2

LaTeX is more or less built to typeset books, particularly (but not exclusively) scientific literature. It is less obvious that LaTeX is also extremely good at producing

  • Songbooks
  • Play scripts
  • Chess diagrams
  • Linguistic literature and IPA
  • Bibles
  • Dictionaries
  • Presentations
  • Tolkien alphabets

Can people mention other surprising and inspring uses of LaTeX that go beyond scientific literature?

This question is meant as a place to showcase surprising uses of TeX, made by you or others, a bit similar to the posting Showcase of beautiful typography done in TeX & friends, which focuses on beautiful TeX and LaTeX documents.

Community
  • 1
Gaussler
  • 12,801
  • Is the formulation clear/correct enough? Other suggestions are welcome. – Gaussler Jan 13 '15 at 09:47
  • @Clément, most of what is covered there is not really what I would call serious uses of LaTeX. – Gaussler Jan 13 '15 at 09:59
  • 1
    Fireworks at http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/219349/make-fireworks-with-only-text/219362#219362 turned out nicer than I expected. Acrostics were somewhat fascinating, as well: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/121440/tex-assistance-in-writing-hidden-acrostics – Steven B. Segletes Jan 13 '15 at 11:39
  • TeX is turing complete. Whatever input it can read, it can process and output. There is nothing surprising. – yo' Jan 13 '15 at 11:48
  • 1
    While the MWE's at http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/176591/typesetting-genealogical-trees/176609#176609 just give a taste, I have found the ability to compose beautiful family trees with significant generational depth to be straightforward with a slight variation on cfr's answer at that question. – Steven B. Segletes Jan 13 '15 at 11:51
  • 1
    @yo' But it is perhaps surprising how many packages are available for some purposes quite far from the needs of scientific literature. Obviously, lots of things are possible in LaTeX, if you sit down and write a package for it. But as a front end user, the things that are possible for me are those provided by the packages. So it is often the very existence of some packages that is surprising. – Gaussler Jan 13 '15 at 11:52
  • @yo' That same argument shows that there can be no surprising productions of literature. For there are only finitely many combinations of letters on (say) 600 pages, and any one of these we can put together we can send to the printer. – Gaussler Jan 13 '15 at 11:57
  • @Gaussler And if you ask 10 literature experts, 5 will tell you that the existence of the Bible is a surprise and 5 that it's not. This is not a duplicate, this is simply opinion-based, as most of these big lists are. – yo' Jan 13 '15 at 11:59
  • 1
    I haven't been able to find out much about it, but I understand that typesetting music with LilyPond is very impressive. (http://www.lilypond.org/) – Steven B. Segletes Jan 13 '15 at 12:06
  • @StevenB.Segletes However, LilyPond's relation to TeX is similar to the PHP's relation to C++. – yo' Jan 13 '15 at 13:11

0 Answers0