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Is TeX that widely used for traditional publishing? The areas that TeX is good at (e.g. academic STEM) don't seem to have reduced in output, and there hasn't be

Is TeX that widely used for traditional publishing? The areas that TeX is good at (e.g. academic STEM) don't seem to have reduced in output, and there hasn't been a reasonable replacement in the 45(!) years since it came out, so absent a significant change in academia, I'd expect it to continue being around for the foreseeable future.

tialaramex 3y ago
The LaTeX system makes sense under the assumption that you want to produce typeset documents, as gradually it is apparent that you don't, in fact, produce typeset documents, the extra bother seems dubious. Knuth writes books. That's what TeX is for. If you write journal papers, eh, TeX is more likely to ensure you see in print what you intended, but increasingly Maths is done online in forums, nobody wants to wait six months to read a camera ready spell checked document - and meanwhile Unicode means squiggles are easier to write on a computer correctly, and programming means you can express what you meant in (terrible) Python instead of squiggles. The Math professors at the University I work for do still write a lot of LaTeX (whereas in CS it's not so common as it was) but I wouldn't be surprised if an ordinary Maths undergrad can't write decent LaTeX today, so that's a smaller and ageing constituency.
- aragilar 3y ago
  I'm curious what input method you've found for unicode maths, most of it seems to be input via various TeX-like DSLs (e.g. mathjax), or people just take photos (or screenshots of the TeX and paste into powerpoint...)? Also, (La)TeX gives you a good-enough environment (especially with something like overleaf for sharing) for maths+crossrefs+citations that I'm not sure you can go simpler (I've tried with markdown and rst, but both end up being more of a pain, and the more maths you have, the harder it is to go without macros). Modern word remains a issue as I found out today, and most other word processors have even less support for throwing something vaguely academic together (i.e. with LaTeX I can just start dumping in content and refs and maths just work).

tialaramex 3y ago

The LaTeX system makes sense under the assumption that you want to produce typeset documents, as gradually it is apparent that you don't, in fact, produce typeset documents, the extra bother seems dubious. Knuth writes books. That's what TeX is for. If you write journal papers, eh, TeX is more likely to ensure you see in print what you intended, but increasingly Maths is done online in forums, nobody wants to wait six months to read a camera ready spell checked document - and meanwhile Unicode means squiggles are easier to write on a computer correctly, and programming means you can express what you meant in (terrible) Python instead of squiggles. The Math professors at the University I work for do still write a lot of LaTeX (whereas in CS it's not so common as it was) but I wouldn't be surprised if an ordinary Maths undergrad can't write decent LaTeX today, so that's a smaller and ageing constituency.

aragilar 3y ago
I'm curious what input method you've found for unicode maths, most of it seems to be input via various TeX-like DSLs (e.g. mathjax), or people just take photos (or screenshots of the TeX and paste into powerpoint...)? Also, (La)TeX gives you a good-enough environment (especially with something like overleaf for sharing) for maths+crossrefs+citations that I'm not sure you can go simpler (I've tried with markdown and rst, but both end up being more of a pain, and the more maths you have, the harder it is to go without macros). Modern word remains a issue as I found out today, and most other word processors have even less support for throwing something vaguely academic together (i.e. with LaTeX I can just start dumping in content and refs and maths just work).