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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • LaTeX is just fundamentally not that fast, especially when pulling in lots of packages. I’m running it on a server with a i7-12700K and 64 GB of RAM, but I didn’t really notice a slowdown when running it on an old laptop, they’re both about the same speed as the official overleaf. With longer or more complex documents, I usually split it into multiple files and edit them on their own, then use \include{} to being them into the final file with proper formatting and the right preamble. Of course, thats using a local MikTeX install, so YMMV.

    To be honest, I’ve always wondered why you can’t like “pre-compile” a bunch of packages into a binary and include that to speed things up. I’m sure there are good reasons, I just don’t know them.




  • Also LyX will not seamlessly interconvert with a TeX file, even though it seems like it ought to. Pandoc conversion between TeX and markdown seems to be less fixing each time, but is also not 1:1. For writing where I care about being able to draft quickly, I’ve settled on writing markdown with embedded LaTeX with something like Zettlr, then converting to a LaTeX with Pandoc for final formatting. You can also convert to Word better from md than from TeX, for those collaborators who refuse to comment on a PDF.



  • If you’re on Linux, I found Gummy to be the closest to Overleaf’s constant recompilation. My default has always been TexStudio, it has a good UI, but you can also use a VSCode extension. These are all just editors, though. You’d also need to download LaTeX locally. On Windows, that’s MikTeX, on Mac it’s MacTeX, and on Linux texlive is usually already installed, but you may need to install packages. On Debian-based distros, they’re grouped into collections like texlive-science.

    I will say that I’ve helped friends who were very used to overleaf to a local editor, and they were quite frustrated that TeXStudio wasn’t exactly 1:1 with the overleaf UI. Please know beforehand that if you’re expecting to be able to do things like open images in the TeX editor to check on them before inserting them, that’s not gonna happen.

    Happy writing!







  • Yeah I remember that conspiracy theory. Iirc, the claim was basically that any company which had any relationship with any US institution must be a honeypot. It was pretty out there, and as far as I’m aware it was very much debunked.

    I’m pretty sure that the Google libraries F-droid are things like the push notification service, which afaik almost anything with notifications uses, even signal.

    I’ve never actually compiled from source, but AFAIK they are open source. Its been convenient to use for me, just make very sure you don’t lose your password!


  • If you’re OK with using inkscape and GIMP, if the background color is different than the chicken, you could apply a color filter to simplify the image to “chicken” and “not chicken” (basically, reduce the number of total colors to 16 or less), then use inkscape Trace Bitmap in Colors mode.

    Tracing a bitmap to an SVG is really only practical if it’s a line drawing or if it has less than 16 (preferably less than 8) colors, because each color becomes a different vector object. Its really not intended for full on photos, unfortunately.



  • Yeah I can explicitly not recommend modern HP or Toshiba laptops for reliability reasons. I’ve had serious hardware and structural issues with both. Also, in general 2-in-1s will break at the hinge in less time than other laptops. Lenovo 2-in-1s specifically have known issues with the hinge which can shatter the screen. If you want durability, go for a more traditional form factor with no touchscreen.

    Edit: oops thought you said 2-in-1