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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
by 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.