3 ms·

>>One man wrote TeX, albeit one exceptionally talented and driven man, and to this day a whole industry uses it in preference to anything else because it does w

>>One man wrote TeX, albeit one exceptionally talented and driven man, and to this day a whole industry uses it in preference to anything else because it does what it differently and much better than the mainstream product. I'm assuming that industry is academia? LaTeX was almost all I saw in university but that definitely changed once I entered industry. I don't know any professional technical writers that use it. I'm not dogging it and think its great (my resume is in LaTeX) I don't know if its comparable of the other programs (Office and CS) that you mentioned that aim for a much broader appeal. It has a market but it is a small niche one.

Silhouette 13y ago
I'm not dogging it and think its great (my resume is in LaTeX) I don't know if its comparable of the other programs (Office and CS) that you mentioned that aim for a much broader appeal. It has a market but it is a small niche one. That's true, and in a way it's part of my point. Trying to take on one-size-fits-all giants is probably not a good long-term strategy for FOSS, because the barrier to entry is prohibitively high and you drain a lot of resources (primarily enthusiastic volunteers) away from other projects they could potentially have supported instead. But pick a niche, or get a larger team together to build something more general but with a different perspective than the likes of Office and CS, and as the likes of TeX (or Sublime Text, as a more contemporary example) show, not many people can get remarkable things built.
weland 13y ago
It's quite widely used for technical publishing in general, not necessarily in academia. Typeset equations in many high-profile publishing packages are still somewhere between abysmal and horrible, so there's still some incentive to its use. Outside that? Probably not, but there's a lot of polarization in modern typography. Much of it is either of exceptional quality that goes beyond "just" advanced typesetting, or of such a poor taste that Word suffices.

Silhouette 13y ago

I'm not dogging it and think its great (my resume is in LaTeX) I don't know if its comparable of the other programs (Office and CS) that you mentioned that aim for a much broader appeal. It has a market but it is a small niche one. That's true, and in a way it's part of my point. Trying to take on one-size-fits-all giants is probably not a good long-term strategy for FOSS, because the barrier to entry is prohibitively high and you drain a lot of resources (primarily enthusiastic volunteers) away from other projects they could potentially have supported instead. But pick a niche, or get a larger team together to build something more general but with a different perspective than the likes of Office and CS, and as the likes of TeX (or Sublime Text, as a more contemporary example) show, not many people can get remarkable things built.

weland 13y ago

It's quite widely used for technical publishing in general, not necessarily in academia. Typeset equations in many high-profile publishing packages are still somewhere between abysmal and horrible, so there's still some incentive to its use. Outside that? Probably not, but there's a lot of polarization in modern typography. Much of it is either of exceptional quality that goes beyond "just" advanced typesetting, or of such a poor taste that Word suffices.