Some of my colleagues teach it in conjunction with our Software
Carpentries stuff (but there's no formal Carpentries approved lesson
yet).
I have experimented with it for open scholarship publishing purposes.
Frankly, the more I think about it, the less I think it is worth dealing
with. Overleaf is nice, I guess, but very expensive.
There are projects like Tectonic
(https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/) where they have taken a lot of
the crud (for lack of a better word) and also dropped the kind of
elitism that comes with knowing e.g. that it's la-tec and not latex. I
suppose you could say it's 'LaTeX but for "normal" people.'
I don't mean this to come across as a criticism of LaTeX users, just to
relay the frustration some of us feel when dealing with it...some of my
best friends use LaTeX...
all best,
ander
-----
ander kierig
Web Application Developer
University of Minnesota Libraries
https://www.lib.umn.edu
they/them
On 2023-07-18 at 10:32 (-0500) Dan Johnson wrote:
Dear List,
How do you all deal with LaTeX? The LaTeX Project describes it as a
"high-quality typesetting system," but it *looks* similar to a few
different software paradigms, and this makes it hard to figure out who
on a
university campus should be supporting it.
For example, one could make the case that it's an advanced, low-level
form
of word processing, which should therefore be supported with training
and
problem solving by central IT, who cover Microsoft Word and Google
Docs.
But it's much more than WYSIWYG word processing, and support for IT
would
be a very heavy lift.
So maybe instead you think of it as a markup system. In that case,
perhaps
it's the library's digital scholarship center that should be providing
support. Yet, it's not really used for the purposes of scholarly
annotation
and digital presentation of primary sources that TEI is.
Since it's used for creating beautifully-looking articles and books,
perhaps it's a scholarly communication tool, and hence the schol comm
division of the library should support it. But the biggest use case
may be
dissertation formatting, in which case perhaps a university's graduate
school or office of research should take charge (especially if they
provide
a dissertation template).
But then, the software is especially good at formatting mathematical
notations, and indeed, the vast majority of dissertations submitted
with
LaTeX formatting come from the school of science, so perhaps it is
scientific computing software. In that case, maybe the college of
science's
departmental IT units should bear the brunt of support.
The final option, it seems to me, is to call it "just one of those
very
helpful things," like regex, that you won't see in any formal or
informal
learning environment, and so you have to figure it out on your own to
be in
the know.
How do you all parcel this out?
Best,
Dan
--
*Daniel Johnson, Ph.D.*
*Interim Co-Director, Navari Family Center for Digital Scholarship *
*English; Digital Humanities**; and Film, Television, and Theatre *
*Librarian*
*University of Notre Dame*
250C Hesburgh Library
Notre Dame, IN 46556
o: 574-631-3457
e: djohn...@nd.edu
