Some disciplines wound up having lots of handy LaTeX macros written to handle things that are common to the kinds of papers that get written, as well as there f

Some disciplines wound up having lots of handy LaTeX macros written to handle things that are common to the kinds of papers that get written, as well as there formerly being the requirement that papers be submitted as LaTeX documents. More the first reason, I think, tended to encourage LaTeX usage for a while. Once you got used to it, LaTeX really made it faster to get what you want without having to fiddle too much with the formatting. I know I spent a lot of time with qtree, gb4e, and pstricks.