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LaTeX's support is already problematic. Most people just don't use it in sufficient intensity to notice. We produce thousands of (mostly) custom written techn

LaTeX's support is already problematic. Most people just don't use it in sufficient intensity to notice. We produce thousands of (mostly) custom written technical reports a year using LaTeX and there are all sorts of subtle issues cropping up. It's a distribution (edit: or at least texlive is) of many, many packages from many developers, and maintenance can be spotty and vary. Unlike some people would like to believe, stuff breaks all the time. Check this out for example: https://github.com/tabu-issues-for-future-maintainer/tabu https://github.com/tabu-issues-for-future-maintainer/tabu This used to be the most recommended package for tables. This bug is still not fixed after at least 9 years AFAIK: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/203629/longtable-and-floats-wrong-table-breaks-on-pages-with-floats-part-2 https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/203629/longtable-and... It affects us regularly. I'm not even going to comment on the fact that all of the following packages provide some sort of tabular feature: array, table, tabu, tabular, tabularx, longtable, supertabular, longtabu, xltabular, lxtable, booktabs, tabularray, ctable. Good luck figuring out which one does what you need and has the least side effects with everything else. Also, while I'm not familiar with the internals of the LaTeX project, I keep reading the same names, most of which appear to be getting closer and closer to retirement. I wonder if suitable successors will pick up the task of maintaining LaTeX in the future.

jltsiren 2y ago
LaTeX has always been like that. Random packages have never worked together properly, and submitting the manuscript in the format the publisher requires has always been a struggle. It's often easier to reinvent the wheel than to use a third-party package for some functionality. The way I learned it, the best practice of using LaTeX has always been based on whitelisting. When you create documents for yourself, you establish a list of packages that work well together and stick to it. And if you expect documents from others, you provide a document class and a list of supported packages. But despite all these shortcomings, LaTeX is widely supported. Both in the technical sense and in the social sense. Journals and similar entities not only accept but often except LaTeX documents.

jltsiren 2y ago

LaTeX has always been like that. Random packages have never worked together properly, and submitting the manuscript in the format the publisher requires has always been a struggle. It's often easier to reinvent the wheel than to use a third-party package for some functionality. The way I learned it, the best practice of using LaTeX has always been based on whitelisting. When you create documents for yourself, you establish a list of packages that work well together and stick to it. And if you expect documents from others, you provide a document class and a list of supported packages. But despite all these shortcomings, LaTeX is widely supported. Both in the technical sense and in the social sense. Journals and similar entities not only accept but often except LaTeX documents.