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Ask HN: Do people lose interest in TeX/LaTeX after leaving academia?

9 points by amichail 1y ago

More generally, maybe they lose interest in high quality typography as well?

DamonHD 1y ago
I used LaTeX extensively at uni for my BSc/MSc then took a 30Y+ break to earn a living, now I am back using LaTeX for journal papers for my PhD. I didn't stop caring about good typography and typesetting, eg I edited a supercomputing trade rag for a while. And I don't like flaky WYSIWYG editors, so have preferred (say) HTML over Word for most of my text output. But I just didn't have cause to use LaTeX or maintain that toolchain for decades away from academia, so I didn't.
- amichail 1y ago
  What do you think of WYSIWYG editors that are not flaky, namely TeXmacs and its fork Mogan?
  - DamonHD 1y ago
    I use LibreOffice for when I have to interoperate with people using Word. It is OK. I use vi and plain text (or marked up, eg HTML or Markdown) where possible. I don't wan't to get into opaque binary formats with possibly limited life.
pmontra 1y ago
In my case yes, because back in the 90s I had to write Word files at work, when I had to write something. More recently because I write inside any tool my customers are using and in md files for myself. Obviously none of my customers nor myself are writing academic papers. If we did maybe we would be using LaTeX, but the chances to have to write papers in normal companies are slim.
kelipso 1y ago
I have only used it for academic papers, which I still do every so often, so I would the answer is mostly yes. I tried using beamer for presentations but it was too much effort for not enough gain. I use tikz for diagrams and graphs in academic papers, really useful for updating graphs by just ruining a single script. But outside of that, again, it was too much effort for not enough gain, when I can just print out jupyter lab output.. Pretty much, I only care about typography when it comes to academic papers, so that’s the issue. If I care about it in other contexts, I probably would use latex.
- paologiacometti 1y ago
  Same as me I only once created an invoicing system where the pdf was generate from an as400 system in latex and then converted to pdf and sent, but eventually modern erp does the same directly so the project was closed
bjourne 1y ago
If high-quality typography is so important why are web pages so prevalent?
jeffreygoesto 1y ago
Still writing all my letters with LaTeX (using DINBrief).
rickteng 1y ago
I think so, at least for myself. I think this is a habit formed with conventions, industry has its own conventions different from academia and more driven by productivity and ROIs.
nbernard 1y ago
Left academia, still using LaTeX for about every document (not counting org-mode documents for my own use). At this point, using "common" text processors (Word, Writer, ...) still (?) feels like torture.
- DeepSeaTortoise 1y ago
  No offense, but an org-mode user's opinion about Latex is about equivalent to a Masochist's opinion on letting your child play with Lego in the living room.
  - nbernard 1y ago
    None taken! :)
hulitu 1y ago
> Ask HN: Do people lose interest in TeX/LaTeX after leaving academia? I wrote my diploma in LaTeX. I would use it today, after 30 years, if i had to write a long text. Word was, and still is, horrible. (i use it everyday at work)
d--b 1y ago
They don’t lose interest, they lose the need to use it. And then they forget how it works. what’s that about high quality typography? People generally don’t use TeX for its awesome typography. They ude TeX cause someone told them to
ValtteriL 1y ago
I tried to use it in my business. I wrote contracts, testing reports, and even slide decks with it. Eventually, I decided the friction to be too much. My partner (lawyer) didn't want to spend any time learning it as Word is the de facto in her field. So I had to either maintain also Word, or be on my own. Testing report template consumed a lot of time to construct. I didn't have enough iterations generating reports to reap benefits from codification and git version control. Adequate Word templates on the other hand were easy to outsource for $100. Slide decks were beautiful to me as an engineer but they didn't seem to convince the buyers (usually non-technical). I'm not super keen on presenting and the added stress from unfamiliar presentation tooling didn't help.

9 points by amichail 1y ago

More generally, maybe they lose interest in high quality typography as well?

I used LaTeX extensively at uni for my BSc/MSc then took a 30Y+ break to earn a living, now I am back using LaTeX for journal papers for my PhD. I didn't stop caring about good typography and typesetting, eg I edited a supercomputing trade rag for a while. And I don't like flaky WYSIWYG editors, so have preferred (say) HTML over Word for most of my text output. But I just didn't have cause to use LaTeX or maintain that toolchain for decades away from academia, so I didn't.

amichail 1y ago
What do you think of WYSIWYG editors that are not flaky, namely TeXmacs and its fork Mogan?
- DamonHD 1y ago
  I use LibreOffice for when I have to interoperate with people using Word. It is OK. I use vi and plain text (or marked up, eg HTML or Markdown) where possible. I don't wan't to get into opaque binary formats with possibly limited life.

pmontra 1y ago

In my case yes, because back in the 90s I had to write Word files at work, when I had to write something. More recently because I write inside any tool my customers are using and in md files for myself. Obviously none of my customers nor myself are writing academic papers. If we did maybe we would be using LaTeX, but the chances to have to write papers in normal companies are slim.

kelipso 1y ago

I have only used it for academic papers, which I still do every so often, so I would the answer is mostly yes. I tried using beamer for presentations but it was too much effort for not enough gain. I use tikz for diagrams and graphs in academic papers, really useful for updating graphs by just ruining a single script. But outside of that, again, it was too much effort for not enough gain, when I can just print out jupyter lab output.. Pretty much, I only care about typography when it comes to academic papers, so that’s the issue. If I care about it in other contexts, I probably would use latex.

paologiacometti 1y ago
Same as me I only once created an invoicing system where the pdf was generate from an as400 system in latex and then converted to pdf and sent, but eventually modern erp does the same directly so the project was closed

bjourne 1y ago

If high-quality typography is so important why are web pages so prevalent?

jeffreygoesto 1y ago

Still writing all my letters with LaTeX (using DINBrief).

rickteng 1y ago

I think so, at least for myself. I think this is a habit formed with conventions, industry has its own conventions different from academia and more driven by productivity and ROIs.

nbernard 1y ago

Left academia, still using LaTeX for about every document (not counting org-mode documents for my own use). At this point, using "common" text processors (Word, Writer, ...) still (?) feels like torture.

DeepSeaTortoise 1y ago
No offense, but an org-mode user's opinion about Latex is about equivalent to a Masochist's opinion on letting your child play with Lego in the living room.
- nbernard 1y ago
  None taken! :)

hulitu 1y ago

> Ask HN: Do people lose interest in TeX/LaTeX after leaving academia? I wrote my diploma in LaTeX. I would use it today, after 30 years, if i had to write a long text. Word was, and still is, horrible. (i use it everyday at work)

d--b 1y ago

They don’t lose interest, they lose the need to use it. And then they forget how it works. what’s that about high quality typography? People generally don’t use TeX for its awesome typography. They ude TeX cause someone told them to

ValtteriL 1y ago

I tried to use it in my business. I wrote contracts, testing reports, and even slide decks with it. Eventually, I decided the friction to be too much. My partner (lawyer) didn't want to spend any time learning it as Word is the de facto in her field. So I had to either maintain also Word, or be on my own. Testing report template consumed a lot of time to construct. I didn't have enough iterations generating reports to reap benefits from codification and git version control. Adequate Word templates on the other hand were easy to outsource for $100. Slide decks were beautiful to me as an engineer but they didn't seem to convince the buyers (usually non-technical). I'm not super keen on presenting and the added stress from unfamiliar presentation tooling didn't help.