Sorry for taking some time, monday morning suddenly hit me in the face… I’ve put up some files here that you should be able to download. The files can be opened with any plain-text editor (notepad, textedit, or similar).

My recommendation is to create an account on overleaf, click “create new project”, and upload the files there. Then you can hit “recompile” to see how the document looks. My guess is that you’ll figure out how stuff works pretty quickly just by modifying that file. If what you want to write is a simple document, you can really just get going :)

Feel free to let me know if you have any issues :)

Ahh, now I understand! I’ll try my best to make it less scary :)

To start off

why is there a need for external packages for a text document?

There usually isn’t, as long as you only want a simple document. The most basic thinkable document would be

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
This is the text in my document
\end{document}

However, you’ll likely want a title and author, so you can start off with

\documentclass{article}
\title{Fishes are nice}
\author{Definitely not Jason Mamoa}
\begin{document}

\maketitle

\section{Introduction}
This is a text about why fishes are nice.

\end{document}

You have your “Super basic document”, with at title and author. You can make simple formatting changes by modifying the documentclass statement at the top. My recommendation with all the external packages (usepackage) is to look them up one-by-one as you need them. You’ll typically find a small handfull of packages that you need very often, and then you’ll probably end up copy-pasting those declarations over whenever you create a new document. For most basic documents I’m using like 2-5 packages at most (fancy math fonts, hyperlinks, pretty bibliography, etc.)

Tables are straight up scary

They take a little getting used to, I agree. For someone working a lot with tables, I would recommend getting used to them, but if you only very rarely need them, there are “graphical editors” that let you build a table in a GUI and then give you the Latex code for it. Overleaf has an integrated “visual editing” mode that makes the barrier to entry lower. However I don’t really recommend it for someone that really wants to learn to use Latex, because I think it prevents people from progressing past the very basics.

plotting - I didn’t even try to comprehend it

I’ve used Latex for years, specifically writing documents with a lot of plots. I have yet to attempt to learn to plot directly in Latex. I know some people that will create figures and plots directly in Latex, and I respect them. I use inkscape for figures, and python for plotting, and can get stuff looking pretty awesome that way. Learning to draw/plot directly in Latex is by no means a must.

Please, make it any sort of user-friendly!

As with other powerful tools, I think people are often overwhelmed coming in because of the massive number of possibilities, and the fine-grained control that is possible. My recommendation is to start out with something like the above, and progressively add complexity as you need it. Most people don’t require more than basic section (and sub- subsub- etc.) headers, tables, figures, and equations. In that case, you’ll need like 3-5 external packages and 3-5 “commands” (stuff like \begin{equation}). If you start out with the above example, you’ll probably learn the basics on your own in a couple hours :)

I’ve held some latex-courses for beginners, so if you want, I could send you the “basic starting file” that the people taking the course have completed writing (with help) after about two hours :) I’ve been told that most of them feel pretty comfortable learning on their own once they have that.

Ohhh, I can sign off on this.

The amount of 20 year old university students that do not understand how to save a file to a specific location on their computer and then retrieve that file later has skyrocketed the last five years.

This is very obviously a consequence of them only ever having worked through tablet- or phone-type interfaces, where the file system is completely hidden to the user. I teach these people to program, and their eyes gloss over when I ask them where they put the data file they need to parse for the assignment. Once they understand the question they’ll typically open the file explorer, click on “recent files”, and ask me why their python script won’t open it, when the files are right there next to each other in “recent files”.

• If it’s meant to be pretty, portable, and read-only: pdf
• If it’s text with no formatting: txt
• If it’s formatted and read-write: md

Do you actually write all the headers and stuff

I’ve used Latex as my go-to tool for writing anything that needs formatting for years, and I’m not quite sure I understand what you mean?

I start off my document with a documentclass statement, which is one line…? And then I will sometimes usepackage a couple things for further document-wide formatting, but we’re still talking about a small handful of lines (like 5-10 at most).

The preamble can grow quite large for big documents with a lot of specific formatting, but I have some boilerplate preambles with the most common packages lying around that I can copy-paste in. Usually however, the preamble grows as you’re writing the document and you add things dynamically as you need them.

I would love to give you a better answer to your question, since my impression is that pretty much no one that swaps to Latex ever looks back, and I would love to help you learn. Feel free to expand on what you mean by “all the headers and stuff” and I’ll try to give a better answer :)

“Not a marketing company” as in their business model is not centred around shoving ads in your face for money is how I read it.

Oh absolutely. As with all other infrastructure, there is a cost to be paid. However, when you look at an average to small river, even routing 10 % of the water via an osmosis plant before passing it to the sea is an absolutely massive volume. There’s also the point that you don’t want to build these things in large, meandering, flat river deltas. You want a large salinity gradient, which means relatively small, fast-running fresh water meeting the ocean more “suddenly” than what you get in a classical river delta is the optimal source here.

Because osmotic power has enormous potential in the sense that millions of cubic meters of fresh water is running into oceans all over the world every minute. If we’re able to get even a low-efficiency method of using the salinity gradient to generate power working then every place a river meets the sea is essentially an unlimited (albeit low-yield) power source.

This is tech that doesn’t rely on elevation (like hydropower) or weather conditions (like wind/solar) it’s stable and in principle possible to set up at pretty much any river outlet, which is great!

Hep look at Wuff. Hep do the bonking. Wuff only good for seeking. Hep think he can bonk Wuff too.

Exactly this. The whole premise of the tax system is based around the historically correct idea that you need to physically move goods in order to sell them, or physically be somewhere to sell services.

Companies like google are making buckets of money all over the world, and don’t need to tax a dime most places, because they have no physical presence there. This makes it pretty much impossible to compete with the international behemoths, because they have access to a munch of tax-free revenue, while a startup will typically be centred around wherever they’re based, where they also need to pay taxes.