• Retiring@lemmy.ml
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    6 months ago

    There are a lot of typos in this book. Are you looking for someone to proofread? Great work btw

  • theshatterstone54@feddit.uk
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    6 months ago

    Great! I forgot that Latex was on my mental list of things to learn/look into, so now I can add it on my actual written list, and bookmark this page.

  • filister@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    You guys should also check out Typst https://typst.app/. It is a lot easier than LaTeX even though not as powerful. It has meaningful error messages making the debugging a lot more user friendly.

    • nice@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      6 months ago

      I had been using LaTeX at work and decided to give Typst a try:

      I installed the compiler and vscode extensions to run Typst natively.

      Setting up my orgs template in Typst was significantly easier then LaTeX and took about 20% less lines of code.

      I like the more modern, practical syntax for writing docs.

      It’s still a relatively young project though, so I found a few rough edges:

      • Paragraph indentation rules for my language weren’t available: managed to find a workaround though
      • Only allows use of relative paths for images, imports etc: apparently for security reasons, forces me to have template logo in almost every folder
      • Localized dates: Typst can’t do it
      • No \graphicspath like command: LaTeX will search for an image by filename in each specified folder, in order. Typst has no equivalent command (yet)

      Overall I was positively impressed, but went back to LaTeX mostly because of the last two points. Curious to see how Typst will be in a few years!

    • jonno
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      6 months ago

      Why can’t I find any information about pricing on that page?

    • Retiring@lemmy.ml
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      6 months ago

      Under every single LaTeX themed post there is someone suggesting typst. Why use something open, if you can use something proprietary? /s

        • Retiring@lemmy.ml
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          6 months ago

          What are you using it for? Did you publish anything written in typst? Edit: this is a genuine question.

      • moritz@l.deltaa.xyz
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        6 months ago

        The Typst compiler is available under the Apache License 2.0.

        The web app at https://typst.app is proprietary but also completely optional. You can use Typst with only a text editor supporting the LSP (VSCodium, Kate, Atom, …), typst-lsp (Apache-2.0 OR MIT) and the Typst compiler.

  • Farid@startrek.website
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    6 months ago

    What’s an “open source” book? You don’t compile a book, aren’t they all “open source”? Do they list all the sources for their text or something?

    • NotNotMike@programming.dev
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      6 months ago

      Well yes, but also no. You can’t reproduce a book because that violates copyrights.

      Open source in this context just means that nobody owns the book, you can reproduce it however many times you want, and distribute it where you want as long as you include the original license in the reproduction (MIT license).

      Also, there’s a bit of a colloquial understanding that others are able to contribute or fork the original source material.

      • Farid@startrek.website
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        6 months ago

        But “open source” doesn’t even mean that you can reproduce it or use it for free. It just means that you can see the source code. The permissiveness, as you mentioned, lies in the licensing.
        So I still think that it’s a complete misnomer.

        • Markaos@lemmy.one
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          6 months ago

          But “open source” doesn’t even mean that you can reproduce it or use it for free.

          You’re thinking of source-available licenses. Open source has a clear and widely accepted definition that requires a certain level of freedom. You’re free to ignore this definition, but you can’t expect the rest of the world to do the same.

          To be clear, open source allows for only providing access to paying customers, but those paying customers are then free to use and distribute their copies without any further payment. Then it wouldn’t be open source anymore.

          • Farid@startrek.website
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            6 months ago

            Fair enough, I didn’t know that “open-source” is, in of itself, sort of a misnomer and, by the formal definition, a book can be open-source, because the phrase means certain specific things not tied to source code, contrary to what the name implies.
            And in my defense, I’ve seen some software that required license key to use, with code available on GitHub or something that called itself open-source (I won’t be able to recall the specific names). I assume the term is misused often.

            • Markaos@lemmy.one
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              6 months ago

              No worries, nothing wrong with not knowing everything about every random subject. I would like to apologize for being overly harsh, I assumed that people in c/opensource would have general knowledge of this definition, but that assumption was clearly bad. So again, sorry.

              I assume the term is misused often.

              Yes, companies sometimes do that. Open source is marketable as a guarantee that you won’t fully lose access to a piece of software, and there aren’t any real consequences of misusing it. But there’s also a scheme called dual licensing where the software is available under two licenses - one license is open source but annoying for commercial use, and the other is a “normal” proprietary license under which businesses can buy the code. This is fine (as long as the provider has copyright to all the code being dual licensed) and is pretty common and makes the software open source.

    • Markaos@lemmy.one
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      6 months ago

      I mean, it’s called “LaTeX by example”, so there’s a pretty good chance it’s written in LaTeX, which you do indeed compile to get the PDF or whatever output you want.

      Also, just having access to the source doesn’t make it open source - that requires more freedoms. For example, here’s GitLab Enterprise Edition source code, fully functional and ready to be used. And also officially described as the proprietary edition of GitLab by the GitLab company itself. Why? Because its license pretty much boils down to “you can use this only for testing and development, unless you have paid for it”.

      • Farid@startrek.website
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        6 months ago

        I’m surprised this is still getting responses.
        Fair jab, but I was obviously the computing term, implying “…from source code”.

        • Bobby Turkalino@lemmy.yachts
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          6 months ago

          Yeah, even in that sense… the irony

          Ok I’ll stop being a prick 😂 if you haven’t used Latex before, you do write source code that gets compiled into PDF/PPT/whatever

          • Farid@startrek.website
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            6 months ago

            I have some experience with Latex, but afaik, it’s mostly for writing mathematical formulas and stuff, no?

            • Bobby Turkalino@lemmy.yachts
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              6 months ago

              Sort of, if you’re writing a research paper or presentation or something like that with a lot of math in it, you can use Latex (for the whole thing, not just the formulas). It’s 10000X better than writing the same stuff in Word, especially if you know how to code