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Just finished and submitted a 295 page Ph.D. dissertation written in LaTex. The only real downside, as I see it, is that «normal» people are used to giving feed

• ketzu 6y ago
  Congratulations on submitting your thesis! My personal gripes with latex (or downsides): * Positional only Arguments with flexible in between options (makes it really hard for me to remember things) * Long. Long. Long compile times. * Intermediate results can be stale and create errors that are not errors of the document at all. * Errors that require multiple compile passes to go away * Unlocateable errors (Dozens of box errors that are reported for the first or last document line) * Bad error messages and error location in general (also due to the command structure) * Multistage tools that need to run in certain order, be rerun and producing various errors if you do it wrong (especially bibliography related) * Basic programming tasks like loops or coutners feel unnecessarily complex. My problems with the programming and syntax side of latex might be attributed to me never getting the feeling of being familiar with the syntax (and not using the programmatic aspects much). Even though I write some documents in latex for 10 years now. I never got familiar with alternatives either (like MS Word), though, because I assume it would be as much work as learning latex in the beginning.