Countering counterarguments: > To cut to the chase, LaTeX documents are very hard to read until typeset, Not my experience on Overleaf. I compile early and of

Countering counterarguments: > To cut to the chase, LaTeX documents are very hard to read until typeset, Not my experience on Overleaf. I compile early and often just like in programming since it is a programming language. > LaTeX is, as already noted, a markup language. It is also Turing Complete and I have used it to do bibliographic database lookups, replacement and insertions. I used to program a bibliography per medium item and it would automatically figure out what medium item it was (e.g. journal, online blog post, online video, book, etc.). > disruptive of the text for human readers (including editors and the original author): looking at the screenshot, we see the text mixed up with a lot of symbols that are not part of the text I'd recommend you to use something like Overleaf and see if that's still the case (disclaimer: not affiliated with them, I actually used ShareLatex before that, I only went to them because I had to since they merged -- ShareLatex is open source by the way, so no internet connection needed). > By the way, one of the words in the screenshot is not right. It’s a typing error that I deliberately inserted. I know where it is because I put it there, but looking for it is hurting my eyes. Again, use something like Overleaf. They have spell-check. > But that isn’t how most people want to write. Most people also don't want to program. I won't recommend LaTeX to my girlfriend either, but to fellow programmers, why not? Maybe they like the program/debug cycle more. > Never mind boilerplate code like \documentclass{article} or \begin{document} at the start of your document – running into something along the lines of \parencite[706]{lena_peterson_2008} in the middle of a paragraph and having to mentally parse it into ‘(Lena and Peterson 2008, p. 706)’ interrupts your train of thought and makes it harder to do what you really need to be doing: reading your punctuated words back to yourself to make sure that they ‘sound’ like what you really wanted to say and don’t have any mistakes in them. I disagree. I never wanted to read my citations full out and I'm happy I can read them by aliases. > This is what LaTeX is good for: not helping people to compose text, but helping them to make it look nice. If that is important to you, go ahead and give it a look. LaTeX is good for long pieces of text. I never need to scroll millions of pages since everything is in a folder structure that I can immediately click on. Making things look nice is very important and even a slight competitive advantage, it makes you look more credible. > I think you’ll probably agree that the LaTeX version looks better than the word processor export version. Whether it looks sufficiently better to justify the additional effort is a judgement call that you’ll have to make for yourself. I think that students can invest the time. It took me about 40 to 80 hours to get a good flow with LaTeX. After that I didn't have any issues anymore. Also, whenever I got issues it was a fun procrastination activity (students like that from time to time).