Writing articles with LaTeX
I had to write a quite short article for school a few weeks ago. I’m used to write my homework with Apple’s Pages, with always the same template I’ve built once. But this time, I wanted to change the look of my document, yet there is a bug I can’t manage to solve with Pages: I have a paragraph, it has a background color, inner margins, and I want borders on its top and its bottom. I don’t know why, but borders stop before the inner margin.
Borders are nasty with me
I’ve eared about an amazing, powerful, word processor called LaTeX. Well, OK why not. I decided to give it a try. After several cups of coffee hours I had finally wrote my document with my own custom style document class.
In my opinion, LaTeX is nice, nevertheless it has a major drawback: it is old. Oh, I like writing text with non-WYSIWYG programs, I don’t really like icons, and the less my macbook does the best it runs. But LaTeX, because of its age needs a serious cleaning. There are dozen of packages (some kind of pluggable pieces of code for your document) which does nearly the same things, but not exactly. So you need 2 or 3 of them to reach your goal. More over, I think something like CSS is far more efficient (okay, it has some drawbacks (e.g. IE) that LaTeX doesn’t but…).
If you are curious and want to see what I’ve done, here are my files:
LaTeX source file PDF render The picture which is used in the document My custom document class
Oh, and I’m still looking for a work around for my Pages problem!