this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2024
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Do you have a minute to talk about our lord and savior LaTeX?
LaTeX and the wonderful world of \looseness=-1, manual linebreaks and negative vspace
(but it's still leagues ahead of word)
I'm rooting for Typst to grow into something better.
Currently working in LaTeX for work.
I don't think you really need looseness (I assume you want to avoid single lines?), you can rather increase the badness of them so that they're avoided through other means.
Manual line breaks I only use in tables (thanks tabularray author). In text, I don't think I have any.
Negative vspace I also don't have, what's your use case? I can imagine it for very specific tasks (a special page like a title page it something similar where everything is set very precisely) but for normal writing, I didn't encounter it.
All in all, I think LaTeX shows its age, but the huge ecosystem is the main reason it's still a good choice despite a little of shortcomings like the arcane macro system, features that are seemingly impossible to implement like accessibility (
My current document approached 50 pages with about 10 tables, 3 figures (tikz) and 10 bibliography entries and it's perfectly handleable. Just informing having to do that with word gives me agony. I worked on the same type of document in word that was kind of an earlier draft by someone else and stuff broke left and right, and that was without the more complex formatting that I later employed.
As someone else answered, I'm also looking forward to typst. Unfortunately, PDFs generated by it are currently much larger than through LaTeX (https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/895, fix currently not in any stable version) and package import is a preview. Some features aren't implemented yet but would be really nice, the syntax seems really sane and it's fast, so I'm optimistic it can become a strong contender.
Note that this was an exaggeration of my experience with LaTeX, it's not like I use these commands everywhere. I think its better to let LaTeX do its job. Nevertheless, looseness=-1 can help to cram a few words in a new line into the previous paragraph, which subjectively looks better sometimes and frees up some space. Negative vspace around figures or tables can also be used to make more space for text and avoid unwanted page breaks. Manual linebreaks can come in handy if you switch TeX engines (e.g. pdfTeX -> LuaTeX) and somehow things don't look like they are supposed to look. You can do it right or you can add manual linebreaks here and there to get the same results.
Ah, I see. Makes sense. I have seen some horrible LaTeX code at uni where someone didn't follow your simple rule:
The decision LaTeX makes are often very good, and the problem is often that what one thinks is better comes with even bigger downsides.
Now, once we get into tables... Ugh