documents. I was bummed out, finding the perfect tool for me, without any use for it.
Then a few weeks ago I started attending university
Being in person with lectures has made me want to take notes, and not having the best or fastest handwriting, I wanted to try doing it digitally. Sure I could have done it in just a plain text document, but I saw the opportunity to LaTeX and dammit I wanted to take it. So for the past three weeks, whenever I have to submit a document or have to take notes, I'm using LaTeX.
It's worked really well! I've set up some shortcuts for creating sections and subsections to reduce the amount of repetitive typing as well as for compiling the document. I wrote a little script that allows me to easily create a new note, select where I want it to be saved (under which class folder), give it a title, select from a series of templates for formatting (Blank, MLA, IEEE), and automatically opens it in neovim and my document viewer. It's made doing homework kinda fun! Hell even on my day off today I took notes for my physics class for fun! I just wanted some practice with writing inline math formulas and saw my opportunity.
I plan on continuing to use LaTeX as much as possible and love how well it has integrated into my workflow!