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Be Aware of the Makefile Effect

(blog.yossarian.net)
431 points thunderbong | 1 comments | 11 Jan 25 04:13 UTC | HN request time: 0.212s | source
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szarnyasg ◴[11 Jan 25 06:50 UTC] No.42663859[source]▶
I have observed the Makefile effect many times for LaTeX documents. Most researchers I worked with had a LaTeX file full of macros that they have been carrying from project to project for years. These were often inherited from more senior researchers, and were hammered into heavily-modified forks of article templates used in their field or thesis templates used at their institution.
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wjholden ◴[11 Jan 25 07:08 UTC] No.42663951[source]▶
This is a great example of an instance of this "Makefile effect" with a possible solution: use Markdown and Pandoc where possible. This won't work in every situation, but sometimes one can compose a basic Beamer presentation or LaTeX paper quickly using largely simple TeX and the same Markdown syntax you already know from GitHub and Reddit.
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1. kergonath ◴[11 Jan 25 07:59 UTC] No.42664182[source]▶
> use Markdown and Pandoc where possible.

That won’t solve any problem that LaTeX macros solve. Boilerplate in LaTeX has 2 purposes.

The first is to factor frequently-used complex notations. To do this in Markdown you’d need to bolt on a macro preprocessor on top of Markdown.

The second one is to fine-tune typography and layout details (tables are a big offender). This is something that simply cannot be done in Markdown. A table is a table and if you don’t like the style (which is most of the time inadequate) then there is no solution.