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So, I decided to give LaTeX a try today. I completed the Learn LaTeX in 30 minutes tutorial and I decided to actually try and use LaTeX for something. While I do like some things, I have little problems with some things.

Here I will show the same document made with default settings in both LaTeX and LibreOffice

enter image description here

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(Yes, I did flip my screen orientation to take those screenshots. I felt so stupid while doing it)

I'm sorry for the pretty bad examples, but it's the only way I thought I could show my problems.

It's just that, LaTeX seems so much more simple and nice and tidy, but at the same time so much more space inneficient and if I could get those small things fixed it would be the greatest tool for me

I will have to admit though that I did not use any of the LibreOffice's styles, I just made everything manually with custom font sizes

So, what's your advice for me? How could I make LaTeX more usable for me personally?

EDIT: What I forgot to add on the screenshot for LaTeX:

  • The title font size might be a little bit too big
  • Why doesn't it add the "tab" (for lack of a better word) after the first paragraph after a section?
Andy3153
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  • Welcome to TeX.SE. Please provide a full MWE. – Roland Oct 03 '21 at 09:17
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    That is all changeable, but you need to find out how. You could try another class like memoir or scrartcl (from the KOMA bundle). They have more in-built options to change various things. And if you want an indentation after the section use the indentfirst package. But I would at first try to get used to LaTeX without worrying to much about these layout stuffs. – Ulrike Fischer Oct 03 '21 at 09:19
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    not indenting the first paragraph of a section follows a few hundred years of typesetting tradition (not everywhere but look in most published books and I guess you'll see this in over half of them) add \usepackage{indentfirst} to change the behaviour of the standard classes like article or choose a different document class that has an indented layout by design. But as Ulrike says use latex for a few months (or decades in our case) before changing too many settuings. – David Carlisle Oct 03 '21 at 09:52
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    also note that it isn't that latex chooses large margins it is that A4 paper is too wide for comfortable reading lines at 10pt if you make the margins small. Sure if you are just wanting to cram personal notes on to paper while saving trees it doesn't really matter but for extended blocks of text designed to be read on paper, you don't want line lengths a lot longer than the latex defaults. – David Carlisle Oct 03 '21 at 10:00

1 Answers1

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Thanks everyone for the suggestions! I came up with solutions to all my problems using everything you all told me, and what I found on the internet, but, yeah, it's a pretty large preamble.

% Document preamble
\documentclass[
12pt,
a4paper
]{article}

% Packages
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}         % UTF-8 support
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}            % Proper hyphenation
\usepackage[romanian]{babel}        % Romanian characters support
\usepackage{indentfirst}            % Add paragraph indentation even after a section
\usepackage[margin=2.7cm, marginparwidth=2cm, marginparsep=3mm]{geometry} % Make document margins smaller
\usepackage{marginnote}             % Notes on the margins of a document (more advanced \marginpar)
\usepackage{titlesec}               % Customize titles


% Custom titles, sections, subsections etc. format
\titleformat*{\section}{\large\bfseries}
\titleformat{\subsection}{\normalfont\normalfont\bfseries}{}{0pt}{}


% Page numbering
%\pagenumbering{gobble} % uncomment if you want to disable it


% Custom commands
% Format: \newcommand{\command}{action (add '\ ' or '{}' if it won't add a space properly)}


% Basic document info
\title{}
\date{}   % Show no date in the title
\author{} % Empty author to not get a warn about missing author


\begin{document}
\maketitle % Show the title
\reversemarginpar % put margin notes on left instead of on right


% Beginning of text


\end{document}

Yeah, I know in theory it's bad to intervene and modify so many things without actually using/making a different document class, but it's the solution I came up with. I am going to use this as a template in Kile which is the program I use and it'll be good enough for me until I find a better solution, if I find any I'll just use that instead.

EDIT: small changes to template

Andy3153
  • 361
  • I'd suggest learning to add \ or {} after commands rather than rely on xspace . See Drawbacks of xspace. – erik Oct 04 '21 at 15:24
  • @erik Oh, thank you for that! I relied on xspace only because it's the first method that came up when I searched on the internet. That's much better, the less packages the better – Andy3153 Oct 04 '21 at 18:13