33 ms·

Word processors are ditching equation editors in favour of LaTeX

286 points by goerz 7y ago

stefan_ 7y ago
Notice that this article is explicitly about formatting equations in LaTeX. Other Word processors, of course, don't actually do any LaTeX, they simply emulate the equation stuff from it.
cameronbrown 7y ago
I think going one-step further and making LaTeX the entire backing structure of a document would be a great idea. Kind of like HTML WYSIWYG designer tools. Would be a boon for interoperability which is probably why it'll never happen.
- _ZeD_ 7y ago
  soo.. like lyx? https://www.lyx.org/ https://www.lyx.org/
- CJefferson 7y ago
  It would be an awful idea. Latex can't produce HTML, it can't produce EPUBs or any other reflowable document type. It can't produce any document which is accessible to blind people (other than giving them the raw LaTeX file). Note: You will find various libraries that claim to produce HTML output. I can tell you from experience none of them work, given a random LaTeX paper you download from, say, Arxiv.
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    Pandoc does all that, from LaTeX source (among others). https://pandoc.org https://pandoc.org
    - corollari 7y ago
      Pandoc's documentation itself says that the conversion is lossy.
    - piadodjanho 7y ago
      Pandoc creates PDF using LaTeX. You still constrained to LaTeX features, and therefore the lack of trivial accessibility.
    - pseingatl 7y ago
      Pandoc conversion is another trip down the rabbit hole (latex to markdown: Error at "input" (line 265, column 1): unexpected '\n'
      - dredmorbius 7y ago
        The assertion was that LaTeX cannot generate specific formats. Using Pandoc (NB: Pandoc Is Not Markdown, though it's often used with it), s well as earlier tools, that is in fact quite possible. Using templates, with quite a level of flexibility.
throwawaytemp2 7y ago
So is LaTeX worth mastering? It depends on the researcher: how often do you use equations, how much is fine-grained control do you need over a document, and how much time do you have to devote to learning a new language? But I use LaTeX mainly because the resulting documents simply look better, and I imagine that’s a major selling point for many.
- n1000 7y ago
  other selling points include great look, reproducible, gitable, makes for great boilerplates, etc.
- nabla9 7y ago
  For equations LaTeX is the best and most comprehensive syntax. For normal text you can use some other markup that converts to LatTex when needed. Then you can add LaTeX packages or your own styles using LaTeX. LaTeX can be treated as intermediate representation. There are many tools for, graph, table, image editing and drawing that can emit LaTeX/TeX.
- ncmncm 7y ago
  Markdown filtered through pandoc to PDF looks as great as native LaTeX, but is overwhelmingly nicer to work with in source form. I should note that the reason it looks great is that pandoc translates to LaTeX on the way there; and you can embed LaTeX in the markdown where needed. EDIT: I see that many others below have already said it. But it was worth repeating.
  - copperx 7y ago
    The problem with Markdown is its embarrassingly poor support for highly structured documents. Something as simple as writing a multi-level list interspersed with complete paragraphs is a nightmare to do in Markdown. Tables and images aren't a big improvement over LaTeX and require special syntax to scale and position. I'd rather use Word for simple documents so I can enjoy drag and drop and graphical image positioning and scaling and easy tables and leave LaTeX for complex documents. Markdown is the worst of both worlds. However, I could see myself using the much superior Asciidoc (vs Markdown) instead of LaTeX, but unfortunately, the worse-is-better philosophy is still alive and has made Markdown the defacto simple markup language, and tool support for Asciidoc is as poor as LaTeX, so I just go directly to LaTeX instead.
lol768 7y ago
LaTeX is one of the most important tools that I properly started using regularly whilst at unviersity. It's the typesetting tool in CS, and you can get some really beautiful results from it. There's great tooling for IDEs like IntelliJ (https://github.com/Ruben-Sten/TeXiFy-IDEA https://github.com/Ruben-Sten/TeXiFy-IDEA), it makes managing references (using BibTeX) much less of a chore, there are tons of high-quality packages that do pretty much anything you could think of and there's an excellent community on e.g. TeX.SE to provide support. It's free software, the results are better than Word and it's much less painful to use than an unpredictable WYSIWYG editor. I've used it in industry to write security audit reports and more recently as part of my dissertation. My only regret is not discovering LaTeX earlier and using it more.
na85 7y ago
My biggest issue with (la)tex is how hard it is to find up to date best practices. There are fifty ways to accomplish your desired outcome but it seems like every blog post or stack exchange answer conflicts with everything else and it turns out half of what you're doing is deprecated. I'd pay good money for a "modern idiomatic latex"-type of tutorial.
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  Just get Lyx. It's a graphical front end for LaTeX, so you never actually write LaTeX. You don't have to worry about what's idiomatic at all, because you aren't writing it. You're just writing a document.
  - sackintor 7y ago
    The best bit about LyX is using it to format LaTeX tables nicely. When writing my thesis I used LyX but found myself creating more and more ERT (what LyX calls raw LaTeX code). I eventually just started using a text editor. However, I still do tables in LyX and copy them over -- such a pain to insert a column otherwise...
  - na85 7y ago
    That's kind of an indictment of latex in and of itself; the best way to use latex is to not use it? At that point why not just use .docx?
    - souterrain 7y ago
      Repeatability. Complex formatting, such as figure captions and figure placement, in Word documents suddenly break for no apparent reason. Troubleshooting a “broken” Word doc is akin to fixing a typewriter while one is blindfolded.
      - sjy 7y ago
        Wouldn't it be nice if Word actually provided some kind of UI for working with the underlying XML, like the old WordPerfect 'show codes' feature?
jrimbault 7y ago
For my own uses the combinations of markdown and pandoc feels very satisfying. Pandoc allows me to pick and choose what parts of LaTeX I want to use and I can otherwise write in plain text/markdown.
lytefm 7y ago
Allington often uses Markdown, which he describes as more “lightweight” than LaTeX, because the formatting commands are more straightforward. [...] That said, some journals and conferences don’t accept documents in Markdown format. Having used LaTeX a lot since I started studying, I nowadays also prefer Markdown because LaTeX often feels like an overkill. There are many great Markdown Editors out there for quick note taking. And when things get more academic, I like to use VSCode with PandocCiter (https://github.com/notZaki/PandocCiter https://github.com/notZaki/PandocCiter) to manage the sources. Also, it's easy to convert the Markdown docs to LaTeX or Word if needed.
- TylerE 7y ago
  LaTeX feels ultimately like the wrong level of control. I'd either rather be simpler (Markdown) or have more control (CoNTeXt) CoNText, for those unfamiliar, is a bit more modern...built to really take advantage of PDF features like full color and hyperlinks that LaTeX isn't as good at. Also much better control over figure placement, and is capable of things like sidebars that are somewhere between very fiddly to impossible in LaTeX.
  - lytefm 7y ago
    Thanks for pointing out ConTeXt, I might try it out for my next presentation. The examples in the wiki seem to provide all that I need in a much more concise way that the LaTeX-Beamer package.
    - TylerE 7y ago
      It's very powerful. Syntax isn't as nice as LaTeX (although it is much more consistent, since context is mostly developed by a single team instead of being a mass of extension), but you really have much more control (LaTeX floats are the devil incarnate).
  - rocqua 7y ago
    ConText looks pretty good, but the formulas seem rather verbose with \placeformula[eqn:famous-emc] \startformula E = mc^2 \stopformula Compared to the quick an dirty latex: /[ E = mc^2 /] Granted, with references in latex you'd need something pretty similar \begin{equation}\ref{eqn:famoues-emc} E = mc^2 \end{equation} I must say that the \begin{env} and \end{env} feel better to me that \startenv and \stopenv. Simply because it differentiates the environment name better.
thangalin 7y ago
For anyone looking to use Markdown while reaping the benefits of a typesetting engine, you may find the following series on how to typeset Markdown using ConTeXt of interest: https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/05/22/typesetting-markdown-part-1/ https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/05/22/typesetting-markdow...
tapia 7y ago
Reducing LaTeX to the look of the equations it produces clearly misses the point. I use LaTeX because it just formats everything correctly. Inserting figures or tables in word can be one of the most frustrating tasks I can do. Every little change can potentially break the format. Have you ever tried to add a table in word in a double column document? It is madness. The caption system for figures and tables is a joke, too. With LaTeX your references get updated when you add new figures or tables without having to think about it. The same holds for the references. The formatting of sections and titles is kept (the only way to change the format is that you really want to). In the Word-templates for papers of conferences there are always so many rules about the formatting. Most of the people never satisfies all those rules, even if they started with the template. I blame word for that, because there is no way to enforce a template (take care of the references, captions, etc.). The last year I just stopped sending word documents to the conferences I go, and instead created an equivalent latex template for them (one of them got even officially accepted). I prefer to invest a few days in making a good LaTeX template than loosing much more days fighting against the Word-nonsense. It is true that LaTeX requires some time to learn, but it definitely compensates for the time you can loose using word.
- codetrotter 7y ago
  > It is true that LaTeX requires some time to learn, but it definitely compensates for the time you can loose using word. Yes but with LaTeX (or anything else that requires signifcant time to learn) you have to make a noticeable investment of your time upfront. If you already use and know Word you may be aware of its shortcomings but it can still be difficult to justify spending the time required to learning something else. Especially because while you know that your current system (in this case Word) is annoying, you also know that it works. In the sense that you are able to produce whatever it is that you are using it for. Even though you might also recognize that the result could be better. With switching to anything new, you don't know - How much time it will take for you to learn it and become effective in using it. - If it will solve the problems that what you are currently using has. - That it won't have other problems instead. And I think to a lot of people the perceived risk outweighs the potential gain. Especially for people who are working a full time job, have a family etc. Furthermore, a Word document can be edited by "anyone". If you collaborate with someone else on something, switching to LaTeX means that either they have to learn it too, or they will have to tell you what changes to make and then you must do the editing. Also, not every document is worth typing out in LaTeX. I used LaTeX for a couple of years. It has some benefits but I rarely use it myself any longer. Most of my documents I write in Google Docs or in Markdown. Sometimes I use Markdown with a sprinkle of LaTeX and run it through pandoc to produce a pretty PDF with some formulas without having to use almost any LaTeX at all except for in a few select places in the document. For some documents I use Adobe InDesign. Even one of my best friends who used to be a hardcore proponent of using LaTeX for everything I don't think he's using it that much any longer. Not to the extent he used to back when we were in the university. In summary, the time cost is a hard sell and it's not given that the time spent learning it will actually be worth it.
azangru 7y ago
> Proponents embrace LaTeX because of the total control it offers for document layout Erm. Doesn’t a word processor or a specialized publishing software like Adobe InDesign offer more control over document layout? I thought LaTeX sort of takes over the control (which, some would argue, is a good thing, because you can focus on writing instead of formatting your text).
- fsloth 7y ago
  For all purposes I would claim LaTeX does take full control, only because the damn thing is so obscure that it takes a very specific mind to fathom how to use it. I've done desktop publishing, I've done my MSc thesis in LaTeX, I'm a software engineer by profession - but if I would want any control by myself to any aspect of the document I would probably choose some other layout system than LaTeX.
CJefferson 7y ago
While LaTeX makes a good language for writing maths, I always feel I want to add it is an awful system for accessibility. The PDFs / outputs created by other systems like Microsoft Word are much more accessible. For blind users, LaTeX Tables come out as an unreadable mess. The large-scale use of Latex to generate PDFs makes academia extremely unfriendly to anyone who needs accessible documents.
- nerdponx 7y ago
  Couldn't that be fixed though? Would be a shame to have to give up on the Tex language because pdftex is out of date.
  - goerz 7y ago
    I suppose new development would happen as part of luatex. It would be really nice if latex could compile to more accessible documents!
- ncmncm 7y ago
  We need a program to extract an accessible representation from PDFs produced by LaTeX.
  - dubya 7y ago
    On the Mac, the Equation Service or LaTeXit (?) included the source in the PDF so that it remained editable. Maybe the source would be easier to parse, especially if no macros were used.
  - nicodjimenez 7y ago
    Check out Mathpix snipping tool https://mathpix.com https://mathpix.com (disclaimer: I’m a founder)
    - mcchew 7y ago
      I work in disability services and I can add a (perhaps slightly less biased) take that MathPix really is the real deal!
_Nat_ 7y ago
LaTeX should be regarded as a legacy technology, not the future. It's useful because it's a standardized language everyone knows and can be applied across the web, e.g. on many StackExchange sites (at least the TeX subset via MathJax), but it's too limited to be held up as a standard to move toward. For a discussion of some of its limitations and things that can be improved: [The LATEX3 Project][1] (1999). Personally, though, my main criticism of LaTeX is that its logic is static and based in plaintext. The future is in interactive documents (e.g., in the direction of [Wolfram's][2]), not statically compiling plaintext to image-like documents. Of course, credit to where credit is due: LaTeX was a hugely powerful tool that's done a lot of good in the world. It also continues to be useful for many purposes, especially due to its widescale adoption from this bright history. It's a great page for the history books -- but, it's not the future. [1]: https://www.latex-project.org/help/documentation/ltx3info.pdf https://www.latex-project.org/help/documentation/ltx3info.pd... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computable_Document_Format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computable_Document_Format
- unixhero 7y ago
  Agreed. The future is more within Juøyter Notebooks being shared.
  - equdi 7y ago
    "the future is more complexity" is how we arrived to the modern web.
    - _Nat_ 7y ago
      Could you explain that a bit? For example, are you implying that the modern web is somehow too complex? Or/and are you implying that we should've stuck to some simpler alternative than the modern web? And if so, what might that alternative have been? I don't mean to put words in your mouth, just trying to figure out what you meant.
      - equdi 7y ago
shereadsthenews 7y ago
LaTeX integration is one of the neat features of Dropbox Paper. I don't know if people think of it as a "word processor" but you can stick a bit of LaTeX in any context by just using the $$ macro.
Theodores 7y ago
The Web is where I want to read stuff. I find the publishing industry simply curious nowadays.
gerbilly 7y ago
Maybe it's because I did way more plain TeX than LaTeX, but just what is it that everyone finds so difficult about LaTeX? Is LaTeX itself that much more difficult than plain TeX? If so then why not just use TeX, the TeXBook is really easy to follow and gives clear examples. The equations are formatted exactly the same way in both.¹ 1: Unless you choose to use some package like amsmath, but why ?)
- wongarsu 7y ago
  I think writing text and equations in LaTex is very simple. It's not WYSIWYG, but fairly straighforward. Even complex equations are fairly easy to formulate and look great. However as soon as you want to change how something is presented you might be in for a world of pain.
  - gerbilly 7y ago
    > However as soon as you want to change how something is presented you might be in for a world of pain. So yeah, don't use LaTeX then use TeX, where you can change things easily because it's not as complicated.
devit 7y ago
I find LaTeX's math syntax quite bad, e.g. the fact that you have to use \frac instead of just the / operator, \left( instead of just (, and so on. AsciiMath is much better and actually works as you would expect it to.
- thomasahle 7y ago
  \left can be a hassle, but the distinction between \frac and / is often quite useful. In inline math something like x/y can be a lot more readable than \frac xy. You might say it should just automatically choose, but often some terms are more important than others and I really want to control which get rendered more compact. I also don't like how parentheses in asciimath sometimes don't get rendered.
deehouie 7y ago
When I saw this headline, I feel really sorry for those millions of non-programmer users. Having used LaTeX for more 10 yrs, I have to say this is one of the worst software in existent. The whole thing is really just a programming language with so many bugs so many broken packages so many idiosyncractic "features" that no one knows why they are the way they are. Sadly, I still use it because there's no alternative.
- zzleeper 7y ago
  I'm really surprised not enough people are making this point. So bug prone, so many fragile packages, so many weird incantations that must be done if you ever want any flexibility... it absolutely sucks, but then I use it again and again.
  - garmaine 7y ago
    PDF document typesetting is the poster child of unsexy software to work on. Everybody wants a replacement but nobody wants to write one.
- bobbiechen 7y ago
  >Could you use a standard word processor to approximate LaTeX, while obtaining an arguably better experience? Introducing the WordTeX template [for Microsoft Word] . From the SIGBOVIK 2018 presentation, "WordTeX - a WYSIPCTWOTCG Typesetting Tool" : https://youtu.be/jlX_pThh7z8 https://youtu.be/jlX_pThh7z8
CrazyCatDog 7y ago
18 years ago I was submitting a proof I wrote in word as an undergrad for my Econ grad school application. My dad (engineering prof) saw it, and said: “here’s what I do when I get asked to referee a paper in word.” And he threw it away. He rewrote the proof in Latex and I’m still using that doc as the skeleton for all my work 18 years later. Like him, I cry myself to sleep at night for not being awesome enough to use TeX, but instead using the layman TeX, Latex.
- analog31 7y ago
  Pro tip: Write in Word but use the LaTeX font. You get the speed of Word and the virtue signaling of LaTeX. Win Win. This is just tongue in cheek, of course. I wrote my thesis in 1993, and in that time period, my anecdotal observation was that the students who used LaTeX generally took longer to finish. Today, I use MathJax inside of markdown, and don't even use word processing very much. Industry has gotten less formal. Most text is edited in an e-mail editor with screen shots pasted in. The main use of word processing is documents that nobody will ever read, such as functional procedures and HR proclamations.
  - sjy 7y ago
    What industry are you talking about? Email doesn't scale to the size of a detailed report; I've been criticised for sending 'wall of text' emails that were barely over 1,000 words. I'm sure you weren't entirely serious, but if 'nobody ever reads' documents longer than this, that is concerning.
    - analog31 7y ago
      I work in industry, and am amazed by the decline in use of things like detailed reports. Nobody reads any more. Someone might produce an in depth study of something, and present a summary as a PowerPoint, but that becomes the only documentary output of the work. If someone needs to know more detail, they go and ask the person. If the person get run over a bus, the knowledge is lost. Even before this trend, there was a lot of documentation that was never intended to be read. Huge piles of what I call "ornamental" documentation, e.g., in fulfillment of ISO-9000 or other regulatory obligations.
xvilka 7y ago
LaTeX (and many other TeX-based technologies) simply amazing. But it is not enough for better scientific publishing. There was quite an interesting discussion[1] about creating something in between Overleaf[2], ArXiv[3], Git, and Wikipedia, moreover with the ability to do a peer-to-peer review, discussion, and social networking. There are a few implementations, albeit not covering all features, like Authorea[4] and MIT's PubPub[5] (it is the open source[6]). See also GitXiv[7]. See also the Publishing Reform[8] project. Moreover, there is a quite interesting initiative from DARPA, to create the scientific social network of a kind - Polyplexus[9]. [1] http://blog.jessriedel.com/2015/04/16/beyond-papers-gitwikxiv/ http://blog.jessriedel.com/2015/04/16/beyond-papers-gitwikxi... [2] https://www.overleaf.com/ https://www.overleaf.com/ [3] https://arxiv.org/ https://arxiv.org/ [4] https://authorea.com/ https://authorea.com/ [5] https://www.pubpub.org/ https://www.pubpub.org/ [6] https://github.com/pubpub https://github.com/pubpub [7] https://medium.com/@samim/gitxiv-collaborative-open-computer-science-e5fea734cd45 https://medium.com/@samim/gitxiv-collaborative-open-computer... [8] https://gitlab.com/publishing-reform/discussion https://gitlab.com/publishing-reform/discussion [9] https://polyplexus.com/ https://polyplexus.com/
xvilka 7y ago
Typing with LaTeX within Vim can be as fast (or even faster) than in the Word processors. You can use the power of Vim plugins, concealments, and customized snippets. Most probably the same can be done inside Emacs as well. See the excellent article[1] on how to set up your Vim to follow the mathematics lectures in real time. [1] https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-1/ https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-1/
rijoja 7y ago
In Finland the nation wide test in math are now digitalized. Which is good bit neither memorizing latex commands or menu hunting feels as natural as "drawing" by hand. This will inevitably spread, what to do?
madhadron 7y ago
I see a few things at work here. First, over a period of decades, LaTeX's syntax became the lingua franca of nontrivial mathematics in plain text. I regularly emailed quite sophisticated equations to people as part of discussions because you could assume that anyone who could understand the equation understand its LaTeX representation. Given that cultural fact, providing LaTeX as an input syntax for equations is totally normal. Second, most LaTeX users are not trained in any other typesetting system. This quote from the article is typical: > “For me, LaTeX is the tool when I want to get the typesetting just so,” says Casey Greene, a bioinformatician at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. I spent a lot of hours typesetting in the family business using Quark Xpress back in the 1990's. I turned in most of my graduate level math homework in LaTeX generated PDFs, because rewriting three page long proofs by hand because you realized you had an error on page one is a pain. Of my two books, I typeset one in LaTeX and one in Adobe InDesign. If I want the typesetting just so, I would use InDesign over LaTeX every time. It's simply a better tool for the job. The book I did in LaTeX I did because I happened to know that it would fit extraordinarily smoothly in that. It was a long flow of text with a few inline figures and equations and a really disgusting number of references. If I had a comparable reference tracking system in InDesign, I would have absolutely used it instead. Finally, a lot of writing I'm doing these days is meant to be read on a screen, with all the vagaries of reflowing and unknown screen size that implies. In that situation your best bet is to wrap yourself in a straitjacket. Markdown and pandoc with blocks of raw HTML as needed is where I've landed, not because I love it, but because it's a well supported straitjacket with an easy escape hatch.
stenl 7y ago
Why do they claim that Word ditched its equation editor? I believe I’m on the latest Word and it certainly still has the editor. Word’s equation editor is hands-down the best WYSIWYG equation editor I ever used. The results are beautiful and if you want a tilde you just type a f*ing tilde instead of spending an hour figuring out which combination of packages and fonts will cause LaTeX to grace you with this standard unicode character. I guess maybe MS discontinued the old plugin equation editor (which was terrible, agreed), but the built-in one is still there.
stevekemp 7y ago
If you run/operate/host an online service which allows rendering user-submitted LaTeX you must care about security. There are a bunch of sites which take arbitrary input and convert it to PDF - they're often easily exploited, to allow arbitrary files to be read from the server, and commands executed: \begin{document} \setlength{\parindent}{0cm}{\Huge \Hello} \bigskip \section*{Execute Commands} \immediate\write18{uptime> scriptoutput.tex} \immediate\write18{id >> scriptoutput.tex} \immediate\write18{ps -ef >> scriptoutput.tex} \begin{alltt} \input{scriptoutput.tex} \end{alltt} \bigskip \section*{Read Files} \begin{alltt} \input{/etc/passwd} \end{alltt}
jillesvangurp 7y ago
I think Latex is awesome for what it is: a system designed to enable engineers and (beta) scientists to produce printable documents without having to think a lot about making it look good; which is something they tend to be not good at. From having worked with skilled designers, I know I suck at this at least. As soon as you broaden the scope of writing to include e.g. ebooks, websites, and search engines as first class citizens, latex stops being an appropriate solution. I rarely produce text for the purpose of printing these days but I used to do this a lot when still working as an academic. These days, I read a lot of books in ebook form and I read a lot of articles, blogs, and news in HTML form. Likewise my output seems to be online documentation, social media comments, the occasional blog article, etc. Pdfs (and their printed output) are a second class citizen in that kind of world. They are harder to machine read, which results in issues with SEO, accessibility, or even simply re-flowing to deal with different screens or output formats. Pdfs are actually only appropriate for sending to a printer. On screen PDF reading is tedious and the UX for that tends to be not great. The whole page metaphor is simply not appropriate because it means setting the size of the output window to some fixed dimensions and hard-coding assumptions about the medium on which it is going to be consumed. It only makes sense if your medium is paper. My printer is rarely used these days. I've had it for 12 years and I'm only on the second toner cartridge. The awesome thing with laser printers is that they don't dry out. Most of the output is exclusively limited to bureaucratic stuff. Thankfully that's very limited these days. I used to print stuff like boarding passes but these days you just wave the QR code around with your phone. Engineers have tried to fix latex to produce things other than .ps and later .pdf documents. The results were never that popular. You can do e.g. presentations in latex and people have probably produced websites from latex as well. But lets just say that it's not a great fit for that kind of thing and also not that commonly used that way. Additionally, the results are typically kind of bland and boring because the people most eager to produce stuff this way tend to have very little interest in e.g. design quality or making things visually interesting. It sort of self selects to people who have neither the skills nor the patience for that kind of thing. I.e. engineers. The same is actually true for the paper output. Yes you can do nice typography with it and some people do, but most people just stick with the bland defaults, which results in a kind of yawn inducing and bland look that instantly jumps out from a page. What I've learned over the years is that engineers are obsessed with their tools and that mostly the tools don't actually matter. This article makes the simple observation that for mathematical formulas, Latex provides a pretty awesome DSL and that when it comes to doing math in systems other than latex, that DSL is increasingly what people fall back to rather than whichever formula editor comes with word, open office, etc. or alternatives like mathml, matlab, or hand scribbled things in bitmap form, etc. I think it makes sense. I'd probably use it all the time if writing math formulas was a thing in my life. This happens to be not the case for me, so I have had zero exposure to Latex in most of this century. I do a lot of my writing in relatively dumb editors or even an HTML Text area. I seem to use markdown a lot as it is good enough and doesn't lock me in to taking any decisions for the output. Funny story: when I was in university we had secretaries that knew how to use latex. Reason: several of the elderly math professors had no clue how to use a computer and were used to handing their papers in handwritten form to the secretaries for further processing. It's easy to forget that computers and word-processors are relatively new tools and that people have been publishing scientific work for centuries. Even Latex is not that old. Ultimately it's about the content, not the tools.
maliker 7y ago
When I was studying math, I enjoyed the challenge of writing LaTeX. It gave me a break from struggling with (e.g.) a real analysis proof to instead think about typography, struggle with syntax, and tweak my document layout.
red_admiral 7y ago
I've used LaTeX for years, written part of a textbook and a whole dissertation in it, and I don't like it. There are two good parts to the TeX ecosystem in my opinion. - Typesetting math formulae. Even Word agrees that it's superior to point-and click for this use case (unlike our Blackboard online learning environment ... *sigh*) - Plain-text based. You can use your favourite editor, you can put it in version control, diff it, etc. But for writing text-based documents such as lecture notes in subjects that are not mathematics, I really don't feel comfortable with the usability. For example, - Getting figures, page breaks etc. where I want them. - Underlining things is suprisingly hard (and not intuituve). - A marco preprocessor that has many of the disadvantages of that in C. - Confusing error messages, stuff randomly doesn't build. - Package X doesn't work with package Y (unless you include package W with option Z first) type problems. I would switch in a heartbeat if there were something with the advantages of TeX, but not the disadvantages. It seems to me like neither of LaTeX3, luaTeX or XeTeX has got enough traction to get everyone to switch. For things less than 50 pages or so, I've actually moved back to word, which if you buy the proper version rather than the 365 one is surprisingly good. I've found that in practice, for things where I care a lot how they look (which is pretty much everything), unless it's very mathematics-heavy I get the job done in just over half the time in Word usually.
jxramos 7y ago
Interesting there was no mention of MathType, just the indirection of citing Word's Equation Editor which was originally licensed from the maker's of MathType I believe. You can still order their licensed software which functions like a plug in and is more rich than the default equation editor that was a feature trimmed release of the broader MathType software I believe. http://www.dessci.com/en/products/mathtype/ http://www.dessci.com/en/products/mathtype/

286 points by goerz 7y ago

Notice that this article is explicitly about formatting equations in LaTeX. Other Word processors, of course, don't actually do any LaTeX, they simply emulate the equation stuff from it.

cameronbrown 7y ago

I think going one-step further and making LaTeX the entire backing structure of a document would be a great idea. Kind of like HTML WYSIWYG designer tools. Would be a boon for interoperability which is probably why it'll never happen.

_ZeD_ 7y ago
soo.. like lyx? https://www.lyx.org/ https://www.lyx.org/
CJefferson 7y ago
It would be an awful idea. Latex can't produce HTML, it can't produce EPUBs or any other reflowable document type. It can't produce any document which is accessible to blind people (other than giving them the raw LaTeX file). Note: You will find various libraries that claim to produce HTML output. I can tell you from experience none of them work, given a random LaTeX paper you download from, say, Arxiv.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  Pandoc does all that, from LaTeX source (among others). https://pandoc.org https://pandoc.org
  - corollari 7y ago
    Pandoc's documentation itself says that the conversion is lossy.
  - piadodjanho 7y ago
    Pandoc creates PDF using LaTeX. You still constrained to LaTeX features, and therefore the lack of trivial accessibility.
  - pseingatl 7y ago
    Pandoc conversion is another trip down the rabbit hole (latex to markdown: Error at "input" (line 265, column 1): unexpected '\n'
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      The assertion was that LaTeX cannot generate specific formats. Using Pandoc (NB: Pandoc Is Not Markdown, though it's often used with it), s well as earlier tools, that is in fact quite possible. Using templates, with quite a level of flexibility.

throwawaytemp2 7y ago

So is LaTeX worth mastering? It depends on the researcher: how often do you use equations, how much is fine-grained control do you need over a document, and how much time do you have to devote to learning a new language? But I use LaTeX mainly because the resulting documents simply look better, and I imagine that’s a major selling point for many.

n1000 7y ago
other selling points include great look, reproducible, gitable, makes for great boilerplates, etc.
nabla9 7y ago
For equations LaTeX is the best and most comprehensive syntax. For normal text you can use some other markup that converts to LatTex when needed. Then you can add LaTeX packages or your own styles using LaTeX. LaTeX can be treated as intermediate representation. There are many tools for, graph, table, image editing and drawing that can emit LaTeX/TeX.
ncmncm 7y ago
Markdown filtered through pandoc to PDF looks as great as native LaTeX, but is overwhelmingly nicer to work with in source form. I should note that the reason it looks great is that pandoc translates to LaTeX on the way there; and you can embed LaTeX in the markdown where needed. EDIT: I see that many others below have already said it. But it was worth repeating.
- copperx 7y ago
  The problem with Markdown is its embarrassingly poor support for highly structured documents. Something as simple as writing a multi-level list interspersed with complete paragraphs is a nightmare to do in Markdown. Tables and images aren't a big improvement over LaTeX and require special syntax to scale and position. I'd rather use Word for simple documents so I can enjoy drag and drop and graphical image positioning and scaling and easy tables and leave LaTeX for complex documents. Markdown is the worst of both worlds. However, I could see myself using the much superior Asciidoc (vs Markdown) instead of LaTeX, but unfortunately, the worse-is-better philosophy is still alive and has made Markdown the defacto simple markup language, and tool support for Asciidoc is as poor as LaTeX, so I just go directly to LaTeX instead.

lol768 7y ago

LaTeX is one of the most important tools that I properly started using regularly whilst at unviersity. It's the typesetting tool in CS, and you can get some really beautiful results from it. There's great tooling for IDEs like IntelliJ (https://github.com/Ruben-Sten/TeXiFy-IDEA https://github.com/Ruben-Sten/TeXiFy-IDEA), it makes managing references (using BibTeX) much less of a chore, there are tons of high-quality packages that do pretty much anything you could think of and there's an excellent community on e.g. TeX.SE to provide support. It's free software, the results are better than Word and it's much less painful to use than an unpredictable WYSIWYG editor. I've used it in industry to write security audit reports and more recently as part of my dissertation. My only regret is not discovering LaTeX earlier and using it more.

na85 7y ago

My biggest issue with (la)tex is how hard it is to find up to date best practices. There are fifty ways to accomplish your desired outcome but it seems like every blog post or stack exchange answer conflicts with everything else and it turns out half of what you're doing is deprecated. I'd pay good money for a "modern idiomatic latex"-type of tutorial.

AnimalMuppet 7y ago
Just get Lyx. It's a graphical front end for LaTeX, so you never actually write LaTeX. You don't have to worry about what's idiomatic at all, because you aren't writing it. You're just writing a document.
- sackintor 7y ago
  The best bit about LyX is using it to format LaTeX tables nicely. When writing my thesis I used LyX but found myself creating more and more ERT (what LyX calls raw LaTeX code). I eventually just started using a text editor. However, I still do tables in LyX and copy them over -- such a pain to insert a column otherwise...
- na85 7y ago
  That's kind of an indictment of latex in and of itself; the best way to use latex is to not use it? At that point why not just use .docx?
  - souterrain 7y ago
    Repeatability. Complex formatting, such as figure captions and figure placement, in Word documents suddenly break for no apparent reason. Troubleshooting a “broken” Word doc is akin to fixing a typewriter while one is blindfolded.
    - sjy 7y ago
      Wouldn't it be nice if Word actually provided some kind of UI for working with the underlying XML, like the old WordPerfect 'show codes' feature?

jrimbault 7y ago

For my own uses the combinations of markdown and pandoc feels very satisfying. Pandoc allows me to pick and choose what parts of LaTeX I want to use and I can otherwise write in plain text/markdown.

lytefm 7y ago

Allington often uses Markdown, which he describes as more “lightweight” than LaTeX, because the formatting commands are more straightforward. [...] That said, some journals and conferences don’t accept documents in Markdown format. Having used LaTeX a lot since I started studying, I nowadays also prefer Markdown because LaTeX often feels like an overkill. There are many great Markdown Editors out there for quick note taking. And when things get more academic, I like to use VSCode with PandocCiter (https://github.com/notZaki/PandocCiter https://github.com/notZaki/PandocCiter) to manage the sources. Also, it's easy to convert the Markdown docs to LaTeX or Word if needed.

TylerE 7y ago
LaTeX feels ultimately like the wrong level of control. I'd either rather be simpler (Markdown) or have more control (CoNTeXt) CoNText, for those unfamiliar, is a bit more modern...built to really take advantage of PDF features like full color and hyperlinks that LaTeX isn't as good at. Also much better control over figure placement, and is capable of things like sidebars that are somewhere between very fiddly to impossible in LaTeX.
- lytefm 7y ago
  Thanks for pointing out ConTeXt, I might try it out for my next presentation. The examples in the wiki seem to provide all that I need in a much more concise way that the LaTeX-Beamer package.
  - TylerE 7y ago
    It's very powerful. Syntax isn't as nice as LaTeX (although it is much more consistent, since context is mostly developed by a single team instead of being a mass of extension), but you really have much more control (LaTeX floats are the devil incarnate).
- rocqua 7y ago
  ConText looks pretty good, but the formulas seem rather verbose with \placeformula[eqn:famous-emc] \startformula E = mc^2 \stopformula Compared to the quick an dirty latex: /[ E = mc^2 /] Granted, with references in latex you'd need something pretty similar \begin{equation}\ref{eqn:famoues-emc} E = mc^2 \end{equation} I must say that the \begin{env} and \end{env} feel better to me that \startenv and \stopenv. Simply because it differentiates the environment name better.

thangalin 7y ago

For anyone looking to use Markdown while reaping the benefits of a typesetting engine, you may find the following series on how to typeset Markdown using ConTeXt of interest: https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/05/22/typesetting-markdown-part-1/ https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/05/22/typesetting-markdow...

tapia 7y ago

Reducing LaTeX to the look of the equations it produces clearly misses the point. I use LaTeX because it just formats everything correctly. Inserting figures or tables in word can be one of the most frustrating tasks I can do. Every little change can potentially break the format. Have you ever tried to add a table in word in a double column document? It is madness. The caption system for figures and tables is a joke, too. With LaTeX your references get updated when you add new figures or tables without having to think about it. The same holds for the references. The formatting of sections and titles is kept (the only way to change the format is that you really want to). In the Word-templates for papers of conferences there are always so many rules about the formatting. Most of the people never satisfies all those rules, even if they started with the template. I blame word for that, because there is no way to enforce a template (take care of the references, captions, etc.). The last year I just stopped sending word documents to the conferences I go, and instead created an equivalent latex template for them (one of them got even officially accepted). I prefer to invest a few days in making a good LaTeX template than loosing much more days fighting against the Word-nonsense. It is true that LaTeX requires some time to learn, but it definitely compensates for the time you can loose using word.

codetrotter 7y ago
> It is true that LaTeX requires some time to learn, but it definitely compensates for the time you can loose using word. Yes but with LaTeX (or anything else that requires signifcant time to learn) you have to make a noticeable investment of your time upfront. If you already use and know Word you may be aware of its shortcomings but it can still be difficult to justify spending the time required to learning something else. Especially because while you know that your current system (in this case Word) is annoying, you also know that it works. In the sense that you are able to produce whatever it is that you are using it for. Even though you might also recognize that the result could be better. With switching to anything new, you don't know - How much time it will take for you to learn it and become effective in using it. - If it will solve the problems that what you are currently using has. - That it won't have other problems instead. And I think to a lot of people the perceived risk outweighs the potential gain. Especially for people who are working a full time job, have a family etc. Furthermore, a Word document can be edited by "anyone". If you collaborate with someone else on something, switching to LaTeX means that either they have to learn it too, or they will have to tell you what changes to make and then you must do the editing. Also, not every document is worth typing out in LaTeX. I used LaTeX for a couple of years. It has some benefits but I rarely use it myself any longer. Most of my documents I write in Google Docs or in Markdown. Sometimes I use Markdown with a sprinkle of LaTeX and run it through pandoc to produce a pretty PDF with some formulas without having to use almost any LaTeX at all except for in a few select places in the document. For some documents I use Adobe InDesign. Even one of my best friends who used to be a hardcore proponent of using LaTeX for everything I don't think he's using it that much any longer. Not to the extent he used to back when we were in the university. In summary, the time cost is a hard sell and it's not given that the time spent learning it will actually be worth it.

azangru 7y ago

> Proponents embrace LaTeX because of the total control it offers for document layout Erm. Doesn’t a word processor or a specialized publishing software like Adobe InDesign offer more control over document layout? I thought LaTeX sort of takes over the control (which, some would argue, is a good thing, because you can focus on writing instead of formatting your text).

fsloth 7y ago
For all purposes I would claim LaTeX does take full control, only because the damn thing is so obscure that it takes a very specific mind to fathom how to use it. I've done desktop publishing, I've done my MSc thesis in LaTeX, I'm a software engineer by profession - but if I would want any control by myself to any aspect of the document I would probably choose some other layout system than LaTeX.

CJefferson 7y ago

While LaTeX makes a good language for writing maths, I always feel I want to add it is an awful system for accessibility. The PDFs / outputs created by other systems like Microsoft Word are much more accessible. For blind users, LaTeX Tables come out as an unreadable mess. The large-scale use of Latex to generate PDFs makes academia extremely unfriendly to anyone who needs accessible documents.

nerdponx 7y ago
Couldn't that be fixed though? Would be a shame to have to give up on the Tex language because pdftex is out of date.
- goerz 7y ago
  I suppose new development would happen as part of luatex. It would be really nice if latex could compile to more accessible documents!
ncmncm 7y ago
We need a program to extract an accessible representation from PDFs produced by LaTeX.
- dubya 7y ago
  On the Mac, the Equation Service or LaTeXit (?) included the source in the PDF so that it remained editable. Maybe the source would be easier to parse, especially if no macros were used.
- nicodjimenez 7y ago
  Check out Mathpix snipping tool https://mathpix.com https://mathpix.com (disclaimer: I’m a founder)
  - mcchew 7y ago
    I work in disability services and I can add a (perhaps slightly less biased) take that MathPix really is the real deal!

_Nat_ 7y ago

LaTeX should be regarded as a legacy technology, not the future. It's useful because it's a standardized language everyone knows and can be applied across the web, e.g. on many StackExchange sites (at least the TeX subset via MathJax), but it's too limited to be held up as a standard to move toward. For a discussion of some of its limitations and things that can be improved: [The LATEX3 Project][1] (1999). Personally, though, my main criticism of LaTeX is that its logic is static and based in plaintext. The future is in interactive documents (e.g., in the direction of [Wolfram's][2]), not statically compiling plaintext to image-like documents. Of course, credit to where credit is due: LaTeX was a hugely powerful tool that's done a lot of good in the world. It also continues to be useful for many purposes, especially due to its widescale adoption from this bright history. It's a great page for the history books -- but, it's not the future. [1]: https://www.latex-project.org/help/documentation/ltx3info.pdf https://www.latex-project.org/help/documentation/ltx3info.pd... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computable_Document_Format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computable_Document_Format

unixhero 7y ago
Agreed. The future is more within Juøyter Notebooks being shared.
- equdi 7y ago
  "the future is more complexity" is how we arrived to the modern web.
  - _Nat_ 7y ago
    Could you explain that a bit? For example, are you implying that the modern web is somehow too complex? Or/and are you implying that we should've stuck to some simpler alternative than the modern web? And if so, what might that alternative have been? I don't mean to put words in your mouth, just trying to figure out what you meant.
    - equdi 7y ago

shereadsthenews 7y ago

LaTeX integration is one of the neat features of Dropbox Paper. I don't know if people think of it as a "word processor" but you can stick a bit of LaTeX in any context by just using the $$ macro.

Theodores 7y ago

The Web is where I want to read stuff. I find the publishing industry simply curious nowadays.

gerbilly 7y ago

Maybe it's because I did way more plain TeX than LaTeX, but just what is it that everyone finds so difficult about LaTeX? Is LaTeX itself that much more difficult than plain TeX? If so then why not just use TeX, the TeXBook is really easy to follow and gives clear examples. The equations are formatted exactly the same way in both.¹ 1: Unless you choose to use some package like amsmath, but why ?)

wongarsu 7y ago
I think writing text and equations in LaTex is very simple. It's not WYSIWYG, but fairly straighforward. Even complex equations are fairly easy to formulate and look great. However as soon as you want to change how something is presented you might be in for a world of pain.
- gerbilly 7y ago
  > However as soon as you want to change how something is presented you might be in for a world of pain. So yeah, don't use LaTeX then use TeX, where you can change things easily because it's not as complicated.

devit 7y ago

I find LaTeX's math syntax quite bad, e.g. the fact that you have to use \frac instead of just the / operator, \left( instead of just (, and so on. AsciiMath is much better and actually works as you would expect it to.

thomasahle 7y ago
\left can be a hassle, but the distinction between \frac and / is often quite useful. In inline math something like x/y can be a lot more readable than \frac xy. You might say it should just automatically choose, but often some terms are more important than others and I really want to control which get rendered more compact. I also don't like how parentheses in asciimath sometimes don't get rendered.

deehouie 7y ago

When I saw this headline, I feel really sorry for those millions of non-programmer users. Having used LaTeX for more 10 yrs, I have to say this is one of the worst software in existent. The whole thing is really just a programming language with so many bugs so many broken packages so many idiosyncractic "features" that no one knows why they are the way they are. Sadly, I still use it because there's no alternative.

zzleeper 7y ago
I'm really surprised not enough people are making this point. So bug prone, so many fragile packages, so many weird incantations that must be done if you ever want any flexibility... it absolutely sucks, but then I use it again and again.
- garmaine 7y ago
  PDF document typesetting is the poster child of unsexy software to work on. Everybody wants a replacement but nobody wants to write one.
bobbiechen 7y ago
>Could you use a standard word processor to approximate LaTeX, while obtaining an arguably better experience? Introducing the WordTeX template [for Microsoft Word] . From the SIGBOVIK 2018 presentation, "WordTeX - a WYSIPCTWOTCG Typesetting Tool" : https://youtu.be/jlX_pThh7z8 https://youtu.be/jlX_pThh7z8

CrazyCatDog 7y ago

18 years ago I was submitting a proof I wrote in word as an undergrad for my Econ grad school application. My dad (engineering prof) saw it, and said: “here’s what I do when I get asked to referee a paper in word.” And he threw it away. He rewrote the proof in Latex and I’m still using that doc as the skeleton for all my work 18 years later. Like him, I cry myself to sleep at night for not being awesome enough to use TeX, but instead using the layman TeX, Latex.

analog31 7y ago
Pro tip: Write in Word but use the LaTeX font. You get the speed of Word and the virtue signaling of LaTeX. Win Win. This is just tongue in cheek, of course. I wrote my thesis in 1993, and in that time period, my anecdotal observation was that the students who used LaTeX generally took longer to finish. Today, I use MathJax inside of markdown, and don't even use word processing very much. Industry has gotten less formal. Most text is edited in an e-mail editor with screen shots pasted in. The main use of word processing is documents that nobody will ever read, such as functional procedures and HR proclamations.
- sjy 7y ago
  What industry are you talking about? Email doesn't scale to the size of a detailed report; I've been criticised for sending 'wall of text' emails that were barely over 1,000 words. I'm sure you weren't entirely serious, but if 'nobody ever reads' documents longer than this, that is concerning.
  - analog31 7y ago
    I work in industry, and am amazed by the decline in use of things like detailed reports. Nobody reads any more. Someone might produce an in depth study of something, and present a summary as a PowerPoint, but that becomes the only documentary output of the work. If someone needs to know more detail, they go and ask the person. If the person get run over a bus, the knowledge is lost. Even before this trend, there was a lot of documentation that was never intended to be read. Huge piles of what I call "ornamental" documentation, e.g., in fulfillment of ISO-9000 or other regulatory obligations.

xvilka 7y ago

LaTeX (and many other TeX-based technologies) simply amazing. But it is not enough for better scientific publishing. There was quite an interesting discussion[1] about creating something in between Overleaf[2], ArXiv[3], Git, and Wikipedia, moreover with the ability to do a peer-to-peer review, discussion, and social networking. There are a few implementations, albeit not covering all features, like Authorea[4] and MIT's PubPub[5] (it is the open source[6]). See also GitXiv[7]. See also the Publishing Reform[8] project. Moreover, there is a quite interesting initiative from DARPA, to create the scientific social network of a kind - Polyplexus[9]. [1] http://blog.jessriedel.com/2015/04/16/beyond-papers-gitwikxiv/ http://blog.jessriedel.com/2015/04/16/beyond-papers-gitwikxi... [2] https://www.overleaf.com/ https://www.overleaf.com/ [3] https://arxiv.org/ https://arxiv.org/ [4] https://authorea.com/ https://authorea.com/ [5] https://www.pubpub.org/ https://www.pubpub.org/ [6] https://github.com/pubpub https://github.com/pubpub [7] https://medium.com/@samim/gitxiv-collaborative-open-computer-science-e5fea734cd45 https://medium.com/@samim/gitxiv-collaborative-open-computer... [8] https://gitlab.com/publishing-reform/discussion https://gitlab.com/publishing-reform/discussion [9] https://polyplexus.com/ https://polyplexus.com/

xvilka 7y ago

Typing with LaTeX within Vim can be as fast (or even faster) than in the Word processors. You can use the power of Vim plugins, concealments, and customized snippets. Most probably the same can be done inside Emacs as well. See the excellent article[1] on how to set up your Vim to follow the mathematics lectures in real time. [1] https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-1/ https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-1/

rijoja 7y ago

In Finland the nation wide test in math are now digitalized. Which is good bit neither memorizing latex commands or menu hunting feels as natural as "drawing" by hand. This will inevitably spread, what to do?

madhadron 7y ago

I see a few things at work here. First, over a period of decades, LaTeX's syntax became the lingua franca of nontrivial mathematics in plain text. I regularly emailed quite sophisticated equations to people as part of discussions because you could assume that anyone who could understand the equation understand its LaTeX representation. Given that cultural fact, providing LaTeX as an input syntax for equations is totally normal. Second, most LaTeX users are not trained in any other typesetting system. This quote from the article is typical: > “For me, LaTeX is the tool when I want to get the typesetting just so,” says Casey Greene, a bioinformatician at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. I spent a lot of hours typesetting in the family business using Quark Xpress back in the 1990's. I turned in most of my graduate level math homework in LaTeX generated PDFs, because rewriting three page long proofs by hand because you realized you had an error on page one is a pain. Of my two books, I typeset one in LaTeX and one in Adobe InDesign. If I want the typesetting just so, I would use InDesign over LaTeX every time. It's simply a better tool for the job. The book I did in LaTeX I did because I happened to know that it would fit extraordinarily smoothly in that. It was a long flow of text with a few inline figures and equations and a really disgusting number of references. If I had a comparable reference tracking system in InDesign, I would have absolutely used it instead. Finally, a lot of writing I'm doing these days is meant to be read on a screen, with all the vagaries of reflowing and unknown screen size that implies. In that situation your best bet is to wrap yourself in a straitjacket. Markdown and pandoc with blocks of raw HTML as needed is where I've landed, not because I love it, but because it's a well supported straitjacket with an easy escape hatch.

stenl 7y ago

Why do they claim that Word ditched its equation editor? I believe I’m on the latest Word and it certainly still has the editor. Word’s equation editor is hands-down the best WYSIWYG equation editor I ever used. The results are beautiful and if you want a tilde you just type a f*ing tilde instead of spending an hour figuring out which combination of packages and fonts will cause LaTeX to grace you with this standard unicode character. I guess maybe MS discontinued the old plugin equation editor (which was terrible, agreed), but the built-in one is still there.

stevekemp 7y ago

If you run/operate/host an online service which allows rendering user-submitted LaTeX you must care about security. There are a bunch of sites which take arbitrary input and convert it to PDF - they're often easily exploited, to allow arbitrary files to be read from the server, and commands executed: \begin{document} \setlength{\parindent}{0cm}{\Huge \Hello} \bigskip \section*{Execute Commands} \immediate\write18{uptime> scriptoutput.tex} \immediate\write18{id >> scriptoutput.tex} \immediate\write18{ps -ef >> scriptoutput.tex} \begin{alltt} \input{scriptoutput.tex} \end{alltt} \bigskip \section*{Read Files} \begin{alltt} \input{/etc/passwd} \end{alltt}

jillesvangurp 7y ago

I think Latex is awesome for what it is: a system designed to enable engineers and (beta) scientists to produce printable documents without having to think a lot about making it look good; which is something they tend to be not good at. From having worked with skilled designers, I know I suck at this at least. As soon as you broaden the scope of writing to include e.g. ebooks, websites, and search engines as first class citizens, latex stops being an appropriate solution. I rarely produce text for the purpose of printing these days but I used to do this a lot when still working as an academic. These days, I read a lot of books in ebook form and I read a lot of articles, blogs, and news in HTML form. Likewise my output seems to be online documentation, social media comments, the occasional blog article, etc. Pdfs (and their printed output) are a second class citizen in that kind of world. They are harder to machine read, which results in issues with SEO, accessibility, or even simply re-flowing to deal with different screens or output formats. Pdfs are actually only appropriate for sending to a printer. On screen PDF reading is tedious and the UX for that tends to be not great. The whole page metaphor is simply not appropriate because it means setting the size of the output window to some fixed dimensions and hard-coding assumptions about the medium on which it is going to be consumed. It only makes sense if your medium is paper. My printer is rarely used these days. I've had it for 12 years and I'm only on the second toner cartridge. The awesome thing with laser printers is that they don't dry out. Most of the output is exclusively limited to bureaucratic stuff. Thankfully that's very limited these days. I used to print stuff like boarding passes but these days you just wave the QR code around with your phone. Engineers have tried to fix latex to produce things other than .ps and later .pdf documents. The results were never that popular. You can do e.g. presentations in latex and people have probably produced websites from latex as well. But lets just say that it's not a great fit for that kind of thing and also not that commonly used that way. Additionally, the results are typically kind of bland and boring because the people most eager to produce stuff this way tend to have very little interest in e.g. design quality or making things visually interesting. It sort of self selects to people who have neither the skills nor the patience for that kind of thing. I.e. engineers. The same is actually true for the paper output. Yes you can do nice typography with it and some people do, but most people just stick with the bland defaults, which results in a kind of yawn inducing and bland look that instantly jumps out from a page. What I've learned over the years is that engineers are obsessed with their tools and that mostly the tools don't actually matter. This article makes the simple observation that for mathematical formulas, Latex provides a pretty awesome DSL and that when it comes to doing math in systems other than latex, that DSL is increasingly what people fall back to rather than whichever formula editor comes with word, open office, etc. or alternatives like mathml, matlab, or hand scribbled things in bitmap form, etc. I think it makes sense. I'd probably use it all the time if writing math formulas was a thing in my life. This happens to be not the case for me, so I have had zero exposure to Latex in most of this century. I do a lot of my writing in relatively dumb editors or even an HTML Text area. I seem to use markdown a lot as it is good enough and doesn't lock me in to taking any decisions for the output. Funny story: when I was in university we had secretaries that knew how to use latex. Reason: several of the elderly math professors had no clue how to use a computer and were used to handing their papers in handwritten form to the secretaries for further processing. It's easy to forget that computers and word-processors are relatively new tools and that people have been publishing scientific work for centuries. Even Latex is not that old. Ultimately it's about the content, not the tools.

maliker 7y ago

When I was studying math, I enjoyed the challenge of writing LaTeX. It gave me a break from struggling with (e.g.) a real analysis proof to instead think about typography, struggle with syntax, and tweak my document layout.

red_admiral 7y ago

I've used LaTeX for years, written part of a textbook and a whole dissertation in it, and I don't like it. There are two good parts to the TeX ecosystem in my opinion. - Typesetting math formulae. Even Word agrees that it's superior to point-and click for this use case (unlike our Blackboard online learning environment ... *sigh*) - Plain-text based. You can use your favourite editor, you can put it in version control, diff it, etc. But for writing text-based documents such as lecture notes in subjects that are not mathematics, I really don't feel comfortable with the usability. For example, - Getting figures, page breaks etc. where I want them. - Underlining things is suprisingly hard (and not intuituve). - A marco preprocessor that has many of the disadvantages of that in C. - Confusing error messages, stuff randomly doesn't build. - Package X doesn't work with package Y (unless you include package W with option Z first) type problems. I would switch in a heartbeat if there were something with the advantages of TeX, but not the disadvantages. It seems to me like neither of LaTeX3, luaTeX or XeTeX has got enough traction to get everyone to switch. For things less than 50 pages or so, I've actually moved back to word, which if you buy the proper version rather than the 365 one is surprisingly good. I've found that in practice, for things where I care a lot how they look (which is pretty much everything), unless it's very mathematics-heavy I get the job done in just over half the time in Word usually.

jxramos 7y ago

Interesting there was no mention of MathType, just the indirection of citing Word's Equation Editor which was originally licensed from the maker's of MathType I believe. You can still order their licensed software which functions like a plug in and is more rich than the default equation editor that was a feature trimmed release of the broader MathType software I believe. http://www.dessci.com/en/products/mathtype/ http://www.dessci.com/en/products/mathtype/