14 ms·

Serious question: Is LaTeX used outside academia these days?

by TwoBit 10y ago

oever 10y ago
"Mastering MuseScore" was written in LaTeX. The presentation and content are excellent. https://musescore.org/en/node/64711 https://musescore.org/en/node/64711
Avshalom 10y ago
Hell I think it's just barely hanging on in acedamia
- Cyph0n 10y ago
  That's definitely not the case in computer science and electrical engineering at least. LaTeX definitely isn't great, but I don't see a viable alternative.
  - privong 10y ago
    > That's definitely not the case in computer science and electrical engineering at least. Same for astronomy/astrophysics. Most of the publications are typeset in LaTeX.
  - opieters 10y ago
    Indeed, lots of people I know (mainly computer science, electrical engineering and physics) still heavily rely on it for long documents and papers.
  - DonaldFisk 10y ago
    In the 1990s I used FrameMaker. It's still around, now owned by Adobe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_FrameMaker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_FrameMaker
  - washadjeffmad 10y ago
    There's always InDesign, but given its time to proficiency, I think the bast case for similar purposes might still be something creating LaTeX/DocBooks source that ports well to InDesign.
    - whorleater 10y ago
      Can't diff a indesign file, whereas latex is easy to diff.
- theophrastus 10y ago
  In my current experience with states-side academia: draw a line between the most math/theoretical departments through physics and end up at the engineering departments. The tendency to use TeX/LaTeX follows that line from a relatively high probability to zero on arrival to engineering. In European academia it stays reasonable high throughout.
zzleeper 10y ago
Hell, even in academia people hate it =\
- XaspR8d 10y ago
  I honestly miss LaTeX a lot, especially the quality of documents I could create with it (when I was in academia). Hopefully I'll get a chance to do a white paper later this year and bust out the skills. But I am totally willing to accept my role as an outlier... I even wrote a small TeX package at one point, so I'm aware it's not a "fun" system. :P
- opieters 10y ago
  I think it's not perfect, but for many academic purposes, LaTeX is still the best tool in my opinion. It's definitely not perfect, but there's a lot of historical weight and quirks, but the results look great if a little effort is spent. :)
- twblalock 10y ago
  I'm not sure why you were downvoted. Most of the academics I know hate it. They use it because certain journals require it, or their advisor makes them use it.
  - graycat 10y ago
    I use TeX. LaTeX also works, but the books are longer and less well written than Knuth's original TeXBook! :-)! I love TeX -- it's one of my favorite and most important tools. I have a Ph.D. in applied math, and IMHO TeX (or LaTeX) is just essential, call that more than ESSENTIAL for my work. E.g., now I'm a "solo founder" of a startup, a Web site. The crucial core of the work is some original applied math I derived. So, yup, i typed it into TeX. So, as I wrote the corresponding software, I referred back to the TeX output of my core math -- worked great! Without the math, the software would be impossible; one would just look at the screen and wonder what the heck to type. With the math, the software was just routine, essentially just trivial. For typing material with a lot of math, I see no reasonable alternative to TeX or LaTeX. I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation with word processing (thankfully!) but without TeX. What a pain. I could have included more math in the dissertation if I'd had TeX to do the word whacking. More generally, at one point in my career, I could easily have written and published a lot of original and tutorial applied math but didn't because of the difficulty of the math word whacking before TeX. The last paper I published, some a bit wild mathematical statistics, was a good test for TeX -- some of my mathematical expressions in subscripts were a bit much, but TeX worked flawlessly! If anyone is typing a lot of mathematical material and objects to TeX, then just encourage them to do the typing without TeX and see if they like that world better! Computing is changing the world in major ways, some just astounding and/or astoundingly good; math is helping, a lot now and will more in the future; and TeX is just crucial for getting the math word whacking done. But Knuth knew that and did a great job. So far, for the near and distant future of computing, TeX is one of the stronger pillars of civilization.
robinhoodexe 10y ago
Check out http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/40720/latex-in-industry http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/40720/latex-in-indust.... I like the one about the Deutsche Bahn (german railway company) using TeX to typeset the time tables on the train stations.
- fhars 10y ago
  But is it still true? The downloadable files containing several time tables say: Creator: Adobe InDesign CS6 (Windows) Producer: Acrobat Distiller 10.1.16 (Windows) While the ones with just a single one say: Creator: Hafas Print Bahnhofstafeln 4.6.5 Producer: PDFlib 9.0.5 (Win32)
analog31 10y ago
I work in scientific instrumentation, on the product development side. I've never seen LaTeX output (unless it's been well concealed) in a report or paper. What I'm seeing is that the use of typesetting and even its cousin, word processing, are generally going downhill. My employer has largely given up on print advertising. If we write papers, they're for the more commercial oriented journals or trade mags, that don't use TeX for their own typesetting. More and more, I see stuff that's just written in the e-mail editor, with graphics copy-pasta'd from screen captures, or directly into web based services such as Office 365. Or, PowerPoint (with all of the pitfalls described by Edward Tufte). Word processing has practically been relegated to documents that nobody reads, such as functional procedures and announcements from HR. I realize this all sounds kind of cynical, but I hope is taken in good humor. However, the gist is that writing and correspondence are becoming increasingly informal.
simias 10y ago
I use it when I need to write some documents (user guides etc...). If the alternative is open office or some other "WYSIWYG" editor I'll take LaTeX any time. I don't really love it though, I find myself using org-mode more and more for that purpose, then I let emacs generate the latex code for my doc. It's not nearly as flexible but it works well and your source is a lot more readable. I also use LaTeX for my resume, if you find a good theme they end up looking pretty sharp and professional with little work.
- pbtflakes 10y ago
  If you're converting Org documents to PDF, you can use Pandoc (http://pandoc.org/ http://pandoc.org/) to automatically convert & send through pdfLaTeX.
  - simias 10y ago
    Thanks, that looks useful. But org-mode's built in "org-latex-export-to-pdf" worked well enough for me so far.
0xffff2 10y ago
I do EECS research in the aerospace industry. Every journal we ever submit to either requires or accepts Latex. I also used it regularly to write reports as an undergrad. At least in the EECS side of the engineering field, Latex is alive and well.
username223 10y ago
Yes. I just wrote a guidebook with it. It's not that great if you want to do a full-color glossy thing, but the results are way better than using something like Word.
rev_bird 10y ago
I'm finishing up a 350+ page family history book that I wrote in LaTeX; I've got two or three more to go, and I wouldn't consider using anything else. It's got its quirks, but it was so easy to work with page formatting, footnotes/endnotes, and sections that it made up for all the fiddly issues I ran into with images. I have also been using the genealogytree[0] package (which relies on TikZ, coincidentally used by OP) to draw diagrams programatically. In addition to satisfying my scripting itch, it looks beautiful despite my unlearned eye for graphic design. Related: I wrote a resume in LaTeX a few years ago. After an in-person interview, the manager took me to meet the team: When we walked in, they were crowded around a monitor arguing about figure out how I'd made such a cool-looking CV. It probably didn't actually look all that good, but anything that isn't Word stands out nowadays.
- neonkiwi 10y ago
  I'm very curious to see this CV!
- seanmcdirmid 10y ago
  I thought my Latex CVs were great, but my wife always does better in...Illustrator out of all programs.
  - grzm 10y ago
    In my experience there's a lot of layout that's been done in Illustrator. I suspect it's because of how long Illustrator's been around and had pretty good layout support, especially when compared with the early years of Aldus PageMaker and QuarkXPress and other tools. Illustrator was needed to do a lot of graphics work that these other tools didn't support, so it can make sense to do as much as you can in a single tool. If you can get good results doing everything you need in terms of text handling in Illustrator, why take the time to use a DTP application when you're likely going to need to use Illustrator anyway for graphics work.
- graycat 10y ago
  For longer documents in TeX, I wrote a collection of TeX macros for to make cross referencing easy. The collection was a little tricky to write but is fairly easy to use and works great. The package is based on some logical names that serve as, say, pointers; then in one place define such a name and in other places refer to it and get the page number, etc. inserted where the reference is made. Given some simple examples, it's really easy to use. I have a simple macro for my favorite text editor that will create a new, the next according to one scheme, such logical name. Having an easy way to have cross references is nice. I also have something similar but simpler for bibliographic references. TeX, some TeX macros, a good text editor with a good macro language (e.g., KEdit), and a good spell checker (e.g., ASpell with the last TeX distribution I got) are super good writing tools to have.
vivekd 10y ago
Yes, I am a lawyer with mind dyslexia and I often got into trouble for missing stuff on my letters or rearranging the letters of things like the other parties names or case numbers etc. So I use the LaTeX letter document class and import the other parties information from an adr file. That way I only have to type the darn thing once. I think I can automate more stuff on documents where I often make errors but I'm just getting started with LaTeX. It's been a big stress reliever for me.
- JumpCrisscross 10y ago
  Interesting. I always instruct my lawyers to reference all counterparty information only once, either in the header or preferably in the signature block, and then make everything else reference an impersonal defined term. I hate transaction-specific information being littered randomly around a document.
kashyapc 10y ago
FWIW, I prefer to use it (LaTex with Beamer) to make technical presentations at conferences. This[1] was my most recent output. Though, I spent way too much time than I care to admit making those, especially tweaking the TikZ 'diagrams' (first time I tried) that can be seen later in the slides. I find it quite convincing. I'm pleased with the end result. [1] http://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/A-Practical-Look-at-QEMU-Block-Layer-Primitives.pdf http://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/...
mpweiher 10y ago
Yes. For example, I wrote "iOS and macOS Performance Tuning: Cocoa, Cocoa Touch, Objective-C, and Swift"[1][2] using LaTeX, and I think it came out rather well (Pearson has some pretty amazing LaTeX compositors that took my rough ramblings and turned them into something beautiful). Quite a while ago, I also used TeX (not LaTeX, IIRC) as part of the typesetting backend of a database publishing tool for the international ISBN agency, to publish the PID (Publisher's International Directory). This was a challenging project. IIRC, each of the directories (there were several) was >1000 pages, 4 column text in about a 4 point font. Without chapter breaks. My colleagues tried FrameMaker first on a subset, they let it run overnight and by morning it had kernel-panicked the NeXTStation we were running it on. The box had run out of swap. TeX was great, it just chugged away at around 1-4 pages per second and never missed a beat. Customer was very happy. The most difficult part was getting TeX not to try so hard to get a "good layout", which wasn't possible given the constraints and for these types of entries just made everything looks worse. [1] https://www.pearsonhighered.com/program/Weiher-i-OS-and-mac-OS-Performance-Tuning-Cocoa-Cocoa-Touch-Objective-C-and-Swift/PGM161424.html https://www.pearsonhighered.com/program/Weiher-i-OS-and-mac-... [2] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321842847/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0321842847&linkCode=as2&tag=metaobject-20&linkId=4f7c355096938fece9d7c880e6916ce8 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321842847/ref=as_li_tl?ie...
tikhonj 10y ago
I work on supply chain optimization at Target, and we write lots of internal documents in TeX. Admittedly the team has a relatively academic background—many PhDs in math, CS and OR—but it's still industry use :). Some Word/PowerPoint creeps in as well, but I highly prefer the TeX documents. They look better, are easier to edit/reuse and slot neatly into Git. I really wish more people used it (or Markdown or whatever) instead of Office nonsense.
- disgruntledphd2 10y ago
  Completely agreed (happy LaTeX user in industry). However, I have recently been using org-mode for emacs and treating LaTeX as one possible output format. Being able to output to HTML/markdown is really useful for automating import into more commonly used tools. For anything with non-trivial maths or structure, I'd still use LaTeX, but it's very nice to have an (easier, more portable) choice of output formats.
apepe 10y ago
Unlike what most LaTeX users may think, LaTeX is actually not even widely adopted in academia, with less than 20% of scholarly articles published every year written using LaTeX (https://www.authorea.com/107393-how-many-scholarly-articles-are-written-in-latex https://www.authorea.com/107393-how-many-scholarly-articles-...). That said, it is the only powerful option to professional typeset mathematical notation. And for that reason, it is used by few in some non-academic research fields (military, gov, pharma, tech, HN readers).
- bnegreve 10y ago
  If I read the blog post I learn that - Latex is widely adopted in hard science. - Latex is not widely used in other disciplines such as sport science. I think this matches with what most latex users think.
arca_vorago 10y ago
As a sysadmin I use it, though to be fair most often in the form of emacs org-mode export to latex because I like the way it makes stuff look (so I'm not editing in latex unless I need to for some reason, which you can do in snippets inside org mode). Resumes, and anything I want to be formal such as latters and invitations I also use it for.
wtbob 10y ago
Well, this was in academia and it was a long time ago, but when I was in college at the turn of the century I used it. Once I noticed that the exact same paper got a whole extra grade in LaTeX, I never went back to word processors.

Serious question: Is LaTeX used outside academia these days?

by TwoBit 10y ago

Serious question: Is LaTeX used outside academia these days?

oever 10y ago

"Mastering MuseScore" was written in LaTeX. The presentation and content are excellent. https://musescore.org/en/node/64711 https://musescore.org/en/node/64711

Avshalom 10y ago

Hell I think it's just barely hanging on in acedamia

Cyph0n 10y ago
That's definitely not the case in computer science and electrical engineering at least. LaTeX definitely isn't great, but I don't see a viable alternative.
- privong 10y ago
  > That's definitely not the case in computer science and electrical engineering at least. Same for astronomy/astrophysics. Most of the publications are typeset in LaTeX.
- opieters 10y ago
  Indeed, lots of people I know (mainly computer science, electrical engineering and physics) still heavily rely on it for long documents and papers.
- DonaldFisk 10y ago
  In the 1990s I used FrameMaker. It's still around, now owned by Adobe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_FrameMaker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_FrameMaker
- washadjeffmad 10y ago
  There's always InDesign, but given its time to proficiency, I think the bast case for similar purposes might still be something creating LaTeX/DocBooks source that ports well to InDesign.
  - whorleater 10y ago
    Can't diff a indesign file, whereas latex is easy to diff.
theophrastus 10y ago
In my current experience with states-side academia: draw a line between the most math/theoretical departments through physics and end up at the engineering departments. The tendency to use TeX/LaTeX follows that line from a relatively high probability to zero on arrival to engineering. In European academia it stays reasonable high throughout.

zzleeper 10y ago

Hell, even in academia people hate it =\

XaspR8d 10y ago
I honestly miss LaTeX a lot, especially the quality of documents I could create with it (when I was in academia). Hopefully I'll get a chance to do a white paper later this year and bust out the skills. But I am totally willing to accept my role as an outlier... I even wrote a small TeX package at one point, so I'm aware it's not a "fun" system. :P
opieters 10y ago
I think it's not perfect, but for many academic purposes, LaTeX is still the best tool in my opinion. It's definitely not perfect, but there's a lot of historical weight and quirks, but the results look great if a little effort is spent. :)
twblalock 10y ago
I'm not sure why you were downvoted. Most of the academics I know hate it. They use it because certain journals require it, or their advisor makes them use it.
- graycat 10y ago
  I use TeX. LaTeX also works, but the books are longer and less well written than Knuth's original TeXBook! :-)! I love TeX -- it's one of my favorite and most important tools. I have a Ph.D. in applied math, and IMHO TeX (or LaTeX) is just essential, call that more than ESSENTIAL for my work. E.g., now I'm a "solo founder" of a startup, a Web site. The crucial core of the work is some original applied math I derived. So, yup, i typed it into TeX. So, as I wrote the corresponding software, I referred back to the TeX output of my core math -- worked great! Without the math, the software would be impossible; one would just look at the screen and wonder what the heck to type. With the math, the software was just routine, essentially just trivial. For typing material with a lot of math, I see no reasonable alternative to TeX or LaTeX. I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation with word processing (thankfully!) but without TeX. What a pain. I could have included more math in the dissertation if I'd had TeX to do the word whacking. More generally, at one point in my career, I could easily have written and published a lot of original and tutorial applied math but didn't because of the difficulty of the math word whacking before TeX. The last paper I published, some a bit wild mathematical statistics, was a good test for TeX -- some of my mathematical expressions in subscripts were a bit much, but TeX worked flawlessly! If anyone is typing a lot of mathematical material and objects to TeX, then just encourage them to do the typing without TeX and see if they like that world better! Computing is changing the world in major ways, some just astounding and/or astoundingly good; math is helping, a lot now and will more in the future; and TeX is just crucial for getting the math word whacking done. But Knuth knew that and did a great job. So far, for the near and distant future of computing, TeX is one of the stronger pillars of civilization.

robinhoodexe 10y ago

Check out http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/40720/latex-in-industry http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/40720/latex-in-indust.... I like the one about the Deutsche Bahn (german railway company) using TeX to typeset the time tables on the train stations.

fhars 10y ago
But is it still true? The downloadable files containing several time tables say: Creator: Adobe InDesign CS6 (Windows) Producer: Acrobat Distiller 10.1.16 (Windows) While the ones with just a single one say: Creator: Hafas Print Bahnhofstafeln 4.6.5 Producer: PDFlib 9.0.5 (Win32)

analog31 10y ago

I work in scientific instrumentation, on the product development side. I've never seen LaTeX output (unless it's been well concealed) in a report or paper. What I'm seeing is that the use of typesetting and even its cousin, word processing, are generally going downhill. My employer has largely given up on print advertising. If we write papers, they're for the more commercial oriented journals or trade mags, that don't use TeX for their own typesetting. More and more, I see stuff that's just written in the e-mail editor, with graphics copy-pasta'd from screen captures, or directly into web based services such as Office 365. Or, PowerPoint (with all of the pitfalls described by Edward Tufte). Word processing has practically been relegated to documents that nobody reads, such as functional procedures and announcements from HR. I realize this all sounds kind of cynical, but I hope is taken in good humor. However, the gist is that writing and correspondence are becoming increasingly informal.

simias 10y ago

I use it when I need to write some documents (user guides etc...). If the alternative is open office or some other "WYSIWYG" editor I'll take LaTeX any time. I don't really love it though, I find myself using org-mode more and more for that purpose, then I let emacs generate the latex code for my doc. It's not nearly as flexible but it works well and your source is a lot more readable. I also use LaTeX for my resume, if you find a good theme they end up looking pretty sharp and professional with little work.

pbtflakes 10y ago
If you're converting Org documents to PDF, you can use Pandoc (http://pandoc.org/ http://pandoc.org/) to automatically convert & send through pdfLaTeX.
- simias 10y ago
  Thanks, that looks useful. But org-mode's built in "org-latex-export-to-pdf" worked well enough for me so far.

0xffff2 10y ago

I do EECS research in the aerospace industry. Every journal we ever submit to either requires or accepts Latex. I also used it regularly to write reports as an undergrad. At least in the EECS side of the engineering field, Latex is alive and well.

username223 10y ago

Yes. I just wrote a guidebook with it. It's not that great if you want to do a full-color glossy thing, but the results are way better than using something like Word.

rev_bird 10y ago

I'm finishing up a 350+ page family history book that I wrote in LaTeX; I've got two or three more to go, and I wouldn't consider using anything else. It's got its quirks, but it was so easy to work with page formatting, footnotes/endnotes, and sections that it made up for all the fiddly issues I ran into with images. I have also been using the genealogytree[0] package (which relies on TikZ, coincidentally used by OP) to draw diagrams programatically. In addition to satisfying my scripting itch, it looks beautiful despite my unlearned eye for graphic design. Related: I wrote a resume in LaTeX a few years ago. After an in-person interview, the manager took me to meet the team: When we walked in, they were crowded around a monitor arguing about figure out how I'd made such a cool-looking CV. It probably didn't actually look all that good, but anything that isn't Word stands out nowadays.

neonkiwi 10y ago
I'm very curious to see this CV!
seanmcdirmid 10y ago
I thought my Latex CVs were great, but my wife always does better in...Illustrator out of all programs.
- grzm 10y ago
  In my experience there's a lot of layout that's been done in Illustrator. I suspect it's because of how long Illustrator's been around and had pretty good layout support, especially when compared with the early years of Aldus PageMaker and QuarkXPress and other tools. Illustrator was needed to do a lot of graphics work that these other tools didn't support, so it can make sense to do as much as you can in a single tool. If you can get good results doing everything you need in terms of text handling in Illustrator, why take the time to use a DTP application when you're likely going to need to use Illustrator anyway for graphics work.
graycat 10y ago
For longer documents in TeX, I wrote a collection of TeX macros for to make cross referencing easy. The collection was a little tricky to write but is fairly easy to use and works great. The package is based on some logical names that serve as, say, pointers; then in one place define such a name and in other places refer to it and get the page number, etc. inserted where the reference is made. Given some simple examples, it's really easy to use. I have a simple macro for my favorite text editor that will create a new, the next according to one scheme, such logical name. Having an easy way to have cross references is nice. I also have something similar but simpler for bibliographic references. TeX, some TeX macros, a good text editor with a good macro language (e.g., KEdit), and a good spell checker (e.g., ASpell with the last TeX distribution I got) are super good writing tools to have.

vivekd 10y ago

Yes, I am a lawyer with mind dyslexia and I often got into trouble for missing stuff on my letters or rearranging the letters of things like the other parties names or case numbers etc. So I use the LaTeX letter document class and import the other parties information from an adr file. That way I only have to type the darn thing once. I think I can automate more stuff on documents where I often make errors but I'm just getting started with LaTeX. It's been a big stress reliever for me.

JumpCrisscross 10y ago
Interesting. I always instruct my lawyers to reference all counterparty information only once, either in the header or preferably in the signature block, and then make everything else reference an impersonal defined term. I hate transaction-specific information being littered randomly around a document.

kashyapc 10y ago

FWIW, I prefer to use it (LaTex with Beamer) to make technical presentations at conferences. This[1] was my most recent output. Though, I spent way too much time than I care to admit making those, especially tweaking the TikZ 'diagrams' (first time I tried) that can be seen later in the slides. I find it quite convincing. I'm pleased with the end result. [1] http://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/A-Practical-Look-at-QEMU-Block-Layer-Primitives.pdf http://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/...

mpweiher 10y ago

Yes. For example, I wrote "iOS and macOS Performance Tuning: Cocoa, Cocoa Touch, Objective-C, and Swift"[1][2] using LaTeX, and I think it came out rather well (Pearson has some pretty amazing LaTeX compositors that took my rough ramblings and turned them into something beautiful). Quite a while ago, I also used TeX (not LaTeX, IIRC) as part of the typesetting backend of a database publishing tool for the international ISBN agency, to publish the PID (Publisher's International Directory). This was a challenging project. IIRC, each of the directories (there were several) was >1000 pages, 4 column text in about a 4 point font. Without chapter breaks. My colleagues tried FrameMaker first on a subset, they let it run overnight and by morning it had kernel-panicked the NeXTStation we were running it on. The box had run out of swap. TeX was great, it just chugged away at around 1-4 pages per second and never missed a beat. Customer was very happy. The most difficult part was getting TeX not to try so hard to get a "good layout", which wasn't possible given the constraints and for these types of entries just made everything looks worse. [1] https://www.pearsonhighered.com/program/Weiher-i-OS-and-mac-OS-Performance-Tuning-Cocoa-Cocoa-Touch-Objective-C-and-Swift/PGM161424.html https://www.pearsonhighered.com/program/Weiher-i-OS-and-mac-... [2] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321842847/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0321842847&linkCode=as2&tag=metaobject-20&linkId=4f7c355096938fece9d7c880e6916ce8 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321842847/ref=as_li_tl?ie...

tikhonj 10y ago

I work on supply chain optimization at Target, and we write lots of internal documents in TeX. Admittedly the team has a relatively academic background—many PhDs in math, CS and OR—but it's still industry use :). Some Word/PowerPoint creeps in as well, but I highly prefer the TeX documents. They look better, are easier to edit/reuse and slot neatly into Git. I really wish more people used it (or Markdown or whatever) instead of Office nonsense.

disgruntledphd2 10y ago
Completely agreed (happy LaTeX user in industry). However, I have recently been using org-mode for emacs and treating LaTeX as one possible output format. Being able to output to HTML/markdown is really useful for automating import into more commonly used tools. For anything with non-trivial maths or structure, I'd still use LaTeX, but it's very nice to have an (easier, more portable) choice of output formats.

apepe 10y ago

Unlike what most LaTeX users may think, LaTeX is actually not even widely adopted in academia, with less than 20% of scholarly articles published every year written using LaTeX (https://www.authorea.com/107393-how-many-scholarly-articles-are-written-in-latex https://www.authorea.com/107393-how-many-scholarly-articles-...). That said, it is the only powerful option to professional typeset mathematical notation. And for that reason, it is used by few in some non-academic research fields (military, gov, pharma, tech, HN readers).

bnegreve 10y ago
If I read the blog post I learn that - Latex is widely adopted in hard science. - Latex is not widely used in other disciplines such as sport science. I think this matches with what most latex users think.

arca_vorago 10y ago

As a sysadmin I use it, though to be fair most often in the form of emacs org-mode export to latex because I like the way it makes stuff look (so I'm not editing in latex unless I need to for some reason, which you can do in snippets inside org mode). Resumes, and anything I want to be formal such as latters and invitations I also use it for.

wtbob 10y ago

Well, this was in academia and it was a long time ago, but when I was in college at the turn of the century I used it. Once I noticed that the exact same paper got a whole extra grade in LaTeX, I never went back to word processors.