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I only wrote one thesis and I did it in Word. Most of my publishing since then has been in WordPress. Is learning LaTeX anywhere near as useful to a professio

I only wrote one thesis and I did it in Word. Most of my publishing since then has been in WordPress. Is learning LaTeX anywhere near as useful to a professional developer as say learning vim or emacs?

kanak 16y ago
> Is learning LaTeX anywhere near as useful to a professional developer as say learning vim or emacs? I would say no (even though I use latex nearly every single day). On the other hand, it is indispensable if you're doing maths or anything that involves lots of formulas, citations, footnotes and what not, because it decouples the structure of the document from the formatting.
jff 16y ago
There's learning LaTeX, and then there's learning it. I think it's safe to say that most paper authors only need to find the appropriate template/example document and fill it out with their content. Once you figure out basic font modifications (bold, emphasis, "typewriter" (monospace)), tables (easy), and images (also easy), you're pretty much set--that's about the limit of my experience with it. Now, I've only had occasion to use it for some math-heavy crypto assignments, a few IEEE-format papers, and a thesis proposal, but in each case I was able to accomplish what I wanted in a short period of time and with minimal hassle. For the most part, you're only typing stuff like this: \section{A Section} A call to {\tt open()} will {\bf return} an integer, which represents a {\emph file descriptor}.\cite{man-open} Easy mode, plus bibtex is a godsend when you have more than a handful of references.
coliveira 16y ago
Latex is something that is nice to know, but developers have little need to what it offers. Latex is required knowledge if you need to create highly structured documents with fine tuned positioning of equations, such as dissertations, math/engineering books, etc. It is also very useful, but hard to use, if you want to typeset general books, music, etc. For the needs of software documentation, I think XML is a better fit, because you can convert it as needed to other formats, including Latex.

kanak 16y ago

> Is learning LaTeX anywhere near as useful to a professional developer as say learning vim or emacs? I would say no (even though I use latex nearly every single day). On the other hand, it is indispensable if you're doing maths or anything that involves lots of formulas, citations, footnotes and what not, because it decouples the structure of the document from the formatting.

jff 16y ago

There's learning LaTeX, and then there's learning it. I think it's safe to say that most paper authors only need to find the appropriate template/example document and fill it out with their content. Once you figure out basic font modifications (bold, emphasis, "typewriter" (monospace)), tables (easy), and images (also easy), you're pretty much set--that's about the limit of my experience with it. Now, I've only had occasion to use it for some math-heavy crypto assignments, a few IEEE-format papers, and a thesis proposal, but in each case I was able to accomplish what I wanted in a short period of time and with minimal hassle. For the most part, you're only typing stuff like this: \section{A Section} A call to {\tt open()} will {\bf return} an integer, which represents a {\emph file descriptor}.\cite{man-open} Easy mode, plus bibtex is a godsend when you have more than a handful of references.

coliveira 16y ago

Latex is something that is nice to know, but developers have little need to what it offers. Latex is required knowledge if you need to create highly structured documents with fine tuned positioning of equations, such as dissertations, math/engineering books, etc. It is also very useful, but hard to use, if you want to typeset general books, music, etc. For the needs of software documentation, I think XML is a better fit, because you can convert it as needed to other formats, including Latex.