
Word processors are ditching equation editors in favour of LaTeX - goerz
https://go.nature.com/2wRfbCD
======
CJefferson
While LaTeX makes a good language for writing maths, I always feel I want to
add it is an _awful_ system for accessibility. The PDFs / outputs created by
other systems like Microsoft Word are much more accessible.

For blind users, LaTeX Tables come out as an unreadable mess. The large-scale
use of Latex to generate PDFs makes academia extremely unfriendly to anyone
who needs accessible documents.

~~~
pmoriarty
Editing LaTeX documents is actually far more accessible, since they're all
plain text. Every formatting instruction in a LaTex document is just text,
while Word and PDF documents have non-text markup like bold, underline,
italic, etc, which is WYSIWYG (with the emphasis being on "see" \-- you must
be able to see to be aware of the markup).

~~~
LifeLiverTransp
Last time i edited some latex document, i ended up in dependancy hell with
diffrent packages excluding one another or distorting the results of elements
used by other packages. Has that become better?

~~~
comicjk
I have run into that problem, but only when merging Latex documents with
different packages. If you find something that's really difficult and requires
a lot of packages, ask why other users haven't made it easy already - maybe
it's not a good design.

------
_Nat_
LaTeX should be regarded as a legacy technology, _not_ the future.

It's useful because it's a standardized language everyone knows and can be
applied across the web, e.g. on many StackExchange sites (at least the TeX
subset via MathJax), but it's too limited to be held up as a standard to move
toward.

For a discussion of some of its limitations and things that can be improved:
[The LATEX3 Project][1] (1999).

Personally, though, my main criticism of LaTeX is that its logic is static and
based in plaintext. The future is in interactive documents (e.g., in the
direction of [Wolfram's][2]), not statically compiling plaintext to image-like
documents.

Of course, credit to where credit is due: LaTeX was a hugely powerful tool
that's done a lot of good in the world. It also continues to be useful for
many purposes, especially due to its widescale adoption from this bright
history. It's a great page for the history books -- but, it's not the future.

[1]: [https://www.latex-
project.org/help/documentation/ltx3info.pd...](https://www.latex-
project.org/help/documentation/ltx3info.pdf)

[2]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computable_Document_Format](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computable_Document_Format)

~~~
unixhero
Agreed. The future is more within Juøyter Notebooks being shared.

~~~
nxpnsv
You mean like cdrom replaced books? Anyhow, i usually put my math in as latex
in my notebooks.

~~~
unixhero
Don't know what you mean buddy. But have a look at Jupyter Notebooks

------
tapia
Reducing LaTeX to the look of the equations it produces clearly misses the
point. I use LaTeX because it just formats everything correctly. Inserting
figures or tables in word can be one of the most frustrating tasks I can do.
Every little change can potentially break the format. Have you ever tried to
add a table in word in a double column document? It is madness. The caption
system for figures and tables is a joke, too.

With LaTeX your references get updated when you add new figures or tables
without having to think about it. The same holds for the references. The
formatting of sections and titles is kept (the only way to change the format
is that you really want to).

In the Word-templates for papers of conferences there are always so many rules
about the formatting. Most of the people never satisfies all those rules, even
if they started with the template. I blame word for that, because there is no
way to enforce a template (take care of the references, captions, etc.). The
last year I just stopped sending word documents to the conferences I go, and
instead created an equivalent latex template for them (one of them got even
officially accepted). I prefer to invest a few days in making a good LaTeX
template than loosing much more days fighting against the Word-nonsense.

It is true that LaTeX requires some time to learn, but it definitely
compensates for the time you can loose using word.

~~~
codetrotter
> It is true that LaTeX requires some time to learn, but it definitely
> compensates for the time you can loose using word.

Yes but with LaTeX (or anything else that requires signifcant time to learn)
you have to make a noticeable investment of your time upfront. If you already
use and know Word you may be aware of its shortcomings but it can still be
difficult to justify spending the time required to learning something else.

Especially because while you know that your current system (in this case Word)
is annoying, you also know that it works. In the sense that you are able to
produce whatever it is that you are using it for. Even though you might also
recognize that the result could be better.

With switching to anything new, you don't know

\- How much time it will take for you to learn it and become effective in
using it.

\- If it will solve the problems that what you are currently using has.

\- That it won't have other problems instead.

And I think to a lot of people the perceived risk outweighs the potential
gain. Especially for people who are working a full time job, have a family
etc.

Furthermore, a Word document can be edited by "anyone". If you collaborate
with someone else on something, switching to LaTeX means that either they have
to learn it too, or they will have to tell you what changes to make and then
you must do the editing.

Also, not every document is worth typing out in LaTeX.

I used LaTeX for a couple of years. It has some benefits but I rarely use it
myself any longer. Most of my documents I write in Google Docs or in Markdown.
Sometimes I use Markdown with a sprinkle of LaTeX and run it through pandoc to
produce a pretty PDF with some formulas without having to use almost any LaTeX
at all except for in a few select places in the document. For some documents I
use Adobe InDesign.

Even one of my best friends who used to be a hardcore proponent of using LaTeX
for everything I don't think he's using it that much any longer. Not to the
extent he used to back when we were in the university.

In summary, the time cost is a hard sell and it's not given that the time
spent learning it will actually be worth it.

~~~
zzless
I have the exact opposite experience with LaTeX. Looking at a few example
documents and trying them out will get nearly anyone started on writing LaTeX
documents. For very sophisticated effects (tables, complicated graphics that
interacts with the text in a nontrivial way, etc) the time investment is much
more substantial but those same effects are just as difficult (if not
impossible) to achieve with Word or other WYSIWYG editors. Automatic
referencing, bibliography maintenance are quite unique to LaTeX and are easy
to use. Tables may be hard but some specialized tools (like Lyx) might help.

Word documents can be edited by people who have access to an appropriate
version of Word (I do not, admittedly by choice) but the documents themselves
are binary (ok, xml) mess, whereas LaTeX ones are greppable, searcheable, etc.
They also 'age' much better. I can still LaTeX most documents from 20 years
ago (sometimes with minor changes).

As a disclaimer, I am one of those people who uses (La)TeX for everything. I
know TeX intimately to the point that I messed with the source code several
times and wrote tens of thousands of TeX macros (this is not an exaggeration).
I may be biased but I still feel that learning LaTeX is well worth the modest
effort it takes to start writing LaTeX documents. And the typesetting TeX is
capable of is still unsurpassed.

~~~
godelski
As a fellow frequent tex user, I'm curious at the macros you've written. I've
found that I've written very few. I believe it is literally one for multi line
commenting, breaking up slides in beamer (like 2x2, 3x2, whatever), and dumb
things like section titles for homeworks. Do you have anything that you find
particularly useful?

~~~
zzless
I have written a lot of style files (in plain TeX, I am actually a quite
passive LaTeX user) for things like handouts and tests I use in my teaching,
including my side job as a flight instructor. Some specialized typesetting
tasks, like multicolumn dictionary typesetting (was another side project) took
a lot of macro writing, as well. I have also written a number of parsers in
TeX for pretty-printing code (I use another great Knuth's invention, literate
programming, quite a bit). I am addicted to TeX, I can see it now :)

------
throwawaytemp2
_So is LaTeX worth mastering? It depends on the researcher: how often do you
use equations, how much is fine-grained control do you need over a document,
and how much time do you have to devote to learning a new language?_

But I use LaTeX mainly because the resulting documents simply look better, and
I imagine that’s a major selling point for many.

~~~
bscphil
> But I use LaTeX mainly because the resulting documents simply look better,
> and I imagine that’s a major selling point for many.

I've encountered a real rabbit hole here, and I'm not sure what to do about
it. The naive view is that LaTeX does typesetting the best way. If you want
better typesetting, use LaTeX, and if you're using LaTeX, you're done.

This turns out not to be true, which is upsetting to those of us ingrained in
the LaTeX ecosystem and used to thinking of it as the best way. The first
thing you're likely to learn is that you need the microtype package. Without
this package, kerning is not as good as it could be. (Which raises the
question - if LaTeX is the final form of a typesetting language, why not do it
right by default?)

But the problems don't end there. Modern OTF / TTF fonts have a lot of
typesetting information that isn't fully retained if you convert the fonts to
use with LaTeX. So if you want modern font support, you can't use LaTeX at
all, you switch to XeTeX!

At this point you realize that the microtype package you previously learned
was crucial isn't compatible with XeTeX, so you can't use it.

So it's a Catch-22. LaTeX is for people who are obsessed with perfect
typesetting. But perfect typesetting can't be achieved (currently, to the best
of my knowledge) in any TeX family language.

~~~
amluto
LuaTeX seems to be the best for overall typesetting quality. You can get
proper rendering of modern fonts.

IMO the underlying issue is that TeX can’t really be parsed by anything other
than Tex because it’s too full of macros that change the language. I think a
better language would generate a well-defined AST, and different tools could
compete to render it well.

~~~
bscphil
What makes LuaTeX better than XeTeX, as far as typography is concerned?

~~~
anaoum
Much better microtype support

------
lol768
LaTeX is one of the most important tools that I properly started using
regularly whilst at unviersity.

It's _the_ typesetting tool in CS, and you can get some really beautiful
results from it. There's great tooling for IDEs like IntelliJ
([https://github.com/Ruben-Sten/TeXiFy-IDEA](https://github.com/Ruben-
Sten/TeXiFy-IDEA)), it makes managing references (using BibTeX) much less of a
chore, there are tons of high-quality packages that do pretty much anything
you could think of and there's an excellent community on e.g. TeX.SE to
provide support. It's free software, the results are better than Word and it's
much less painful to use than an unpredictable WYSIWYG editor.

I've used it in industry to write security audit reports and more recently as
part of my dissertation. My only regret is not discovering LaTeX earlier and
using it more.

------
deehouie
When I saw this headline, I feel really sorry for those millions of non-
programmer users. Having used LaTeX for more 10 yrs, I have to say this is one
of the _worst_ software in existent. The whole thing is really just a
programming language with so many bugs so many broken packages so many
idiosyncractic "features" that no one knows why they are the way they are.

Sadly, I still use it because there's no alternative.

~~~
zzleeper
I'm really surprised not enough people are making this point.

So bug prone, so many fragile packages, so many weird incantations that must
be done if you ever want any flexibility... it absolutely sucks, but then I
use it again and again.

~~~
garmaine
PDF document typesetting is the poster child of unsexy software to work on.
Everybody wants a replacement but nobody wants to write one.

------
lytefm
_Allington often uses Markdown, which he describes as more “lightweight” than
LaTeX, because the formatting commands are more straightforward. [...] That
said, some journals and conferences don’t accept documents in Markdown
format._

Having used LaTeX a lot since I started studying, I nowadays also prefer
Markdown because LaTeX often feels like an overkill. There are many great
Markdown Editors out there for quick note taking. And when things get more
academic, I like to use VSCode with PandocCiter
([https://github.com/notZaki/PandocCiter](https://github.com/notZaki/PandocCiter))
to manage the sources. Also, it's easy to convert the Markdown docs to LaTeX
or Word if needed.

~~~
TylerE
LaTeX feels ultimately like the wrong level of control. I'd either rather be
simpler (Markdown) or have more control (CoNTeXt)

CoNText, for those unfamiliar, is a bit more modern...built to really take
advantage of PDF features like full color and hyperlinks that LaTeX isn't as
good at. Also much better control over figure placement, and is capable of
things like sidebars that are somewhere between very fiddly to impossible in
LaTeX.

~~~
rocqua
ConText looks pretty good, but the formulas seem rather verbose with

    
    
        \placeformula[eqn:famous-emc]
        \startformula
             E = mc^2
        \stopformula
    

Compared to the quick an dirty latex:

    
    
        /[
            E = mc^2
        /]
    

Granted, with references in latex you'd need something pretty similar

    
    
        \begin{equation}\ref{eqn:famoues-emc}
             E = mc^2
        \end{equation}
    

I must say that the \begin{env} and \end{env} feel better to me that \startenv
and \stopenv. Simply because it differentiates the environment name better.

~~~
TylerE
Math isn't really it's strong point - but imagine typesetting something like a
textbook.

------
CrazyCatDog
18 years ago I was submitting a proof I wrote in word as an undergrad for my
Econ grad school application. My dad (engineering prof) saw it, and said:
“here’s what I do when I get asked to referee a paper in word.” And he threw
it away. He rewrote the proof in Latex and I’m still using that doc as the
skeleton for all my work 18 years later.

Like him, I cry myself to sleep at night for not being awesome enough to use
TeX, but instead using the layman TeX, Latex.

~~~
analog31
Pro tip: Write in Word but use the LaTeX font. You get the speed of Word and
the virtue signaling of LaTeX. Win Win.

This is just tongue in cheek, of course.

I wrote my thesis in 1993, and in that time period, my anecdotal observation
was that the students who used LaTeX generally took longer to finish.

Today, I use MathJax inside of markdown, and don't even use word processing
very much. Industry has gotten less formal. Most text is edited in an e-mail
editor with screen shots pasted in. The main use of word processing is
documents that nobody will ever read, such as functional procedures and HR
proclamations.

~~~
sjy
What industry are you talking about? Email doesn't scale to the size of a
detailed report; I've been criticised for sending 'wall of text' emails that
were barely over 1,000 words. I'm sure you weren't entirely serious, but if
'nobody ever reads' documents longer than this, that is concerning.

~~~
analog31
I work in industry, and am amazed by the decline in use of things like
detailed reports. Nobody reads any more. Someone might produce an in depth
study of something, and present a summary as a PowerPoint, but that becomes
the only documentary output of the work. If someone needs to know more detail,
they go and ask the person. If the person get run over a bus, the knowledge is
lost.

Even before this trend, there was a lot of documentation that was never
intended to be read. Huge piles of what I call "ornamental" documentation,
e.g., in fulfillment of ISO-9000 or other regulatory obligations.

------
na85
My biggest issue with (la)tex is how hard it is to find up to date best
practices. There are fifty ways to accomplish your desired outcome but it
seems like every blog post or stack exchange answer conflicts with everything
else and it turns out half of what you're doing is deprecated.

I'd pay good money for a "modern idiomatic latex"-type of tutorial.

~~~
impendia
As a frequent LaTeX editor (professional mathematician) -- what are you
attempting to accomplish? And what do you mean by a "best practice"?

My usual operandi is: poke around or Google for a solution, until I figure out
one of the fifty ways that achieves my desired outcome. I then declare my
problem solved. If my solution is deprecated (by whom?), then whoever
deprecated it may tsk-tsk to their heart's content.

Most mathematicians I know are not all that fussy with how they write their
LaTeX documents, the same way programmers can be extremely fussy with their
code. If there are "best practices" out there, then they aren't widely known
or followed.

That said, here's something that may interest you. On the arXiv (arxiv.org),
at least in math and probably in other disciplines as well, the LaTeX code is
available for nearly any paper you want. Pick your favorite paper, and then
click "Download other formats" on the right.

If nothing else, you can see what professional researchers are using in
practice.

~~~
na85
>As a frequent LaTeX editor (professional mathematician) -- what are you
attempting to accomplish? And what do you mean by a "best practice"?

Well in the simplest case how about something like \bf versus \bfseries versus
\textbf?

Google that and you'll find thousands of blog posts, each telling you which is
the One True Way™ but not expanding on the _why_.

Finding actual answers is really hard for latex.

~~~
impendia
> Well in the simplest case how about something like \bf versus \bfseries
> versus \textbf?

Use any of them.

> thousands of blog posts, each telling you which is the One True Way™

When I don't know how to do something in LaTeX, here is my flowchart for
figuring out how:

1\. Google

2\. Look at any of the thousands of blog posts

3\. Try the proposed solution, while ignoring any "One True Way" crap

4\. Are the results what I wanted? If yes then done; if no go to Step 1.

~~~
kmm
That sounds like a recipe for mysterious breakages and subtle inconsistencies.
And most importantly you can never develop a feel for the language if there
are no clear idiomatic ways to solve some problems. There needn't be one true
way, but there has to be some consistency.

~~~
impendia
I would say this is true of a programming language, but not really of LaTeX.

Now LaTeX technically is a programming language, it's Turing complete. But in
practice for most users it's not.

Sure, there might be subtle inconsistencies. There might be some bit of
mathematical notation that looks slightly different in one part of your
document than another. I guess some people would be bothered by this, I'm not
one of them.

It is true that it's possible to become a LaTeX power user, and write all
sorts of sophisticated macros. In that case, yeah, you want to get the
foundations right. But if you're just doing something simple (e.g. writing up
a math paper), then mysterious breakages aren't an issue; there's not really
anything to break.

When I worked as a programmer in industry, I was quite anal retentive about
how I coded, and getting a feel for the languages I used. They were the tools
with which I _did_ my work. But LaTeX, for me anyway, is merely the tool with
which I _typeset_ my work. An outstanding tool, perfect for the job -- but not
one I choose to invest time in mastering.

~~~
cpach
To me, this sounds like a very reasonable approach.

------
madhadron
I see a few things at work here.

First, over a period of decades, LaTeX's syntax became the lingua franca of
nontrivial mathematics in plain text. I regularly emailed quite sophisticated
equations to people as part of discussions because you could assume that
anyone who could understand the equation understand its LaTeX representation.
Given that cultural fact, providing LaTeX as an input syntax for equations is
totally normal.

Second, most LaTeX users are not trained in any other typesetting system. This
quote from the article is typical:

> “For me, LaTeX is the tool when I want to get the typesetting just so,” says
> Casey Greene, a bioinformatician at the University of Pennsylvania in
> Philadelphia.

I spent a lot of hours typesetting in the family business using Quark Xpress
back in the 1990's. I turned in most of my graduate level math homework in
LaTeX generated PDFs, because rewriting three page long proofs by hand because
you realized you had an error on page one is a pain. Of my two books, I
typeset one in LaTeX and one in Adobe InDesign. If I want the typesetting just
so, I would use InDesign over LaTeX every time. It's simply a better tool for
the job.

The book I did in LaTeX I did because I happened to know that it would fit
extraordinarily smoothly in that. It was a long flow of text with a few inline
figures and equations and a really disgusting number of references. If I had a
comparable reference tracking system in InDesign, I would have absolutely used
it instead.

Finally, a lot of writing I'm doing these days is meant to be read on a
screen, with all the vagaries of reflowing and unknown screen size that
implies. In that situation your best bet is to wrap yourself in a
straitjacket. Markdown and pandoc with blocks of raw HTML as needed is where
I've landed, not because I love it, but because it's a well supported
straitjacket with an easy escape hatch.

------
xvilka
LaTeX (and many other TeX-based technologies) simply amazing. But it is not
enough for better scientific publishing. There was quite an interesting
discussion[1] about creating something in between Overleaf[2], ArXiv[3], Git,
and Wikipedia, moreover with the ability to do a peer-to-peer review,
discussion, and social networking. There are a few implementations, albeit not
covering all features, like Authorea[4] and MIT's PubPub[5] (it is the open
source[6]). See also GitXiv[7]. See also the Publishing Reform[8] project.
Moreover, there is a quite interesting initiative from DARPA, to create the
scientific social network of a kind - Polyplexus[9].

[1] [http://blog.jessriedel.com/2015/04/16/beyond-papers-
gitwikxi...](http://blog.jessriedel.com/2015/04/16/beyond-papers-gitwikxiv/)

[2] [https://www.overleaf.com/](https://www.overleaf.com/)

[3] [https://arxiv.org/](https://arxiv.org/)

[4] [https://authorea.com/](https://authorea.com/)

[5] [https://www.pubpub.org/](https://www.pubpub.org/)

[6] [https://github.com/pubpub](https://github.com/pubpub)

[7] [https://medium.com/@samim/gitxiv-collaborative-open-
computer...](https://medium.com/@samim/gitxiv-collaborative-open-computer-
science-e5fea734cd45)

[8] [https://gitlab.com/publishing-
reform/discussion](https://gitlab.com/publishing-reform/discussion)

[9] [https://polyplexus.com/](https://polyplexus.com/)

------
xvilka
Typing with LaTeX within Vim can be as fast (or even faster) than in the Word
processors. You can use the power of Vim plugins, concealments, and customized
snippets. Most probably the same can be done inside Emacs as well. See the
excellent article[1] on how to set up your Vim to follow the mathematics
lectures in real time.

[1] [https://castel.dev/post/lecture-
notes-1/](https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-1/)

------
shereadsthenews
LaTeX integration is one of the neat features of Dropbox Paper. I don't know
if people think of it as a "word processor" but you can stick a bit of LaTeX
in any context by just using the $$ macro.

------
stenl
Why do they claim that Word ditched its equation editor? I believe I’m on the
latest Word and it certainly still has the editor.

Word’s equation editor is hands-down the best WYSIWYG equation editor I ever
used. The results are beautiful and if you want a tilde you just type a f*ing
tilde instead of spending an hour figuring out which combination of packages
and fonts will cause LaTeX to grace you with this standard unicode character.

I guess maybe MS discontinued the old plugin equation editor (which was
terrible, agreed), but the built-in one is still there.

------
jrimbault
For my own uses the combinations of markdown and pandoc feels very satisfying.

Pandoc allows me to pick and choose what parts of LaTeX I want to use and I
can otherwise write in plain text/markdown.

------
red_admiral
I've used LaTeX for years, written part of a textbook and a whole dissertation
in it, and I don't like it.

There are two good parts to the TeX ecosystem in my opinion.

    
    
      - Typesetting math formulae. Even Word agrees that it's superior to point-and click for this use case (unlike our Blackboard online learning environment ... *sigh*)
      - Plain-text based. You can use your favourite editor, you can put it in version control, diff it, etc.
    

But for writing text-based documents such as lecture notes in subjects that
are not mathematics, I really don't feel comfortable with the usability. For
example,

    
    
      - Getting figures, page breaks etc. where I want them.
      - Underlining things is suprisingly hard (and not intuituve).
      - A marco preprocessor that has many of the disadvantages of that in C.
      - Confusing error messages, stuff randomly doesn't build.
      - Package X doesn't work with package Y (unless you include package W with option Z first) type problems.
    

I would switch in a heartbeat if there were something with the advantages of
TeX, but not the disadvantages. It seems to me like neither of LaTeX3, luaTeX
or XeTeX has got enough traction to get everyone to switch.

For things less than 50 pages or so, I've actually moved back to word, which
if you buy the proper version rather than the 365 one is surprisingly good.
I've found that in practice, for things where I care a lot how they look
(which is pretty much everything), unless it's very mathematics-heavy I get
the job done in just over half the time in Word usually.

------
thangalin
For anyone looking to use Markdown while reaping the benefits of a typesetting
engine, you may find the following series on how to typeset Markdown using
ConTeXt of interest:

[https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/05/22/typesetting-
markdow...](https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/05/22/typesetting-markdown-
part-1/)

------
azangru
> Proponents embrace LaTeX because of the total control it offers for document
> layout

Erm. Doesn’t a word processor or a specialized publishing software like Adobe
InDesign offer more control over document layout? I thought LaTeX sort of
takes over the control (which, some would argue, is a good thing, because you
can focus on writing instead of formatting your text).

~~~
fsloth
For all purposes I would claim LaTeX does take full control, only because the
damn thing is so obscure that it takes a very specific mind to fathom how to
use it.

I've done desktop publishing, I've done my MSc thesis in LaTeX, I'm a software
engineer by profession - but if I would want any _control_ by _myself_ to _any
aspect_ of the document I would probably choose some other layout system than
LaTeX.

------
gerbilly
Maybe it's because I did way more plain TeX than LaTeX, but just what is it
that everyone finds so difficult about LaTeX?

Is LaTeX itself that much more difficult than plain TeX?

If so then why not just use TeX, the TeXBook is really easy to follow and
gives clear examples.

The equations are formatted exactly the same way in both.¹

1: Unless you choose to use some package like amsmath, but why ?)

~~~
wongarsu
I think writing text and equations in LaTex is very simple. It's not WYSIWYG,
but fairly straighforward. Even complex equations are fairly easy to formulate
and look great. However as soon as you want to change how something is
presented you might be in for a world of pain.

~~~
gerbilly
> However as soon as you want to change how something is presented you might
> be in for a world of pain.

So yeah, don't use LaTeX then use TeX, where you can change things easily
because it's not as complicated.

------
stevekemp
If you run/operate/host an online service which allows rendering user-
submitted LaTeX you must care about security.

There are a bunch of sites which take arbitrary input and convert it to PDF -
they're often easily exploited, to allow arbitrary files to be read from the
server, and commands executed:

    
    
           \begin{document}
           \setlength{\parindent}{0cm}{\Huge \Hello}
           
           \bigskip
           \section*{Execute Commands}
           \immediate\write18{uptime> scriptoutput.tex}
           \immediate\write18{id >> scriptoutput.tex}
           \immediate\write18{ps -ef >> scriptoutput.tex}
           \begin{alltt}
           \input{scriptoutput.tex}
           \end{alltt}
           
           \bigskip
           \section*{Read Files}
           \begin{alltt}
           \input{/etc/passwd}
           \end{alltt}

------
rijoja
In Finland the nation wide test in math are now digitalized. Which is good bit
neither memorizing latex commands or menu hunting feels as natural as
"drawing" by hand. This will inevitably spread, what to do?

------
jxramos
Interesting there was no mention of MathType, just the indirection of citing
Word's Equation Editor which was originally licensed from the maker's of
MathType I believe.

You can still order their licensed software which functions like a plug in and
is more rich than the default equation editor that was a feature trimmed
release of the broader MathType software I believe.
[http://www.dessci.com/en/products/mathtype/](http://www.dessci.com/en/products/mathtype/)

------
cameronbrown
I think going one-step further and making LaTeX the entire backing structure
of a document would be a great idea. Kind of like HTML WYSIWYG designer tools.
Would be a boon for interoperability which is probably why it'll never happen.

~~~
CJefferson
It would be an awful idea.

Latex can't produce HTML, it can't produce EPUBs or any other reflowable
document type. It can't produce any document which is accessible to blind
people (other than giving them the raw LaTeX file).

Note: You will find various libraries that claim to produce HTML output. I can
tell you from experience none of them work, given a random LaTeX paper you
download from, say, Arxiv.

~~~
dredmorbius
Pandoc does all that, from LaTeX source (among others).

[https://pandoc.org](https://pandoc.org)

~~~
pseingatl
Pandoc conversion is another trip down the rabbit hole (latex to markdown:

Error at "input" (line 265, column 1): unexpected '\n'

~~~
dredmorbius
The assertion was that LaTeX cannot generate specific formats. Using Pandoc
(NB: Pandoc Is Not Markdown, though it's often used with it), s well as
earlier tools, that is in fact quite possible.

Using templates, with quite a level of flexibility.

------
maliker
When I was studying math, I enjoyed the challenge of writing LaTeX. It gave me
a break from struggling with (e.g.) a real analysis proof to instead think
about typography, struggle with syntax, and tweak my document layout.

------
devit
I find LaTeX's math syntax quite bad, e.g. the fact that you have to use \frac
instead of just the / operator, \left( instead of just (, and so on.

AsciiMath is much better and actually works as you would expect it to.

~~~
thomasahle
\left can be a hassle, but the distinction between \frac and / is often quite
useful. In inline math something like x/y can be a lot more readable than
\frac xy. You might say it should just automatically choose, but often some
terms are more important than others and I really want to control which get
rendered more compact.

I also don't like how parentheses in asciimath sometimes don't get rendered.

------
stefan_
Notice that this article is explicitly about formatting equations in LaTeX.
Other Word processors, of course, don't actually do any LaTeX, they simply
emulate the equation stuff from it.

------
Theodores
The Web is where I want to read stuff. I find the publishing industry simply
curious nowadays.

------
jillesvangurp
I think Latex is awesome for what it is: a system designed to enable engineers
and (beta) scientists to produce printable documents without having to think a
lot about making it look good; which is something they tend to be not good at.
From having worked with skilled designers, I know I suck at this at least. As
soon as you broaden the scope of writing to include e.g. ebooks, websites, and
search engines as first class citizens, latex stops being an appropriate
solution.

I rarely produce text for the purpose of printing these days but I used to do
this a lot when still working as an academic. These days, I read a lot of
books in ebook form and I read a lot of articles, blogs, and news in HTML
form. Likewise my output seems to be online documentation, social media
comments, the occasional blog article, etc.

Pdfs (and their printed output) are a second class citizen in that kind of
world. They are harder to machine read, which results in issues with SEO,
accessibility, or even simply re-flowing to deal with different screens or
output formats. Pdfs are actually only appropriate for sending to a printer.
On screen PDF reading is tedious and the UX for that tends to be not great.
The whole page metaphor is simply not appropriate because it means setting the
size of the output window to some fixed dimensions and hard-coding assumptions
about the medium on which it is going to be consumed. It only makes sense if
your medium is paper.

My printer is rarely used these days. I've had it for 12 years and I'm only on
the second toner cartridge. The awesome thing with laser printers is that they
don't dry out. Most of the output is exclusively limited to bureaucratic
stuff. Thankfully that's very limited these days. I used to print stuff like
boarding passes but these days you just wave the QR code around with your
phone.

Engineers have tried to fix latex to produce things other than .ps and later
.pdf documents. The results were never that popular. You can do e.g.
presentations in latex and people have probably produced websites from latex
as well. But lets just say that it's not a great fit for that kind of thing
and also not that commonly used that way.

Additionally, the results are typically kind of bland and boring because the
people most eager to produce stuff this way tend to have very little interest
in e.g. design quality or making things visually interesting. It sort of self
selects to people who have neither the skills nor the patience for that kind
of thing. I.e. engineers. The same is actually true for the paper output. Yes
you can do nice typography with it and some people do, but most people just
stick with the bland defaults, which results in a kind of yawn inducing and
bland look that instantly jumps out from a page.

What I've learned over the years is that engineers are obsessed with their
tools and that mostly the tools don't actually matter. This article makes the
simple observation that for mathematical formulas, Latex provides a pretty
awesome DSL and that when it comes to doing math in systems other than latex,
that DSL is increasingly what people fall back to rather than whichever
formula editor comes with word, open office, etc. or alternatives like mathml,
matlab, or hand scribbled things in bitmap form, etc. I think it makes sense.
I'd probably use it all the time if writing math formulas was a thing in my
life. This happens to be not the case for me, so I have had zero exposure to
Latex in most of this century. I do a lot of my writing in relatively dumb
editors or even an HTML Text area. I seem to use markdown a lot as it is good
enough and doesn't lock me in to taking any decisions for the output.

Funny story: when I was in university we had secretaries that knew how to use
latex. Reason: several of the elderly math professors had no clue how to use a
computer and were used to handing their papers in handwritten form to the
secretaries for further processing. It's easy to forget that computers and
word-processors are relatively new tools and that people have been publishing
scientific work for centuries. Even Latex is not that old. Ultimately it's
about the content, not the tools.

