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Please, no. I've written thousands of pages in LaTeX, and it's far more usable than most tools IF you can resist trying to overcomplicate things. For example,

Please, no. I've written thousands of pages in LaTeX, and it's far more usable than most tools IF you can resist trying to overcomplicate things. For example, want a diagram? If you do it in xfig/inkscape/omnigraffle, you'll have little pain. If you decide to get clever and try to programmatically do it via tikz or some other package, you've opened up a world of pain. The level of pain experienced by LaTeX users in my experience is more often poor choices made by the users who create unnecessary complexity. Avoid that, and it's a pretty reasonable model to work in.

supergarfield 6y ago
Sure, but it's probably possible to design something better too, that would let users do more complex things without dying. Maybe you don't need it for your usage, but this seems a bit like a Blub problem[1]. Keep the same core design of compiled source code files, but there are many things that don't make any sense. As just one example having to use the `\makeatletter` / `\makeatother` hack to change the visibility of macros seems completely insane to me when we have had languages with fine-grained visibility control for decades. This is one of the many things that make using many packages together needlessly hard. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html
s17n 6y ago
Sure! But the same is true of Word, or CSS for that matter. Any layout system is going to run into this issue: since the space of possible layouts is so big, it's almost inevitable that users will decide they want something that isn't well supported by the system. If the system is sufficiently powerful, they will be able to achieve their desired layout, at the cost of wrecking usability / maintainability. MS word is also perfectly usable, as long as you don't try to do anything weird (as the example in the article illustrates!).
magicalhippo 6y ago
I love LaTeX for writing math-heavy documents, but as soon as it involves figures, images or pseudo-code it is quite horrible compared to Word. For me, the ideal solution would be something WordPerfect but with ability to type LaTeX equations. I want to be able to manipulate the "code" of the document but with a nice UI with real-time preview that helps me placing and formatting figures, text boxes for pseudo-code etc.
alphachloride 6y ago
That's a big if. One has to learn how to not over-complicate. Exactly the reason why latex has usability issues in many cases.

supergarfield 6y ago

Sure, but it's probably possible to design something better too, that would let users do more complex things without dying. Maybe you don't need it for your usage, but this seems a bit like a Blub problem[1]. Keep the same core design of compiled source code files, but there are many things that don't make any sense. As just one example having to use the `\makeatletter` / `\makeatother` hack to change the visibility of macros seems completely insane to me when we have had languages with fine-grained visibility control for decades. This is one of the many things that make using many packages together needlessly hard. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

s17n 6y ago

Sure! But the same is true of Word, or CSS for that matter. Any layout system is going to run into this issue: since the space of possible layouts is so big, it's almost inevitable that users will decide they want something that isn't well supported by the system. If the system is sufficiently powerful, they will be able to achieve their desired layout, at the cost of wrecking usability / maintainability. MS word is also perfectly usable, as long as you don't try to do anything weird (as the example in the article illustrates!).

magicalhippo 6y ago

I love LaTeX for writing math-heavy documents, but as soon as it involves figures, images or pseudo-code it is quite horrible compared to Word. For me, the ideal solution would be something WordPerfect but with ability to type LaTeX equations. I want to be able to manipulate the "code" of the document but with a nice UI with real-time preview that helps me placing and formatting figures, text boxes for pseudo-code etc.

alphachloride 6y ago

That's a big if. One has to learn how to not over-complicate. Exactly the reason why latex has usability issues in many cases.