17 ms·

The LaTeX fetish (2016)

• ecshafer 8y ago
  as a physics student I learned latex and became pretty proficient in it. I do write in latex often and the author misses a few major points. The main point it misses is the issue of how to write a paper fluently if i have a lot of equations or symbols. Here is the case when just write in word is not sufficient.
  • ModernMech 8y ago
    How so? The equation editor in word is great and even understands LaTeX formatting. I too write scientific papers with lots of equations and find Word more than sufficient.
    • gerbilly 8y ago
      >[I] find Word more than sufficient. Ugh, just...no. (de gustibus et coloribus non disputandum)
    • wenc 8y ago
      The built-in Equation Editor in Word used to be awful until about Word 2007-2010 when it started interpreting LaTeX-like keywords (it doesn't really support full LaTeX, only a pseudo-LaTeX-like subset) and fixed some aesthetic issues. I would say the latest Equation Editor is pretty decent and suffices for most scientific papers. Even so, it does stumble on more complicated equations (the kind of equations that pure mathematicians write -- the symbol set in LaTeX is just much bigger, and being a typesetting language, it gives the user much more control over element positioning). Equation Editor also doesn't support more esoteric math objects like say Feynman diagrams, but in LaTeX there's usually a package for it. Also, aesthetically, Equation Editor output, though functional, looks a bit off compared to true typeset math. LaTeX-heads are sensitive to aesthetics that way. In my time, those who outgrew Equation Editor moved to third-party software like MathType, which is much closer to LaTeX in functionality. I'm not sure if people still do that.
    • srfilipek 8y ago
      > I too write scientific papers With references? The reference management in Word is atrocious and does not scale.
      • chronial 8y ago
        As the author mentioned, you should use Zotero for that.
    • mturmon 8y ago
      I'm surprised to hear this claim: about equations being easy in Word. I've written long documents in both, and (1) the math layout in Word is crude/inelegant; (2) there seems to be no easy way to change notation in Word. If you define macros for variables in Latex, you can change notation as needed by changing a couple of macros. This pair of problems has driven me away from writing any but the simplest of mathematics in Word. I've also found the symbol set in Word to be too small, but maybe with the universal adoption of Unicode this has been fixed.
      • ChrisRackauckas 8y ago
        It's not just in Word, it's Unicode in general. Unicode doesn't even have all of the letters available for superscripts and subscripts. I think q is one that doesn't exist as a subscript in Unicode. It's a good system but isn't math-ready.
    • chrisfinazzo 8y ago
      Although I suspect it isn't as powerful, Pages will do TeX and MathML these days in its editor. For people coming from Word however, having to port their styles to another app is probably still a challenge.
    • Koshkin 8y ago
      Well, there's also this difference concerning free software...
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
• gumby 8y ago
  Oh yawn. Use the tools that work for you. I write primarily in Emacs and use markup. I don't try to convince anyone else to do the same. If MS Word (or TextEdit) work for you, great! I tend to write large documents for which I find those tools to be clumsy, but if your milage varies, no problem.
• lewis500 8y ago
  Latex lets you write equations quickly. Whether that makes it worthwhile to learn depends on how many equations you write and how quickly you want to be able to change them. I also like being able to write my papers in vscode, with all the shortcuts and vim settings that I’ve gotten used to from coding. If Vim is second nature to you, it’s frustrating to have to switch over to ms word. Vscode has a good latex plugin. That said, it did take some getting used to. Anything hard and potentially useful can become a “fetish” whereby we fool ourselves it’s the usefulness that motivates us but really it’s the hardness. I recall a time when I tried to use matplotlib to format all my plots, with labels and such. Horrible experience but I was really proud of these ugly graphs I’d make entirely from code. Then one day i just started saving them and opening them in illustrator for all the bells and whistles. Haven’t looked back.
  • wenc 8y ago
    > Latex lets you write equations quickly. This is often underestimated. It is possible to write complicated equations more quickly in LaTeX than in handwriting. I have done it. However, to achieve this, there are provisos: 1) Macros already defined for commonly used structures; 2) Lots of repeated elements that can be copy-pasted; 3) Fast typer with a good text editor. 4) Keywords from amsmath, etc. committed to memory.
    • singhrac 8y ago
      In college I sometimes livetex'd a class, i.e. wrote (full, not terse) notes for a course while the professor was drawing on the board. The above is all necessary, but this is easier than it sounds because speakers pause to let words sink in and to write on chalkboards. The only thing I've found missing from the Word equation editor is: 1) macros, and 2) the output just looks less nice than in PDF form. To be fair I've never exported but I still think Computer Modern has better glyphs.
      • wirrbel 8y ago
        I really don't like the Cambria Math font, alternative ones are * XITS https://github.com/alif-type/xits https://github.com/alif-type/xits (port of STIX, kind of looks like Times New Romans which is not my preferred style but still better than Cambria Math) * https://github.com/firamath/firamath https://github.com/firamath/firamath for Sans Math font In generally I think Computer Modern is okay, I am not enthusiastic about it.
• munin 8y ago
  There are cynical and practical reasons to use LaTeX. The cynical: While most conferences in CS advertise both a LaTeX and Word template for submissions, if you submit an article in Word, it seems quite likely it will be desk-rejected for being quackery, possibly without even being read. Is this fair? No. Has the scientific/mathematical community lost out on any great ideas due to this prejudice? Probably not. Think of this as the ultimate, final form of the clear plastic binder from Calvin and Hobbes, except Calvin was right all along and you probably can get away with saying that bats are bugs if you write it in LaTeX. This says more about the process of science than it does LaTeX. The practical: I can think of three pragmatic reasons. It seems that nowadays, good science is collaborative. Single author papers are rare. How is it that multi-author papers are written? Writing in a text-based markup language allows co-authors to easily send each other changes and keep a versioned history without having to worry about "track changes" and using file names as tags, and worrying about cross-compatability between ancient version of Office on Mac and Windows and that one person who only has Linux and so opens things in Libre. In my experience, people do want to get into the weeds with formatting in LaTeX for many reasons, good and bad. For example, how can we shave off two lines of text so we're within the page limit (yes, even though the proceedings will all be published electronically we will get desk rejected for being one page over the page limit where the only thing on the last page are two lines from the bibliography, c'est la vie). That is a bad reason. But good reasons could include improving the look and feel of a document, or controlling where figures are placed, or drawing figures using TikZ. Additionally, having the sum total of the formatting in plain text has advantages. Do you think that undo really un-does everything in Word? Can't you remember some times where you do something, but then un-do and then do "the same thing" again and a different result occurs? LaTeX has many foibles but that is not one of them. Though, of course, sometimes I will wish you luck in understanding exactly why what you wrote in LaTeX works the way it does now. But for example, it is possible to define new mathematical symbols, operators, etc. in LaTeX in a way that is not possible in word processors. The third pragmatic reason is that everyone else already uses it and some day or another your text will need to be turned into LaTeX for publication. I used to keep a lab notebook in Markdown and sometimes I would feel the desire to copy and paste some text from my lab notebook into a paper (if what I wrote was particularly lucid or well written, or was at least a good place to start from). This almost never ended well. If you have a draft of the paper in Word you might easily spend many days converting it from Word into LaTeX. If it's sufficiently complicated you might never get it converted. This could be a barrier to getting collaborators or submitting at all. I think that everyone that works with LaTeX, knows, deep down, it is absurd, and the arguments the author runs into are not really arguments anyone would stand by if pressed. I think if anyone is going to write something entirely in prose, that they will never care about the versioned history of or want collaborators on, and don't care if the finished product looks good or bad, you can use a word processor, or at least, this is my criteria for whether or not I use a word processor. Am I drafting an outline of how we're going to write the proposal? That happens in Google docs. Am I actually writing the proposal? That happens in LaTeX, because I want control over the typesetting to fit in the page limit, I want it to look good, and I want collaborators to be able to edit the document and send me plaintext patches rather than docx with track changes maybe or maybe not enabled.
• qwerty456127 8y ago
  LaTeX indeed seems overly obscure and the fact it mixes the content with formatting does feel bad but I still can see no viable alternative. It seems the only code-based typesetting system (am I wrong?), the only typesetting system that provides such a degree of power and arguably the only way to produce beautiful PDFs with reasonable ease. So far I have chosen the way of writing well-structured HTML or Markdown (to separate content from formatting), rendering it to LaTeX with a Python script and using LuaTeX to produce final output.
  • adrianN 8y ago
    There is also troff, docbook, and many others.
  • exergy 8y ago
    Your workflow is very in-line with the author's recommendations though. His idea is to use something like pandoc to convert word-processor or markdown writing into latex, and then letting latex do what it's actually good at: Typesetting.
    • wirrbel 8y ago
      I am pretty sure the author of that blog post has not done so. Everytime I used pandoc or similar tools to convert text from one format into another, I had to put in a lot of effort to manually fix up things. Its not realistic for most cases. To-latex conversions are actually among the more developed paths, and all instances I can think of (pandoc, sphinx, dblatex) produce kind-of-weird output. If you cannot stand latex but want to produce print-quality PDFs, Apache FOP (with Docbook) probably is your best bet. Otherwise your kind of bound to introduce a heavily manual processing step between writing and formatting for print.
      • fiddlerwoaroof 8y ago
        I wrote 3 years of papers in LaTeX (ancient philosophy, so minimal math). I generally did markdown>pandoc>xelatex. I never really had to touch up the final output (except for a single script I made that removed some incorrect line breaks): I would just use inline LaTeX as needed to get things like figures into the output.
• pjc50 8y ago
  Generally I would say that if your document doesn't include at least one equation it's not worth learning LaTeX to do. If your writing is going to involve lots of inline maths, or you're submitting to one of the journals that requires it, then it will make your life much easier. Some of the Stackexchange sites make widespread use of MathJax for this purpose: https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5020/mathjax-basic-tutorial-and-quick-reference https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5020/mathjax-b... (Word does now store equations as XML internally, but it's pretty horrible - 5 kilobytes for the quadratic formula, for example) Edit: I've just remembered that when I was at university in the late 90s, there was a small community of non-maths LaTeX users ... who were doing things like New Testament Greek. There may be other specialised use cases where having fine control over WYG is more important than WYSIWYG. Now I've gone looking for it, I can find an example : http://jcsu.jesus.cam.ac.uk/~mma29/essays/dissertation/ http://jcsu.jesus.cam.ac.uk/~mma29/essays/dissertation/ - I think the intent of using LaTeX here was really for Bibtex, the bibliographic system, which is an extremely important part of all true academic papers.
• dpwm 8y ago
  > There were also some development effort to “easy” LaTeX typesettings (for instance ConTeXt) but they not became widespread as “WYSIWYM” editors such LyX or TeXMacs, IMVHO because they are in fact less flexible than plain LaTeX and plain LaTeX is easier enough, at least it’s give you a easy and simple “learning path”. ConTeXt is a substantially different beast to LaTeX. It's not LaTeX, although there are some LaTeX-inspired packages and tools to help migrate. A lot of ConTeXt is now written in Lua, and the versions in TeXlive are now sufficiently up-to-date to work from the manuals. ConTeXt takes the view that it will start with sensible defaults and allow nearly all to be customized. Modules tend to play nicely together in an orthogonal way, but a lot of documents can be written without importing any modules. The one thing I wouldn't say about ConTeXt is it's easier – you probably won't find the answers on stackoverflow like for LaTeX. It's a much more complicated system and you need the reference manual. But if you know how you want the page laid out and don't want to have to hack away at a style file, then it's a very powerful tool for serious typesetting.
  • billfruit 8y ago
    Context seems to risky to use, its being maintained by a tiny number of maintainers, as of sometime I go, (I think) the source repos were not available publicly. Also it is difficult to install, and hard to find documentation for.
    • dpwm 8y ago
      > its being maintained by a tiny number of maintainers That is true, but it is quite stable and it works well. The last released version is from 2015. The last LaTeX release was 2e in 1994. LaTeX 3 is apparently still being developed by a small number of maintainers. [0] > (I think) the source repos were not available publicly From the homepage: "There is no offical repository there the development is going. The source code is released irregularly and placed at the http://www.pragma-ade.com http://www.pragma-ade.com website." There's a git mirror of the releases.[1] > Also it is difficult to install It's in TeXLive and works fine. There was a time of intensive development a few years ago, and TeXLive decided to include older, more stable versions. > and hard to find documentation for. The main documentation is the reference manual, linked to from the home page [2]. That said, it's a real shame there isn't more web-friendly documentation. The Wiki has some commands documented, but others are either missing or out of date. [0] https://www.latex-project.org/latex3/ https://www.latex-project.org/latex3/ [1] https://github.com/contextgarden/context-mirror https://github.com/contextgarden/context-mirror [2] https://wiki.contextgarden.net/Main_Page https://wiki.contextgarden.net/Main_Page
• CarVac 8y ago
  A perfect example of the Blub Paradox wherein the author cannot realize the power of a tool superior to what they're used to, and dismisses it as useless because "I don't need those features". http://wiki.c2.com/?BlubParadox http://wiki.c2.com/?BlubParadox
  • Topolomancer 8y ago
    Counterfactually speaking, how do _we_ know that we are not the ones looking 'up' the power spectrum, as it were? (I am joking of course; even though I would not say that LaTeX is the 'best' solution for all use cases, I can at least state with confidence that it satisfies some properties that traditional word processing tools do not have.)
• billfruit 8y ago
  I do feel there is bit of Latex worship going on. Now I think, markdown/asciidoc that boils down to DocBook is better that latex for most use cases. Markdown more clearly seperates logical formatting, from the rendering dependent physical formatting for different kinds of output. Moreover latex tables are a pain. Maybe I this is my misunderstanding, is something the wrong with 'composability' of constructs in the LaTeX language? A concrete examples eludes me presently, it is like the latex functions/forms cannot be nested arbitrarily like normal programming language blocks/constructs.
  • sonderb 8y ago
    I agree. I use and like LaTex but also use other things as well and am a bit surprised something better hasn't come along. My overall sense is that the underlying reason for this is that supporting math in typesetting is an extremely difficult problem, much more so than people realize. Most typefaces don't come anywhere near being adequate for math, and those that are functionally ok are often really not very good aesthetically speaking. The equation typesetting can also be really difficult, in terms of "under the hood" implementation issues as well as the specification of standards. etc. etc. etc. As a result, it's not so much LaTeX is good, as much as it is that it's been around for so long, and the domain is so much of a slog, that it's hard to develop something better. I think a lot of people have a limited vision of what things could be like, and tend to base impressions on limited experiences with alternatives. The proprietary nature of Word does create problems in sharing written documents sometimes; the "black box" nature of WYSIWYG programs in general can be infuriating when you need to be careful with typesetting equations. On the other hand, constantly having every typesetting detail in your face with most LaTeX implementations can be intrusive and leads to "forest for tree" problems sometimes. There are lots of beautiful texts typeset in LaTeX. But there's also a lot of LaTeX documents out there containing correctly typeset equations that are nonetheless really unpleasant to read or look at, for visual design reasons.
  • _salmon 8y ago
    To be fair, Markdown tables are a pain too
• mettamage 8y ago
  I'll bite as a LaTeX and Google Docs fetishist. Don't worry, I'm not taking this argument too seriously but if you happen to find some good arguments in there, please do tell! > Seriously, anyone who believes that making people type this… Just an introductory argument against it, not going into that. I'm looking for meat. Hmm... meat :) > I know a number of academic authors who seem to spend considerable amounts of time doing that. I shan’t say that this is worse, but is it really better? I did that too, but just because I wanted to be geeky. Was it useful? No. Would I have done this in a word processor? No. But the fact that I get to enjoy LaTeX by being geeky gives me a good feeling to return to it and write in it. Sounds like I have a fetish? I do! And not only one ;-) > When it comes to stopping people from creating documents in purple 28pt Comic Sans, teaching them all to use LaTeX is a lot less efficient than stating that you will refuse to read anything that doesn’t match the style guide. But LaTeX does have better alignment and justification algorithms. You won't see the difference, unless you're starting to compare it with a word processor [1]. > LaTeX does less to prevent authors from getting on with writing documents than TeX does. But if neither of the two existed, and you had to come up with something, right now, in 2016 – would it really be a markup language? It depends, I see that people use Markdown for these reasons. And for my resume writing this is definitely true. The template also looks quite nice and I wouldn't know how to design a beautiful resume. > we have LaTeX evangelism and the false implication that word processors don’t facilitate structured writing at all. I wrote big documents in Word, Google Docs and LaTeX. I prefer LaTeX (my Gdocs fetish is with short documents or any psychology paper I'd need to write collaboratively). > In sum, the case for writing in LaTeX is more than a little weak. My reasons: 1. Automatic reference list generation (never saw psych. students use it in Word). I still don't know APA but I never got minus points for my bibliography. 2. The ability to comment. This has been huge for me (as in 10% to 20% better grades in writing huge) Yes, you can do this in Word and yes it also distracts me, when I do this on Overleaf it doesn't distract me. If I want to read, I read the PDF, if I want to write or edit and get meta information, I type. 3. Super quick restructuring thanks to include. There have been many times where I needed to quickly move +30 pages to a completely different location. It just takes one line. 4. Crash resistant: one time there was this psychology student who had her Word document crashed and unsaved. I had to use the command line to copy some temporary saved file that Word didn't recognize (apparently...) and tweak it in order to restore it. It took me an hour. LaTeX is a text file. 5. Tikz: I needed to create a graph and wanted to do it programmatically. Tikz is love, Tikz is life. 6. Knitr: I wanted to be ultra precise and focus on purely reproducable research, with Knitr you can put R formulas into LaTeX and calculate stuff. I handed in my source and PDF, my psychology teacher thought I was a wizard. 7. Different thinking cycle: by hitting compile and waiting for a bit you get some idle time to mind wander. For me it takes the pressure off and sometimes makes me anxious to see the result. 8. Fetish effect: you start to care about typography and the like (see [1]). Sometimes it isn't the programming language itself but the community behind it that makes it so powerful (Hello JavaScript! NodeOS is wonderfully hilarious! ;-) ). 9. Wizard effect: psychology students would leave me alone because they had no clue what I was doing. It also made me look smart :P Is this an argument? Hmm... I have a fetish, you pick out the good ones ;-) 10. Placing images neatly immediately: oh wait, nope this is a downside. Unless you just put them all in the back which is what I do. It is also kind of neat because I tell people to print 3 bundles: (1) the text, (2) the images and (3) the bibliography and put them side by side so they can cross-reference things a lot faster. And with LaTeX include statements it's easy to create 3 different PDFs as well. 11. Writing prose: whenever I want the feeling of "ohhh I'm a writer now" I open up LaTeX get a default template and start writing immediately. It beats Calibri by a landslide. 12. Just knowing that I have a programming language on hands. Whenever I have a programmatic problem, I can immediately use LaTeX. This is especially handy for: (1) bibliography references (a .bib file is secretly a database in disguise!) and (2) for making API calls to public data sets (have never done this but I could see the need to do it). 13. Oh yea, it's free. Students have no money, err... I meant they are in debt. So free is nice. It'd be better if they give students money but that's a utopia for another day. Let's leave it on 13, consider it my lucky number ;-) [1]: http://nitens.org/taraborelli/latex http://nitens.org/taraborelli/latex
• vkazanov 8y ago
  The article is very, very misinformed. Word processors are good for text..?! Pure text markup formats are bad? Oh, really-really? I suspect the author never really wrote anything reasonably complicated. How about: 1) can't have proper a version control with those binary documents word processors generate. 2) no easy way to split huge papers/thesis/book into manageble pieces 3) conversion between formats is a nightmare, with formatting falling apart all the time. 4) typing formulas in Word (and Libre/OpenOffice) is a torture. 5) diffs 6) ... that's just off the top of my head.
  • vkazanov 8y ago
    From other comments: 7) collaboration is almost impossible
  • mnw21cam 8y ago
    I have to say your points 1 and 5 (which in my opinion are the same thing) is the killer reason why I write stuff in LaTeX (apart from the fact that I hate Microsoft Word with a loathing and find LibreOffice even worse). The other thing is that a LaTeX document is text - I trust my text editor to not mess it up - if I make a mistake with the format and break the document, all the text is all still there, so I can go in and fix it. With a Word/Libreoffice document, the software is doing all sorts of stuff behind my back, so I have no clue what it may have broken, or how to fix it.
    • vkazanov 8y ago
      yes, all those things are just... Enraging. Having a nice diff-based change history and being able to ignore formatting issues when writing is a blessing.
  • Topolomancer 8y ago
    > 1) can't have proper a version control with those binary documents word processors generate. And even worse (maybe): no way of fixing errors later on; arguably, the error messages of LaTeX are obscure for new users, but at least you can always reset your document to a working state.
• quietbritishjim 8y ago
  The article author should have tried LyX [1]. It's a graphical editor but still uses LaTeX to produce the output. (Its main downside is that its LaTeX import functionality is very patchy.) It has support for a large common set of LaTeX functionality, and there are a few ways to extend it e.g. user macros and modules. If all else fails you can directly insert raw LaTeX in your document; obviously this defeats the point so is best avoided where possible, but it shows that it can ultimately do everything LaTeX can. The graphical representation shown on screen is somewhat approximate e.g. fonts and sizes are approximate, and line wrapping is totally unrelated to the final output. But it's good enough to understand what's what, and most importantly it's free of all the markup clutter, and that's what the author objects to. It's especially good at this for equations, but it makes a different even just for regular text. Plus it has autocomplete for LaTeX commands (I realise that there are LaTeX editors that do this too). A lot of people mistake LyX as being a beginner's tool to avoid understanding LaTeX. I would say it is almost exactly the opposite: you still need to understand LaTeX to use LyX effectively. Rather than the markup being right in front of you it's hidden by a layer of indirection, which of course is the whole point, but it makes it harder to understand what's going on when something breaks. It breaks less often (e.g. you never get mismatched close braces) but the hard errors still crop up (e.g. incompatible packages giving really obscure errors about macro expansions). I've written numerous mathematical documents of various lengths in LyX, and prior to that a few documents in LaTeX including my MSc thesis. When I first discovered LyX I was partway through writing up notes from a lecture course I was attending. In LaTeX it took me about three hours to write up notes for each hour lecture; in LyX it took me one hour per hour of lecture. A factor of three speed improvement! I can hardly imagine how long my PhD thesis would've taken without it. [1] http://www.lyx.org/ http://www.lyx.org/
  • cryptonector 8y ago
    This needs to be the top-most reply.
  • ChrisRackauckas 8y ago
    Formatting a difficult equation using LyX is soooo easy because you throw the TeX in and see the result right there. Plain TeX with big equations has a lot of guess-and-check with it, and Word just fails. LyX is definitely a fantastic tool and I use it as my main document writer.
• wyattpeak 8y ago
  The idea of somebody critiquing Latex for being a difficult format to write in while writing almost exclusively plaintext is pretty baffling to me. It's like saying that Photoshop is too complicated because I can draw a square just fine in Paint. My domain is pretty specific - typesetting chemistry papers, but for that it is absolutely invaluable. There's no tool on the market which can do it with anywhere approaching the ease. Even MSWord, which is now good enough that I can type simple maths about as fast as I can in Latex (although frankly even there I prefer Latex to futzing with a gui), doesn't have nearly the tools I need. I'll bet this is true in all sorts of smaller domains, too. Typeset anything unusual enough not to have good specialist tools and the freedom of Latex typesetting will make up for the learning curve in weeks if not days.
  • TremendousJudge 8y ago
    >The idea of somebody critiquing Latex for being a difficult format to write in while writing almost exclusively plaintext is pretty baffling to me Creative writers for instance don't really care about typesetting; they want to keep their manuscript organized and to be able to change it easily. Here's en example[1] of a writer showing his personal workflow for writing (in this case using emacs) and you'll see what I mean [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtieBc3KptU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtieBc3KptU
  • exergy 8y ago
    A few points. First, he is an academic in the humanities. According to his article, most people around him talking up latex tell him the main reason for picking up latex is so you don't have to worry about design. There are not much equation-writing in the humanities, so that's outside his domain. Second, he specifically does encourage using latex to typeset. Just not to type in the first place! Use Markdown, or a word processor, says the author, and then latex do what it is good at: typeset. But don't write long paragraphs in latex with attention-breaking code scattered around the text, since that places obstacles in the path of editing.
    • wyattpeak 8y ago
      I recognise his area, but he's pretty general in his commentary "Don't use it to write (anywhere), it's just for typesetting", so I feel justified in using my similarly limited domain to critique. But I don't know how you expect me to write a chemistry paper without writing the equations? Just leave them blank? Typesetting is instrumental to simply composing the paper, it's not something I can do after. As I said in my initial comment, nothing else will actually do the task as fast as Latex, so it'd be pretty perverse to type in something else. Maybe it works for your domain, but not mine.
• LordHeini 8y ago
  Lets not forget that a lot of people like myself, can not be bothered with even thinking about design. The main reason i write stuff in either plain text or LaTex is, that i do not want to spend even a second on figuring out the height oft a heading. Especially if you are 2 pages in and have to remember random numbers for text size in listings or whatever. Every document looks like crap when i try to do it manually and on top it wastes my time fidgeting with widths and heights. I leave the design to people who now what they are doing (not me) and have the computer do the tedious formatting stuff. Also you can put those Tex docs in source control. And if you don't like how the document looks, choose a different theme and recompile.
• leni536 8y ago
  An other reason to use LaTeX: it's text, so you can throw it in a VCS.
• yiyus 8y ago
  > Free and open source software has a strong tendency towards being difficult to install and get up and running. TeX and LaTeX are no exception. Setting up a LaTeX environment in Windows can be difficult if you do not want to install one of the very big suites (although being honest, who is worried about 2GB when you need more space for something like printer "drivers"?). However, in most Linux distributions, you just choose LaTeX in your package manager and it works. And this is the case for most free and open source software. I do not know about Macs.
  • gms7777 8y ago
    Nowadays there are easier online options, to get you going without having to worry about installing LaTeX, with tools like Overleaf.
  • johnminter 8y ago
    There is a recent development that provides a much smaller subset: TinyTex by Yihui Xie (who has made many contributions to Rmarkdown). See https://yihui.name/tinytex/ https://yihui.name/tinytex/ One can add just the packages you need and it can be installed in user directories for people who do not have admin privleges.
• jancsika 8y ago
  Why aren't research papers scrolls like the web is? And why aren't equations animated already? When I mouse over onethere should be a bunch of example numbers cascading over the equals sign splatting onto a transient graph. I want my jetpack.
• klyrs 8y ago
  I'm more of a leather gal, but... cough I think that's more of a fashion choice I've been using LaTeX for over a decade and I've never heard/made these arguments about LaTeX "separating formatting from content" except when a colleague has painstakingly written a torturous macro to accomplish some fussy layout. And then we happily \include{their code} so that we don't need to look at that godawful mess mixed in with our prose. (okay that's a lie, my prose is interspersed with tikz arcana to make coauthors weep with pain and readers delight over the beauty of my figures -- yes there's some sadism and masochism involved, let's not deny it) Latex gives a powerful basis for document editing that can be learned in hours. It's not special in that regard, and easier markup languages abound. For me and others, LaTeX is a turing-complete, flexible, high powered typesetting engine with good defaults and no handrails. We're programmers, not graphic designers, so we can handle a little (well, a lot) of flagellation to build intermediate tools in the language which accomplish repetitive tasks. All that shit about the language being easy and helpful? It's written by fetishists for sure. Knuth is a big fan of literate programming but the code he writes is a godawful stab through the eyeball. Maybe somebody with more refined tastes in code structure could do a better job. But they haven't and we use LaTeX, so buckle up kiddos you're mathematicians now
  • puzzledobserver 8y ago
    Precisely. The actual structure of working LaTeX documents contains plenty of code to just make stuff look right. The "separating formatting from content" crowd is, in my opinion, actually inexperienced in the language, or being intellectually lazy. The article also seems to focus on the distinction between TeX and LaTeX, which is kind of pointless. Apart from extensions such as ConTeXt, nobody advocates for the use of raw TeX. Just use LaTeX (unless you have a reason not to). The actual reason to use LaTeX, in the professional scientific research community, is that it is more of a lingua-franca, just the way things are done, similar to how lawyers hold the Blue Book dear, and researchers in the social sciences swear by APA. There are some clear advantages to using LaTeX: (1) It gracefully integrates with version control (similar to Markdown and LyX, but unlike, Word docx). (2) Entering mathematics is, after the learning period, painless, even more so that Markdown, and only somewhat less than writing material by hand. (3) Large library of classes and styles on CTAN. Everything from bibliographies to figure drawing to colour to typesetting presentations. (4) The core is mostly stable. TeX certainly, and the LaTeX macros almost. In any case, if the system explodes, the original sources are not usually corrupted. Of course, just like the Blue Book and APA, the system has its warts: TeX-the-language is hideous, and the multi-pass build system archaic, even if the markup is mostly unobtrusive after one gets used to it. I will also agree that LaTeX is often fetishized, though not in the manner the author describes. I have in mind college professors who mandate that homework assignments be typeset in LaTeX. This is a waste of time. Let the students use whatever system they find most convenient, as long as it is submitted as a legible PDF: Word, LaTeX, scanned handwritten pages. After you enter the fold as a professional researcher though, the convention of using LaTeX is the easiest way to progress. It's not as bad as you initially think it to be.
• man-and-laptop 8y ago
  I use Markdown with an HTML preview. I don't have to punch the wall because of syntax errors, unlike with Latex. I use Pandoc to make it look the same as a Latex-generated PDF. I'm thinking of switching to AsciiDoc as I'm running into some of the limitations of Markdown.
• nvusuvu 8y ago
  I wrote my electrical engineering thesis in 2005 using LaTeX. My university had a style guide file for thesis submissions. All I had to do was focus on content of my thesis and a little wrangling to make images look nice. The formatting, typesetting, fonts, sizes, margins, all of it was taken care of. To not have to worry about that was amazing. Thank goodness the style file was already there for me to use. I love LaTeX, but I know some of its limitations and its not intended for the layperson.
  • chrisfinazzo 8y ago
    So much this.
• winstonewert 8y ago
  The author fundamentally misunderstands the argument for LaTeX. The point isn't that people in word processors spend absurd amounts of time deciding what fonts to use or might make stupid choices about formatting. In both word processors and LaTeX, people do the same thing: they write to match a style guide. In LaTeX you drop in a class file that defines your style guide and boom your whole LaTeX document is now formatted according to that style guide. If later you want a different style guide, switch out the class file and you've got something different. Need to write your bibliography in a different style, swap out the file defining that and all your references are changed. That's the point that advocates of LaTeX are making. You separate the content and presentation. Your LaTeX just contains the content and the style guide indicates how to actually format that content. Now, LaTeX doesn't actually do a great job at this. It shows its age. Its got a lot of messiness due to the fact that at hard its a macro expansion language. Its not quite possible to get away with putting everything to do with the style in the class file.
  • da_chicken 8y ago
    > The point isn't that people in word processors spend absurd amounts of time deciding what fonts to use or might make stupid choices about formatting. Except that's exactly one of the most common reasons I see given to people who are not programmers to use LaTeX. "You don't have to fiddle with formatting." "You don't have to worry about text flow around embedded images." And so on. It's absolutely one of the most common reasons people give when the first ones should be, "You require a typesetting language," or "You require portable, comprehensive, codified, standardized, plain text equation markdown syntax." > In LaTeX you drop in a class file that defines your style guide and boom your whole LaTeX document is now formatted according to that style guide. If later you want a different style guide, switch out the class file and you've got something different. Need to write your bibliography in a different style, swap out the file defining that and all your references are changed. > > That's the point that advocates of LaTeX are making. You separate the content and presentation. Your LaTeX just contains the content and the style guide indicates how to actually format that content. I don't really buy these because you can say the same thing about Word. Word has templates which need to be configured and defined just like LaTeX classes. Word has heirarchal styles which can be changed after the fact to completely reformat the document easily. Word has a citation and reference tool which allows you to change the style on the fly [0]. Yes, the features of the two systems are not identical. Yes, some things are more difficult in Word. Some things are more difficult in LaTeX, too. Now we're down to subjective arguments about which you prefer, which isn't quite the same thing. [0]: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/APA-MLA-Chicago-%E2%80%93-automatically-format-bibliographies-405c207c-7070-42fa-91e7-eaf064b14dbb https://support.office.com/en-us/article/APA-MLA-Chicago-%E2...
• al2o3cr 8y ago
  So convinced was I that this was why scientists wrote in LaTeX that I even had a go at writing a LaTeX paper of my own (it never got finished; there was a lesson there). So after successfully completing the task ZERO times, the author still felt fully qualified to dismiss the entire approach and whinge about the tooling. /facepalm
  • jjoonathan 8y ago
    The only problem: he's right.
    • exergy 8y ago
      Indeed. I felt he presented a very limited argument, without much of an overreach. He doesn't say "Never use Latex!". His opinion is that those who are picking it up under the false illusion that latex gets out of there way better than MS Word are doing themselves a disservice. Seems to me to be a fairly uncontroversial opinion. The latex document, especially one that's big, is not trivial to parse and edit. Making sure the 'flow' of the text is right is infinitely easier with WYSIWYG. He absolutely seems to be OK with people who use latex because they care deeply about the beauty of the resulting document, and himself advocates for a post-writing conversion to latex. Markdown>Pandoc>Latex even. I feel many here are not reading the article in context. I have an aside of my own to add to the "latex gets document design out of your way" crowd. I can bet any money that the types of people who will fiddle a lot with the typeface settings on MS Word will fiddle with themes/linespacing/monospaced font-du-jour on their text editor too. It has less to do with the writing environment and more to do with personality. I would know since I'm one of those people.
      • wirrbel 8y ago
        He slams Latex usage as a fetish. Then he actually has a hard time putting forth arguments against latex, ends up with very weak ones, for example he compares MacOS vanilla Emacs installation with a weird green-on-black colorscheme with MS Word as if it was the only editor you could use for Latex. In the end I feel I wasted my time reading his blog pot, because he just does not provide any substantial information. I don't even have the impression that his proposed alternatives (conversion changes from other formats to latex) are really used by him. Ah, I like writing documents in Docbook, so I am not even that kind of a latex enthusiast. But his criticism is kind of really off.
• lallysingh 8y ago
  Has this guy seen pandoc?
• ddavis 8y ago
  When I was an undergrad at UT Austin I remember hearing someone who worked with Steven Weinberg mention that Weinberg told people that he “thinks in TeX”. One of the things I love about TeX is I can write it in my editor _without_ WYSIWYG. The tooling in Emacs to write TeX is amazing. I can never go back to a graphical writing tool.
  • gnulinux 8y ago
    100% this. Nothing I tried even comes close to Emacs + TeX. It's exponential improvement in productivity.
• _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
  In fact, the one place you should never try to do any more substantial writing than designing the poster for your niece's 4th birthday part is a word processor. Word processors are one of the worst environments I can imagine for actually writing. Lots of people surely write in LaTeX in part because they can use a reasonable environment for writing (i.e. a decent text editor). Also, if you're in a decent text editor, writing LaTeX can be pretty easy (though for lots of things Org mode or markdown etc. may be more appropriate), and you can set up macros to auto-fill in things like the preamble etc. I essentially write for a living, and I would not have survived had I not adopted LaTeX.
  • pjc50 8y ago
    People who need to produce Word documents and are writing things like books or scripts may find Scrivener very useful. It's a lot more stable on very large documents.
    • kstrauser 8y ago
      I. Love. Scrivener. My workflow is to sketch out ideas in MindNode, drag the outlines into Scrivener, and work in their to flesh them out. I find this infinitely easier and more flexible than outlining and editing in a word processor. I've heard good things about Ulysses, too, but haven't tried it. I think that whole class of application is inherently better for editing large documents.
      • zapzupnz 8y ago
        Ulysses was fantastic when I last used it to do a multi-chapter document. I separated the chapters into their own files, it remembered each chapter's scroll position so it was easy to look things up in each, and the default templates looked superb. I stopped using it when it went to a subscription, though. I can't accuse a company that lets you write in Markdown, basically plain text, as rent-seeking, but I dislike my workflow being held hostage like that. Haven't really found a suitable, multi-document replacement yet.
• jhfdbkofdcho 8y ago
  I didn’t find this article helpful. But one of my math professors in college quipped, “LaTeX, never has so much bad math looked so good...”
  • phalangion 8y ago
    Similar sentiment to this comic: https://i.imgur.com/NwNPU.png https://i.imgur.com/NwNPU.png
• mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  This article is embarrassingly bad. It attempts to do a literary critique of written statements of the benefits of latex, and analyzes zero actual use cases or implementations. Tex is such a powerful tool. It makes me sad to see someone dismiss it likely because of unpleasant first learning curve, which is also why a lot of people dismiss vim or emacs. When I was a freshman in college, an upper classmen friend advised me to learn TeX, and helped me through writing several documents. That advice & help was absolutely priceless. Today I work in a typical tech company environment, and my team writes most of our technical documentation, sales engineering presentations, in-house tech presentations, and even recently some supporting documents for patent applications, all in LaTeX, all stored in version control in one of our repositories. We can do real code review on technical documentation changes, have the power of many latex packages, beamer, etc., and even build versioned PDFs via our continuous integration tooling. In some cases we also combine latex source with Mako templates and have actual software that can “push button” update all sorts of charts for new data, client-specific requests, etc. It is a very powerful tool.
  • de_watcher 8y ago
    I'm maintaining some documents in VCS+CI. But it feels like writing code in a really bad programming language: can never get the tables, titles, whitespace and page breaks right. There is always some package that does the thing I want while breaking other thing I want.
  • srtjstjsj 8y ago
    Why don't you use Markdown?
    • projektfu 8y ago
      I don't think Markdown alone is powerful enough for most LaTeX use cases. What's the markdown for a numbered formula? How do you refer to it? How do you do proper footnotes and endnotes in markdown and keep the references up to date? Thus you need to use some flavor of Markdown that covers what you need, which may not also cover another use you have. It still doesn't address output, so you need to eventually process the Markdown into something readable or typesettable, like LaTeX, which you'll need to understand anyway if you want to get the output you desire or fit into a style set given to you by a journal. Since LaTeX is the lingua franca of math and CS, you're better off just writing in LaTeX and then your advisor/professor/reviewer/editor can see or edit your intent as well as your output. Unfortunately, if you're in Biology, they're all over the place with their styles, and Word is the default. Perhaps then you will benefit from doing things in your own Markdown flavor and translating it to Word in the end using a little script you've written.
• phalangion 8y ago
  The author's found arguments of separating content from presentation is only part of the reason I use LaTeX. I use LaTeX and other markup languages (mainly AsciiDoc) when I can, as opposed to using a word processor, because I have found that Word manages to find hidden ways to mangle any document that does more than include text in paragraphs. What I like about using LaTeX is if the document is broken, it's usually my fault and I can see the underlying code that is breaking it. If you've ever had to unzip a Word document to fix the underlying XML (I have), you'll understand how frustrating it is working with hidden markup.
  • mr_gibbins 8y ago
    This, this, and this a thousand times. As a PhD student about to write up his thesis I'm on the cusp of deciding whether to go down the Word or LaTeX route. I cannot describe how unbelievably angry I have gotten at Word screwing up document after document. My last effort was a journal paper submission, and the journal in question supplied the (80MB!!!) template which was so crammed full of macros, custom styles and miscellaneous instructions that my AV program quarantined it. When I eventually managed to use it, I literally transferred the content from Notepad++ (my go-to for the act of actually writing - take note, OP) and images etc. from file and spent DAYS trying to get the format right. A hateful experience. Word is great for casual use. For academic or professional use beyond the barest of basic typesetting, absolutely not.
    • chrisfinazzo 8y ago
      Not sure if you saw my above comment, but if you did go down the LaTeX path, would you have to set up the environment yourself? I realize people may want to customize things later, but making the initial install as painless as possible seems highly desirable - esp. for students.
      • zrobotics 8y ago
        For students, especially undergrad, overleaf is an excellent way to dip your toes into latex. I wouldn't want to use it for anything large or serious, but it will handle a typical undergrad length document and doesn't even require installation. https://www.overleaf.com https://www.overleaf.com
• DJHenk 8y ago
  > LaTeX is a typesetting system and a markup language. Typesetting systems are not customarily used for writing in, and while markup languages such as XML and HTML often are, this is generally recognised as a bad idea. This is dumb. One can argue that LaTeX is not a convenient markup language enough to write in. But stating that a markup language in itself is a bad thing for writing, while Markdown was invented in 2004 and wildly popular at the time this article was written (2016), means that the author himself is not completely rational when defending his preference, using XML and HTML as strawmen.
  • exergy 8y ago
    He _does_ mention Markdown, and specifically how it was designed to be human readable. But he lumps Latex with XML and HTML in that they are rubbish to write in. He mentions also how he hates himself for writing in even his simplified version of HTML when writing long posts. His argument is restricted to those looking to use Latex for questionable benefits that they do not fully understand.
• yesenadam 8y ago
  (2016) I read this in 2017, and..early in 2018 spent months getting good at LaTeX/TikZ (using TexShop), and getting some idea about TeX. It's been amazing, well worth the time invested already. For the first time, I have organised notes on everything, including my programming. And it looks lovely, it's a pleasure to look over, makes me want to do more.
• cozzyd 8y ago
  Everytime I try to use a word processor it's full of random j's and k's. Thank goodness overleaf V2 reintroduced git integration because my collaborators love using overleaf for some reason.
• cschmidt 8y ago
  What a weird argument. It seems to me that LaTex is used so much because it is the fastest way to type math equations, once you get good at it. If you don't have math in your paper, then maybe he has a point. But whenever I have lots of equations, there is nothing better. He kind of ignores this part, as far as I could see.
• lautreamont 8y ago
  The problem with word processors is that you can't properly do distributed work with them. No one I work with uses the exact same version of the same word processor I do; actually people in the real world don't even have consistent versions on their multiple machines. Every version switch fucks over fonts, formatting, comments... everything except the bare text. Most of my workflows are at follows: 1. Send LibreOffice text to collaborator 2. Get changes/comments back from collaborator 3. Start addressing them 4. Realize that collaborator has fucked up the formatting by using MS Word 5. Fix formatting 6. Address comments 7. Go home for the day 8. Telecommute the next day, fire up result of 6 on your old machine at home 9. Realize it won't even load comment notes 10. Ask the wife if you can borrow her Win7 machine for the job 11. Give up on formatting, do the editing job first on MS Word 12. Go back to office the day after, fix the formatting which is now an unholy mess of LibreOffice and MS Word 13. Swear at LibreOffice because it somehow spontaneously returns to MS Word formatting but not consistently 14. Get some resemblance of working formatting in order 15. goto 1 Yeah... I'm afraid LaTeX is the lesser evil there. (None of this applies to cloud-based work using e.g. Google Documents. If you want to entrust your drafts to Google, feel free to do so. I don't consider this an option for anything under NDA.)
  • fwip 8y ago
    It sounds like your issue isn't with word processors, it's with you using a different word processor than all your colleagues.
    • antoineMoPa 8y ago
      With LaTeX, you can track your changes in git, collaborate in online platforms, use your favorite editor, perform diffs/merges with your favorite editor. With word processors, you are stuck with 1 editor and few live collaboration options like google docs and word online which have a reduced feature set.
    • tcpekin 8y ago
      I have had the exact same experience as the OP and if you can convince several PI's with better things to do than reinstall a new version of Word, people at other institutions without MS Office licenses using Libre Office and others who don't use either and convert it back and forth to a Google Doc (thereby breaking all the hyperlinking), I would honestly be baffled. Now, in collaborative work I use Overleaf so there is no configuration problems with installing LaTeX (Google Docs for LaTeX), and give everyone write access if they want it, I sync it with my Dropbox and have a working LaTeX distribution if I want to edit without access to the network. Those who don't know LaTeX (which is a small number, especially if they don't want to learn the basics to edit the .tex file in the appropriate place) I can convert a version to Word for their edits, which I then incorporate, or they can just markup a PDF. The Overleaf document then has a complete history of edits, Overleaf supports Word-style comments and track changes, and I can be happy in that the other authors aren't going to break something in the Word "backend".
• choeger 8y ago
  The author is right but IMO totally misses the point. When you do serious writing, you probably do not want to maintain the content in LaTeX. But not because LaTeX is difficult per se, but because there is, for instance, no way to put the content through a decent grammar/style checker and get back some useful annotations. This is simply because (La-)TeX is not a context-free language. If it was, you could parse all the paragraphs of content and feed them into, say, grammarly. Then you could correct your issues and automatically apply the fixes. As it stands now your only choice is to use a spell checker that already "understands" LaTeX. Unfortunately, that understanding is guaranteed to be wrong at some point. Regarding the typesetting aspects: I always wondered how much performance one could get out of a "modern" replacement for TeX. Asides from the time it takes to typeset a 100+ page book with some TikZ elements, the results are already quite close to perfect, IMO.
  • ummonk 8y ago
    Yeah, I’d love to see an a modern cleaner language that fills the same role as LaTeX. Markdown + CSS doesn’t really fit the bill for a multitude of reasons, but markdown is a good example of how easy it should be to cleanly write simple content.
• akvadrako 8y ago
  Why would you hand-write LaTeX if you don't like it? You can just use LyX, basically a structured WYSIWYG word processor.
• sigi45 8y ago
  Had a small CV in latex. It sucked. Took too much effort to install it on window. Didn't touch it for a year and it stopped working on a newer Ubuntu version which I had to fix. I rewrote it in HTML and css. Anyway one thing which just sucks: research papers in latex look all the same and are equally bad to read. Not unbearable bad but nothing for the eyes. Someone just should write a research PDF paper viewer :-(
• cryptonector 8y ago
  The correct answer is: use LyX[0], a WYSIWYM[1] editor. LyX is truly fantastic by comparison to Word and LibreOffice. You get all the power of LaTeX and none of the pain. WYSIWYM is superior to WYSIWYG! WYSIWYG means you have to fiddle with typesetting as you write, whereas WYSIWYM means you don't. LyX also supports a variety of export formats, including XHTML. I've used its export to XHTML feature so that I can edit Internet-Drafts in LyX then convert them to XML (using an XSL) in the schema accepted by xml2rfc, and presto, no need to edit XML. [0] [1] http://www.lyx.org/ [1] What you see is what you mean.
  • gmueckl 8y ago
    I like LyX a lot, but I have issues with the generated LaTEX code. It does not lend itself very well for manual adjustments. If I have to match a journal style, I will generally resort to Kile and write LaTeX directly, using the journal template (most journals only have LaTeX templates) and following their instructions. But if the style is just a standard LaTeX style, LyX is great, especially for complex formulas. Unlike plain LaTeX you cannot ruin the structure of a math equation by misplacing a bracket.
    • cryptonector 8y ago
      I like the idea of LyX, and its GUI, the implementation is showing its age a bit. Starting from scratch today it would be better to implement in Rust using XML as the .lyx document format and XSLT and XSLs for transformations to LaTeX and other output document formats. EDIT: And there are XSLs for such conversions. E.g., http://getfo.org/texml/ http://getfo.org/texml/
• jayalpha 8y ago
  TLDR: Idiot tries to write document in Latex, fails, blogs about it.
• stared 8y ago
  Yes, it takes much more effort to write in LaTeX than in a "normal" word processor. Though, for managing complex things (e.g. citations, equations, being able to change formatting of everything in a consistent way), a typical word processor is not enough. And when it comes to typesetting, people - show me something even close to the level of LaTeX beauty. I bet that with LaTeX default(ish) settings I can create a book with better typesetting than 90% found in a bookstore. Disclaimer: wrote quite a few dozen things in LaTeX, my PhD thesis included. For casual writing and blog posting I use Markdown or Google Docs. But for a book, I would go for LaTeX (or at least - convert to it at some point).
  • moonbread 8y ago
    Would agree here. Use it for certain types of documents like company RFP responses/bids and formal policies & procedures, etc. Creates a sleek, professional-looking document where features such as "Confidential" watermarks with opacity over downsized and embedded PDFs within the document become possible. It took a while to put together the initial template, but being able to reuse it has provided value despite syntax quirks.
• Koshkin 8y ago
  While LaTex is nice (and Texmacs is almost perfect), it seems the future is in automatic recognition of the mathematical handwriting. (I cannot imagine a professor giving a lecture using LaTex and a large screen instead of the whiteboard.)
• mcguire 8y ago
  (See section 7.) Yes, I, too, fellow human, like reading rectangular 7.5" × 9" blocks of space-and-a-half 12pt Times New Roman.
• AnyTimeTraveler 8y ago
  I have to confess that I mainly use \LaTeX for almost all my studywork, because I have my templates for it, automated my workflow with scripts, and I don't think I ever want to draw an automata again without the tikz package...
• superfist 8y ago
  I fully agree with this article. Let say it clear, LaTeX is so old fashioned nowadays. Lack of default UTF8 support. Even if you will fix it, good luck with additional tools like BibTex. For God's sake how this can be still an issue in XXI century? Lack of TrueType Fonts support. Have to use tools like XeTeX. Beamer? Give me a brake, look at all those tamplates. Almost all of them looks like from 90ths LaTeX scripting language is so verbose and odd that after few weeks of not using it you forgot most of the syntax. Is it so hard to create new tool (LaTeX 2.0) that would base for example on superset of HTML5, CSS and JavaScript so we can get rid of that crap?
• zapzupnz 8y ago
  > Comparing good use of LaTeX with poor use of word processors is unfair; the most that can really be said is that you are more likely to be introduced to LaTeX in a class taught by someone who really knows how to use it, and more likely to be introduced to a word processor by playing around with it or under the informal instruction of someone who doesn’t understand it very well, and that, for this reason, the number of people who use LaTeX but don’t use its document-structuring features is probably close to zero while the number of people who use word processors and don’t is enormous. I agree with this very much. My husband and I wrote our Masters theses with LaTeX so that we could support various layout features with relative easy. I created a LaTeX template, and all we needed to do was write our chapters and sections in separate files. A bash script parsed the template and chapter files twice, and spat out a nice PDF. Oh boy, did I ever get my butt kicked by the hassle of LaTeX support for custom CJK fonts. Oh good, just use that package. Oh no, that package doesn't work unless you use that engine. No, that engine doesn't support custom fonts, use a different one. Oh no, this other engine doesn't support that package, but here's a similar package whose arcane settings you need to tweak just right. It took nearly a week for me to get my template to match the university style guide without throwing hissy fits after each compilation — and then I added BibLaTeX to the mix, and it's a wonder the wall doesn't bear an imprint of my head getting my inline APA references to respect those font and layout choices, too! For our purposes, just writing our theses in Pages would've been a hundred times simpler. After we submitted our theses, I created a Pages template, modified all the paragraph and character styles, set our preferred fonts with CJK support, checked that the line heights were consistent, double-checked the paragraph and line spacing, saved the template, and we've never looked back. I'm with the author in that I'm absolutely fine with sane defaults, and I'm sure most people are, but sane defaults for an international world. I'm glad scientists and engineers have an easy way to typeset complicated equations and what have you, but it's such a pain in the neck to (a) support non-ASCII characters (b) in a font that you like (c) with consistent line height when using CJK fonts. Just my two cents as a non-scientist who really loves the power of LaTeX but obviously has different needs to most of its users in support of the author's message that writing documents in LaTeX is not some universal ideal for every writer.
• mnl 8y ago
  People use LaTeX because they have to write equations —besides referencing and quoting them, such a pleasure without it— and the alternatives suck. If the author of this obtuse rant doesn't need equations in print and to begin with hasn't bothered to ask anybody about their reasons for using it before making assumptions, I don't understand what's interesting about his personal views on something he can't get. Too bad, because making references/bibliographies in LaTeX also sucks less than the alternatives. Yeah, it's not WYSIWYG, if you need WYSIWYG use something else. I hate clicking for hours in WYSIWYG equation editors, I can say that because I've had to do it too many times and it's soul-crushing. BTW, your old Equation Editor objects can't be opened anymore using supported Microsoft products. There are millions or hundreds of millions of those out there but they couldn't care. This might teach us something etc. There's also a fish story about the reasons for arXiv requiring LaTeX back then: besides looking nice it really is a crackpot filter.
• Madeindjs 8y ago
  I tried LaTeX but I found the import statements very messy. Also I spend many times to improve output for Listing (for example). So I thinks tools like markdown or Asciidoctot way more easy and more comfortable than LaTex....
• cvansiclen 8y ago
  I'm a physicist who writes research papers using the freeware package "LyX" (based on LaTeX). It's very flexible and easy to use. I highly recommend it!