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I studied typography and I used LaTeX occasionally but also for the 150+ page master thesis in archeology, of my brother. Which required a special type of sour

I studied typography and I used LaTeX occasionally but also for the 150+ page master thesis in archeology, of my brother. Which required a special type of source reference/footnote formatting that I took from some legal/law-related LaTeX package. It also required sections typeset in Sanskrit and old Greek. Different package. There were issues when using them together. That was just the most headache-inducing bit I remember as this was way more than a decade ago. I'm also a developer, most of my life was C/C++, now Rust. But also Tcl, Python, Lua, some projects in specialized functional languages etc. Even with this BG, using LaTeX for the aformentioned thesis, a project where no good readymade template/package that covered all requirements was available, was painful. I worked as a typographer and designer for a decade from my late teens to my late 20's. That was mostly PageMaker and then InDesign (I circumvented QuarkXPress where I could). Using these desktop publishing packages was also often painful. Just in ways orthogonal to the painfulness of LaTeX. I think a typsetting system needs to hit a sweet spot where you can do almost anything you can do in a desktop publishing software and almost anything you can do in a system like LaTeX. I think typst (see [1], currently on HN front page) is on a good trajectory to be just that. Eventually. I don't think (La)TeX was or ever will be able to hit that sweet spot. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41014941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41014941

Gualdrapo 2y ago
I (a mere graphic designer) had mixed feelings about LaTeX for pretty much the same reasons, and realized LaTeX' modularity is its greatest power and its Achilles heel. But I could find that "sweet spot" in ConTeXt. Switched to it 12 years ago and never looked back. I can't feel the same way about Typst. Maybe I'm wrong but it seems to me it's going to have the same kind of Achilles heel than LaTeX.
- DemocracyFTW2 2y ago
  > LaTeX' modularity is its greatest power and its Achilles heel I'd say not quite, it's more the way that the entire system is built on shaky grounds, namely an insane operational model, an insane syntax, the lack of separation of concerns and the lack of namespaces. TeX could have been built on top of a predictable syntax, a transparent operational model, with a separation of styling and content and giving modules segregated namespaces, but none of that happened. When Leslie Lamport wrote LaTeX he tried to inch closer to these and other desiderata; when I built a system on top of XeLaTeX that started with a Markdown-ish/HTML-ish input syntax and compiled a XeLaTeX source text I certainly hoped I could achieve some kind of operational sanity and shield me from many of the dirty details, but in the end I gave up. Edit Ah and to address your point I believe it's not modularity per se it's just that TeX is at its very heart an environment that is actively hostile to being clean and modular, it acts like it wants very much to be a wibbly-wobbly ball of stuff.

Gualdrapo 2y ago

I (a mere graphic designer) had mixed feelings about LaTeX for pretty much the same reasons, and realized LaTeX' modularity is its greatest power and its Achilles heel. But I could find that "sweet spot" in ConTeXt. Switched to it 12 years ago and never looked back. I can't feel the same way about Typst. Maybe I'm wrong but it seems to me it's going to have the same kind of Achilles heel than LaTeX.

DemocracyFTW2 2y ago
> LaTeX' modularity is its greatest power and its Achilles heel I'd say not quite, it's more the way that the entire system is built on shaky grounds, namely an insane operational model, an insane syntax, the lack of separation of concerns and the lack of namespaces. TeX could have been built on top of a predictable syntax, a transparent operational model, with a separation of styling and content and giving modules segregated namespaces, but none of that happened. When Leslie Lamport wrote LaTeX he tried to inch closer to these and other desiderata; when I built a system on top of XeLaTeX that started with a Markdown-ish/HTML-ish input syntax and compiled a XeLaTeX source text I certainly hoped I could achieve some kind of operational sanity and shield me from many of the dirty details, but in the end I gave up. Edit Ah and to address your point I believe it's not modularity per se it's just that TeX is at its very heart an environment that is actively hostile to being clean and modular, it acts like it wants very much to be a wibbly-wobbly ball of stuff.