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Choice of Format
I was reading another newsletter that was a very smoothly formatted in-email type. The author remarked something to the effect of attached PDF's are so 2022. Well, I have been doing attached PDFs for a while now and I was kind of thinking they were a pain in the butt. Until, the advent of AI came. I am going to double down on attached PDFs!
Enter LaTeX
I remembered something from my collegiate youth, LaTeX. A language that promises the crafting of the most beautiful of typeset PDF notes or papers. I could never get really into it. Now AI has removed friction. Using LaTeX, a selection of programming languages, and AI, I built a Make powered pdflatex toolchain that pumps out documents like nobodie's business. Though archaic at times, the documentation in the LaTeX world is pretty magnificent.
The power of latex allows me to input complex styles and macros into my plain text LaTeX documents. These documents are relatively human readable and contain the meat of the output content. The formatting and style is defined in common LaTeX code files. So it turns my documents into a coding problem. This is not at all wysiwyg.
Enter AI
Wow! AI is awesome for this kind of stuff. I can whip up a Make system to build all my .tex files into PDF documents. VS Code connects all of this to Github. Meanwhile Github Copilot is watching over my shoulder and suggesting oddly relevant stuff. I have created a prompting system for these types of repository projects to quickly input the context of the relevant problem and the structure of the files with minimum tokens used. GPT-4 wrote much of my LaTeX code and styling. I am using a repository style organization for my regular day to day documents now.
So AI writes code to turn my ideas into PDF documents now. It is relatively easy code to understand much of the time. I find it relatively frictionless. I just copy what I want to write, paste it into GPT-4 with a command like: Make this LaTeX: Text. Out comes stuff. Which I copy and past into templates that are increasingly awesome. Copilot has a tendency to fill in anything missing in the code. Sometimes I get a head scratcher and have to ask one of my other AI pals. Claude 2 is pretty smart.
With code being written by AI, I can have AI write programs to write documents or parts of documents. With or without AI in those programs. I am hoping to go straight from online real-time quotes to rendered PDF someday. My newsletters are but a capturing of a fleeting moment in time.
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