Comment by szarnyasg
7 months ago
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.
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.
> 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.
A much better solution would be to use Typst, but that still might not work in all situations.