Latex, Tex, Lyx, BibTex, MikTex...

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I've been messing around with LaTeX a little this weekend. I've been looking into it to see if it's something for my thesis.

Bottom line is that it looks good. But that's all. LaTeX manuals also talk pejoratively about word processors, but don't seem to have tried one since those thin leather ties were in style.

Bottom line is - yes, it looks pretty. But it's a total mess of packages and crap everywhere, it creates a bunch of files, it's completely unintuitive, and it's not what you see is what you get, which is fine, and what you see is what you mean is to push it. And as the same time as everything is messy and weird, it is also totally anal.

It has a nice bibliography package, but it is a physical pain to work with, and the actual hard coding you have to do to make it work, with getting all the references' data is not any less work than just typing all the sources by hand in the document.

But it does look good. But I can make it look pretty good in OO too.

A LaTeX document is like a beautiful and cheap (free) piece of clothing that you bought, but you know it's made with child labor.

Or a really good meal, that is made out of poo.

It just doesn't feel so good when you know what's behind.

It's like it's been built upon for too long. It needs reform. It needs to be... simply better.

The not so short guide to LaTeX is like 150 pages. The guide to the APA citation package alone is eighty five pages. That is 85, people. All I want to do is move around some parentheses, and pick some other data out of a database. 85 pages. The little program LyX (which, to be honest, makes a pretty decent effort to make LaTeX for normal people, but it's just so incredibly limiting - and while they keep saying it's for the people who doesn't want to learn LaTeX, that's what you'll have to do if your doc needs to fill some standards they didn't think of) and all the crap needed for LaTeX takes like 250 MB. It's rediculous. I'll probably end up writing my thesis in OpenOffice as I've starte.d
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