
The LaTeX fetish (2016) - edu
http://www.danielallington.net/2016/09/the-latex-fetish/
======
al2o3cr

        So convinced was I that this was why scientists wrote in
        LaTeX that I even had a go at writing a LaTeX paper of my
        own (it never got finished; there was a lesson there).
    

So after successfully completing the task ZERO times, the author still felt
fully qualified to dismiss the entire approach and whinge about the tooling.
/facepalm

~~~
scottlocklin
Linkbait trolling tier for sure. Slams LaTeX for being a markup language, then
suggests we use org mode instead (org mode being a markup language which only
produces interesting LaTeX output when you embed LaTeX in it). FWIIW I do use
org mode as a sort of higher level LaTeX for note taking, mostly because the
latex bits get compiled as I type, but when it comes time to turn my thoughts
into something more organized, it gets turned into pure LaTeX.

There are a real reasons academics and quasi-academics (aka me) use LaTeX
instead of something like libreoffice. Equations are basically impossible
without it. I can't write down a complicated relation in LaTeX as fast as I
can think of it, but it's a lot closer to that speed than laboriously
constructing a relation in the equation editor of any word processor. If you
do something like physics, machine learning or topology, trying to write a
paper in libreoffice or whatever they call Word now is sort of like trying to
write a novel on an iphone. The author never mentions equations. Yeah, it's
more difficult for a n00b to construct, say, a letter to the editor in LaTeX
than it is in Libreoffice -that's not what it's for! Though of course once you
have paid the toll of learning the thing, it's pretty quick and in fact lives
up to its promise of not getting in the way of writing the content.

Beyond that, my equations will be accessible for decades and will be
completely platform independent. If you have an academic career, this is
probably reasonably important.

There's other reasons besides "equations" and "long term stability" (BibTex is
probably top third reason) -but those are the big ones.

Edit add: beamer mode is also a good reason to use it once you know it. Take
your paper; turn it into a presentation -never leave the same application.

~~~
gota
Microsoft Word's equation editor has improved a lot over the last years. I'm
not saying it meets LaTeX at its strenghts but it is very unfair to call it
"hell".

Also, I haven't used it but newer versions recognize handwritten equations and
formulae and automatically transcribe them to the equation format.

~~~
xattt
Word 2016 and above on Windows allow the use of LaTeX to write equations. On
OS X, later versions of Pages do the same thing.

~~~
zrobotics
I was forced to submit a lab report in Word. I'd tried to use the LaTeX
feature, and I couldn't even get it to properly understand limits of
integration. After ~5 minutes, I just gave up and used the annoying Gui
interface, since at least it worked. This was last year, and I haven't tried
again (since if I need to typeset math, I'll just use LaTeX). Word has its
advantages, mostly ease of use, but it just can't handle math and
bibliographies as easily as LaTeX.

~~~
xattt
I haven’t actually used the LaTeX interface in Word, though I had used it in
Pages on several occaisons. I was impressed and unreasonably wished that Pages
was actually a full-featured, live updating LaTeX GUI editor.

------
klyrs
I'm more of a leather gal, but... _cough_ I think that's more of a fashion
choice

I've been using LaTeX for over a decade and I've never heard/made these
arguments about LaTeX "separating formatting from content" except when a
colleague has painstakingly written a torturous macro to accomplish some fussy
layout. And then we happily \include{their code} so that we don't need to look
at that godawful mess mixed in with our prose. (okay that's a lie, my prose is
interspersed with tikz arcana to make coauthors weep with pain and readers
delight over the beauty of my figures -- yes there's some sadism and masochism
involved, let's not deny it)

Latex gives a powerful basis for document editing that can be learned in
hours. It's not special in that regard, and easier markup languages abound.
For me and others, LaTeX is a turing-complete, flexible, high powered
typesetting engine with good defaults and no handrails. We're programmers, not
graphic designers, so we can handle a little (well, a lot) of flagellation to
build intermediate tools in the language which accomplish repetitive tasks.

All that shit about the language being easy and helpful? It's written by
fetishists for sure. Knuth is a big fan of literate programming but the code
he writes is a godawful stab through the eyeball. Maybe somebody with more
refined tastes in code structure could do a better job. But they haven't and
we use LaTeX, so buckle up kiddos you're mathematicians now

~~~
puzzledobserver
Precisely. The actual structure of working LaTeX documents contains plenty of
code to just make stuff look right. The "separating formatting from content"
crowd is, in my opinion, actually inexperienced in the language, or being
intellectually lazy.

The article also seems to focus on the distinction between TeX and LaTeX,
which is kind of pointless. Apart from extensions such as ConTeXt, nobody
advocates for the use of raw TeX. Just use LaTeX (unless you have a reason not
to).

The actual reason to use LaTeX, in the professional scientific research
community, is that it is more of a lingua-franca, just the way things are
done, similar to how lawyers hold the Blue Book dear, and researchers in the
social sciences swear by APA.

There are some clear advantages to using LaTeX: (1) It gracefully integrates
with version control (similar to Markdown and LyX, but unlike, Word docx). (2)
Entering mathematics is, after the learning period, painless, even more so
that Markdown, and only somewhat less than writing material by hand. (3) Large
library of classes and styles on CTAN. Everything from bibliographies to
figure drawing to colour to typesetting presentations. (4) The core is mostly
stable. TeX certainly, and the LaTeX macros almost. In any case, if the system
explodes, the original sources are not usually corrupted.

Of course, just like the Blue Book and APA, the system has its warts: TeX-the-
language is hideous, and the multi-pass build system archaic, even if the
markup is mostly unobtrusive after one gets used to it.

I will also agree that LaTeX is often fetishized, though not in the manner the
author describes. I have in mind college professors who mandate that homework
assignments be typeset in LaTeX. This is a waste of time. Let the students use
whatever system they find most convenient, as long as it is submitted as a
legible PDF: Word, LaTeX, scanned handwritten pages.

After you enter the fold as a professional researcher though, the convention
of using LaTeX is the easiest way to progress. It's not as bad as you
initially think it to be.

------
quietbritishjim
The article author should have tried LyX [1]. It's a graphical editor but
still uses LaTeX to produce the output. (Its main downside is that its LaTeX
_import_ functionality is very patchy.) It has support for a large common set
of LaTeX functionality, and there are a few ways to extend it e.g. user macros
and modules. If all else fails you can directly insert raw LaTeX in your
document; obviously this defeats the point so is best avoided where possible,
but it shows that it can ultimately do everything LaTeX can.

The graphical representation shown on screen is somewhat approximate e.g.
fonts and sizes are approximate, and line wrapping is totally unrelated to the
final output. But it's good enough to understand what's what, and most
importantly it's free of all the markup clutter, and that's what the author
objects to. It's especially good at this for equations, but it makes a
different even just for regular text. Plus it has autocomplete for LaTeX
commands (I realise that there are LaTeX editors that do this too).

A lot of people mistake LyX as being a beginner's tool to avoid understanding
LaTeX. I would say it is almost exactly the opposite: you still need to
understand LaTeX to use LyX effectively. Rather than the markup being right in
front of you it's hidden by a layer of indirection, which of course is the
whole point, but it makes it harder to understand what's going on when
something breaks. It breaks less often (e.g. you never get mismatched close
braces) but the hard errors still crop up (e.g. incompatible packages giving
really obscure errors about macro expansions).

I've written numerous mathematical documents of various lengths in LyX, and
prior to that a few documents in LaTeX including my MSc thesis. When I first
discovered LyX I was partway through writing up notes from a lecture course I
was attending. In LaTeX it took me about three hours to write up notes for
each hour lecture; in LyX it took me one hour per hour of lecture. A factor of
three speed improvement! I can hardly imagine how long my PhD thesis would've
taken without it.

[1] [http://www.lyx.org/](http://www.lyx.org/)

~~~
j88439h84
Org mode can render equations in line. It's got the easy-reading benefits of
lyx but it's all plain text. Then easily compile to latex or pdf. By far my
favorite way to do writing.

~~~
quietbritishjim
From what I've read, AUCTeX (which is also an Emacs extension) is better for
writing full-blown LaTeX documents. But yes, the preview functionality in both
is a big improvement on directly viewing the source markup, and if I couldn't
use LyX then I would certainly use one of those instead.

In fact LyX also supports instant previews of equations. That might sound a
bit odd since it already displays equations graphically, but it's nice to see
a pixel-perfect display of them. It also supports wrapping instant preview of
arbitrary bits of the documents, which is really handy when you have inserted
explicit LaTeX e.g. a Tikz diagram.

------
_emacsomancer_
In fact, the one place you should never try to do any more substantial writing
than designing the poster for your niece's 4th birthday part is a word
processor.

Word processors are one of the worst environments I can imagine for actually
writing. Lots of people surely write in LaTeX in part because they can use a
reasonable environment for writing (i.e. a decent text editor).

Also, if you're in a decent text editor, writing LaTeX can be pretty easy
(though for lots of things Org mode or markdown etc. may be more appropriate),
and you can set up macros to auto-fill in things like the preamble etc.

I essentially write for a living, and I would not have survived had I not
adopted LaTeX.

~~~
ModernMech
I wrote my dissertation in Word. 200+ pages, dozens of captioned and numbered
figures and tables, over 100 equations all numbered and referenced, table of
contents, cross references, works cited. I found it quite pleasant.

~~~
jon-wood
Word is fine if you really, really, know what you're doing with it. By that I
mean understanding how to use styles for formatting, how to properly insert
footnotes/figures/tables etc, and what the implications are if you don't.

When my wife wrote her doctorate she did none of those things, and I ended up
spending the best part of two days laboriously going through the entire
document to make it conform to the university's style guide for thesis being
submitted. Thankfully she uses Scrivener for writing now which as near as
possible enforces doing things the right way the first time.

~~~
srtjstjsj
There was a civilized time when universities hired typesetters to do this job
properly.

~~~
callalex
There was also a time when we paid people to operate an elevator. Then we
improved the technology enough to make it simple enough for everyone to do it
themselves. It has many benefits, and have the user more control over what
they got and when they could do things.

------
phalangion
The author's found arguments of separating content from presentation is only
part of the reason I use LaTeX. I use LaTeX and other markup languages (mainly
AsciiDoc) when I can, as opposed to using a word processor, because I have
found that Word manages to find hidden ways to mangle any document that does
more than include text in paragraphs. What I like about using LaTeX is if the
document is broken, it's usually my fault and I can see the underlying code
that is breaking it. If you've ever had to unzip a Word document to fix the
underlying XML (I have), you'll understand how frustrating it is working with
hidden markup.

~~~
mr_gibbins
This, this, and this a thousand times. As a PhD student about to write up his
thesis I'm on the cusp of deciding whether to go down the Word or LaTeX route.
I cannot describe how unbelievably angry I have gotten at Word screwing up
document after document.

My last effort was a journal paper submission, and the journal in question
supplied the (80MB!!!) template which was so crammed full of macros, custom
styles and miscellaneous instructions that my AV program quarantined it. When
I eventually managed to use it, I literally transferred the content from
Notepad++ (my go-to for the act of actually writing - take note, OP) and
images etc. from file and spent DAYS trying to get the format right. A hateful
experience.

Word is great for casual use. For academic or professional use beyond the
barest of basic typesetting, absolutely not.

~~~
chrisfinazzo
Not sure if you saw my above comment, but if you did go down the LaTeX path,
would you have to set up the environment yourself?

I realize people may want to customize things later, but making the initial
install as painless as possible seems highly desirable - esp. for students.

~~~
zrobotics
For students, especially undergrad, overleaf is an excellent way to dip your
toes into latex. I wouldn't want to use it for anything large or serious, but
it will handle a typical undergrad length document and doesn't even require
installation.

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

~~~
tcpekin
I used Overleaf for my PhD thesis without any issues, including a lot of
figures, etc. In fact, I almost only use Overleaf when it comes to LaTeX - it
takes care of most of the pain points and is a great service that I pay for.

~~~
chrisfinazzo
I tried Overleaf briefly when first converting my CV a couple years ago.
Having a live preview helped so I didn't have to wait while recompiling.

Although things like [Skim][1] exist, Basictex does most of what I need, so
I've never really tried wiring it into my existing install.

 _Pipe dream_ \- If the people who work on macOS's Preview application were
smart, they would steal it (or [Marked's][2]) ability to have a custom
processor for displaying output. In that case, I could point it at my TeX
install and just run my Makefile from there.

[1]: [https://skim-app.sourceforge.io](https://skim-app.sourceforge.io)

[2]:
[http://marked2app.com/help/Custom_Processor.html](http://marked2app.com/help/Custom_Processor.html)

~~~
tcpekin
Very cool tools/perspective, but I think we have pretty different
workflows/setups. I love not struggling to install TeX or its packages, and
for me Overleaf has taken care of so many things that to reproduce it on my
own seems much more effort than I'm willing to do.

------
pjc50
Generally I would say that if your document doesn't include at least one
equation it's not worth learning LaTeX to do. If your writing is going to
involve lots of inline maths, or you're submitting to one of the journals that
requires it, then it will make your life much easier.

Some of the Stackexchange sites make widespread use of MathJax for this
purpose:
[https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5020/mathjax-b...](https://math.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5020/mathjax-
basic-tutorial-and-quick-reference)

(Word does now store equations as XML internally, but it's pretty horrible - 5
kilobytes for the quadratic formula, for example)

Edit: I've just remembered that when I was at university in the late 90s,
there was a small community of non-maths LaTeX users ... who were doing things
like New Testament Greek. There may be other specialised use cases where
having fine control over WYG is more important than WYSIWYG.

Now I've gone looking for it, I can find an example :
[http://jcsu.jesus.cam.ac.uk/~mma29/essays/dissertation/](http://jcsu.jesus.cam.ac.uk/~mma29/essays/dissertation/)
\- I think the intent of using LaTeX here was really for Bibtex, the
bibliographic system, which is an extremely important part of all true
academic papers.

------
DJHenk
> LaTeX is a typesetting system and a markup language. Typesetting systems are
> not customarily used for writing in, and while markup languages such as XML
> and HTML often are, this is generally recognised as a bad idea.

This is dumb. One can argue that LaTeX is not a convenient markup language
enough to write in. But stating that a markup language in itself is a bad
thing for writing, while Markdown was invented in 2004 and wildly popular at
the time this article was written (2016), means that the author himself is not
completely rational when defending his preference, using XML and HTML as
strawmen.

~~~
exergy
He _does_ mention Markdown, and specifically how it was designed to be human
readable. But he lumps Latex with XML and HTML in that they are rubbish to
write in. He mentions also how he hates himself for writing in even his
simplified version of HTML when writing long posts.

His argument is restricted to those looking to use Latex for questionable
benefits that they do not fully understand.

------
lautreamont
The problem with word processors is that you can't properly do distributed
work with them. No one I work with uses the exact same version of the same
word processor I do; actually people in the real world don't even have
consistent versions on their multiple machines. Every version switch fucks
over fonts, formatting, comments... everything except the bare text. Most of
my workflows are at follows:

1\. Send LibreOffice text to collaborator 2\. Get changes/comments back from
collaborator 3\. Start addressing them 4\. Realize that collaborator has
fucked up the formatting by using MS Word 5\. Fix formatting 6\. Address
comments 7\. Go home for the day 8\. Telecommute the next day, fire up result
of 6 on your old machine at home 9\. Realize it won't even load comment notes
10\. Ask the wife if you can borrow her Win7 machine for the job 11\. Give up
on formatting, do the editing job first on MS Word 12\. Go back to office the
day after, fix the formatting which is now an unholy mess of LibreOffice and
MS Word 13\. Swear at LibreOffice because it somehow spontaneously returns to
MS Word formatting but not consistently 14\. Get some resemblance of working
formatting in order 15\. goto 1

Yeah... I'm afraid LaTeX is the lesser evil there.

(None of this applies to cloud-based work using e.g. Google Documents. If you
want to entrust your drafts to Google, feel free to do so. I don't consider
this an option for anything under NDA.)

~~~
fwip
It sounds like your issue isn't with word processors, it's with you using a
different word processor than all your colleagues.

~~~
tcpekin
I have had the exact same experience as the OP and if you can convince several
PI's with better things to do than reinstall a new version of Word, people at
other institutions without MS Office licenses using Libre Office and others
who don't use either and convert it back and forth to a Google Doc (thereby
breaking all the hyperlinking), I would honestly be baffled.

Now, in collaborative work I use Overleaf so there is no configuration
problems with installing LaTeX (Google Docs for LaTeX), and give everyone
write access if they want it, I sync it with my Dropbox and have a working
LaTeX distribution if I want to edit without access to the network. Those who
don't know LaTeX (which is a small number, especially if they don't want to
learn the basics to edit the .tex file in the appropriate place) I can convert
a version to Word for their edits, which I then incorporate, or they can just
markup a PDF. The Overleaf document then has a complete history of edits,
Overleaf supports Word-style comments and track changes, and I can be happy in
that the other authors aren't going to break something in the Word "backend".

~~~
fwip
I guess if you trust DropBox and Overleaf with sensitive data but not Google
Docs or Microsoft Office 365, that works. (If Overleaf is self-hosted, please
disregard that part.)

I also find offline word processors frustrating to collaborate on, but I am
worried that OP is rationalizing their personal preferences post-hoc, rather
than looking for the best option for everyone.

Thanks for the pointer to Overleaf, I will definitely check it out.

Edit: sorry, I thought you were the OP at first.

~~~
tcpekin
Yeah, not the OP, but if I had sensitive information I don't know what I would
do. I know this sounds shill-like, but I absolutely love Overleaf for Latex.
It has every package you need, decent templates that you can then customize,
and the Dropbox and GitHub integration are great - uploading an image is as
simple as saving it in the right Dropbox folder - very useful for when trying
to upload a bunch of images or update a figure in Illustrator. I end up using
MikTex like 2-3 times a year when I'm on a plane, and then everything syncs
once I'm back online. Being able to see who changed what is also great, and
much less overhead than trying to convince non-programmers to use git or
something like that for the Latex files.

------
winstonewert
The author fundamentally misunderstands the argument for LaTeX. The point
isn't that people in word processors spend absurd amounts of time deciding
what fonts to use or might make stupid choices about formatting. In both word
processors and LaTeX, people do the same thing: they write to match a style
guide.

In LaTeX you drop in a class file that defines your style guide and _boom_
your whole LaTeX document is now formatted according to that style guide. If
later you want a different style guide, switch out the class file and you've
got something different. Need to write your bibliography in a different style,
swap out the file defining that and all your references are changed.

That's the point that advocates of LaTeX are making. You separate the content
and presentation. Your LaTeX just contains the content and the style guide
indicates how to actually format that content.

Now, LaTeX doesn't actually do a great job at this. It shows its age. Its got
a lot of messiness due to the fact that at hard its a macro expansion
language. Its not quite possible to get away with putting everything to do
with the style in the class file.

~~~
da_chicken
> The point isn't that people in word processors spend absurd amounts of time
> deciding what fonts to use or might make stupid choices about formatting.

Except that's exactly one of the most common reasons I see given to people who
are not programmers to use LaTeX. "You don't have to fiddle with formatting."
"You don't have to worry about text flow around embedded images." And so on.
It's absolutely one of the most common reasons people give when the first ones
should be, "You require a typesetting language," or "You require portable,
comprehensive, codified, standardized, plain text equation markdown syntax."

> In LaTeX you drop in a class file that defines your style guide and boom
> your whole LaTeX document is now formatted according to that style guide. If
> later you want a different style guide, switch out the class file and you've
> got something different. Need to write your bibliography in a different
> style, swap out the file defining that and all your references are changed.
> > > That's the point that advocates of LaTeX are making. You separate the
> content and presentation. Your LaTeX just contains the content and the style
> guide indicates how to actually format that content.

I don't really buy these because you can say the same thing about Word. Word
has templates which need to be configured and defined just like LaTeX classes.
Word has heirarchal styles which can be changed after the fact to completely
reformat the document easily. Word has a citation and reference tool which
allows you to change the style on the fly [0]. Yes, the features of the two
systems are not identical. Yes, some things are more difficult in Word. Some
things are more difficult in LaTeX, too. Now we're down to subjective
arguments about which you prefer, which isn't quite the same thing.

[0]: [https://support.office.com/en-us/article/APA-MLA-
Chicago-%E2...](https://support.office.com/en-us/article/APA-MLA-
Chicago-%E2%80%93-automatically-format-
bibliographies-405c207c-7070-42fa-91e7-eaf064b14dbb)

~~~
winstonewert
> Except that's exactly one of the most common reasons I see given to people
> who are not programmers to use LaTeX.

There's a subtle point here: LaTeX helps with _application_ not _decision._

When a LaTeX advocate says, "You don't have to fiddle with formatting." they
are saying you don't have to apply the formatting to your document, its
automatic.

But the author misunderstands this as "you don't have to decide on the
formatting for your document". So he responds: follow the defaults or a style
guide. But that's not where LaTeX helps. LaTeX is about automatically applying
a style to a document _NOT_ deciding on what that style should be.

> I don't really buy these because you can say the same thing about Word.

Sure. LaTeX advocates are probably somewhat behind what the savvy word user is
doing. There is less of gap in the approaches than might be assumed.

------
wyattpeak
The idea of somebody critiquing Latex for being a difficult format to write in
while writing almost exclusively plaintext is pretty baffling to me. It's like
saying that Photoshop is too complicated because I can draw a square just fine
in Paint.

My domain is pretty specific - typesetting chemistry papers, but for that it
is absolutely invaluable. There's no tool on the market which can do it with
anywhere approaching the ease. Even MSWord, which is now good enough that I
can type simple maths about as fast as I can in Latex (although frankly even
there I prefer Latex to futzing with a gui), doesn't have nearly the tools I
need.

I'll bet this is true in all sorts of smaller domains, too. Typeset anything
unusual enough not to have good specialist tools and the freedom of Latex
typesetting will make up for the learning curve in weeks if not days.

~~~
exergy
A few points. First, he is an academic in the humanities. According to his
article, most people _around him_ talking up latex tell him the main reason
for picking up latex is so you don't have to worry about design. There are not
much equation-writing in the humanities, so that's outside his domain.

Second, he specifically _does_ encourage using latex to typeset. Just not to
type in the first place! Use Markdown, or a word processor, says the author,
and then latex do what it is good at: typeset. But don't write long paragraphs
in latex with attention-breaking code scattered around the text, since that
places obstacles in the path of editing.

~~~
wyattpeak
I recognise his area, but he's pretty general in his commentary "Don't use it
to write (anywhere), it's just for typesetting", so I feel justified in using
my similarly limited domain to critique.

But I don't know how you expect me to write a chemistry paper without writing
the equations? Just leave them blank? Typesetting is instrumental to simply
composing the paper, it's not something I can do after. As I said in my
initial comment, nothing else will actually do the task as fast as Latex, so
it'd be pretty perverse to type in something else. Maybe it works for your
domain, but not mine.

~~~
exergy
I am a Mechanical Engineering PhD student, with a whole lot of equation
writing to do myself. And as someone who has very briefly dabbled with latex,
I have found MathType to be the better solution for myself. I just cannot get
myself to type out latex equation flawlessly first time, and MS Word's
equation editor is an abomination. MathType has a rather large list of
shortcuts requiring memorising (made more difficult by my dvorak layout), but
once learnt, equation writing proceeds at an enjoyable clip. It has the
secondary benefit for resulting in WYSIWYG, to match with the rest of my MS
Word workflow.

~~~
wyattpeak
MathType looks decent for maths (and I assume engineering). I can see the
appeal of the WYSIWYG, though I don't really see how learning a bunch of
shortcuts is materially different from learning the Latex commands.

Nevertheless, it still doesn't have a bunch of the symbols I need, which was
my point about smaller domains.

I'm glad it works for you, but given the advantage seems to me marginal and it
offers no options for extensibility, I'm still unconvinced that we're at or
even close to a stage where Latex has no place in writing documents.

------
nvusuvu
I wrote my electrical engineering thesis in 2005 using LaTeX. My university
had a style guide file for thesis submissions. All I had to do was focus on
content of my thesis and a little wrangling to make images look nice. The
formatting, typesetting, fonts, sizes, margins, all of it was taken care of.
To not have to worry about that was amazing. Thank goodness the style file was
already there for me to use. I love LaTeX, but I know some of its limitations
and its not intended for the layperson.

~~~
chrisfinazzo
So much this.

------
cryptonector
The correct answer is: use LyX[0], a WYSIWYM[1] editor.

LyX is truly fantastic by comparison to Word and LibreOffice. You get all the
power of LaTeX and none of the pain. WYSIWYM is superior to WYSIWYG! WYSIWYG
means you have to fiddle with typesetting as you write, whereas WYSIWYM means
you don't.

LyX also supports a variety of export formats, including XHTML. I've used its
export to XHTML feature so that I can edit Internet-Drafts in LyX then convert
them to XML (using an XSL) in the schema accepted by xml2rfc, and presto, no
need to edit XML.

    
    
      [0] [1] http://www.lyx.org/
      [1] What you see is what you mean.

~~~
gmueckl
I like LyX a lot, but I have issues with the generated LaTEX code. It does not
lend itself very well for manual adjustments.

If I have to match a journal style, I will generally resort to Kile and write
LaTeX directly, using the journal template (most journals only have LaTeX
templates) and following their instructions.

But if the style is just a standard LaTeX style, LyX is great, especially for
complex formulas. Unlike plain LaTeX you cannot ruin the structure of a math
equation by misplacing a bracket.

~~~
cryptonector
I like the idea of LyX, and its GUI, the implementation is showing its age a
bit. Starting from scratch today it would be better to implement in Rust using
XML as the .lyx document format and XSLT and XSLs for transformations to LaTeX
and other output document formats.

EDIT: And there are XSLs for such conversions. E.g.,
[http://getfo.org/texml/](http://getfo.org/texml/)

------
qwerty456127
LaTeX indeed seems overly obscure and the fact it mixes the content with
formatting does feel bad but I still can see no viable alternative. It seems
the only code-based typesetting system (am I wrong?), the only typesetting
system that provides such a degree of power and arguably the only way to
produce beautiful PDFs with reasonable ease. So far I have chosen the way of
writing well-structured HTML or Markdown (to separate content from
formatting), rendering it to LaTeX with a Python script and using LuaTeX to
produce final output.

~~~
exergy
Your workflow is very in-line with the author's recommendations though. His
idea is to use something like pandoc to convert word-processor or markdown
writing into latex, and then letting latex do what it's actually good at:
Typesetting.

~~~
wirrbel
I am pretty sure the author of that blog post has not done so. Everytime I
used pandoc or similar tools to convert text from one format into another, I
had to put in a lot of effort to manually fix up things. Its not realistic for
most cases. To-latex conversions are actually among the more developed paths,
and all instances I can think of (pandoc, sphinx, dblatex) produce kind-of-
weird output.

If you cannot stand latex but want to produce print-quality PDFs, Apache FOP
(with Docbook) probably is your best bet. Otherwise your kind of bound to
introduce a heavily manual processing step between writing and formatting for
print.

~~~
fiddlerwoaroof
I wrote 3 years of papers in LaTeX (ancient philosophy, so minimal math). I
generally did markdown>pandoc>xelatex. I never really had to touch up the
final output (except for a single script I made that removed some incorrect
line breaks): I would just use inline LaTeX as needed to get things like
figures into the output.

~~~
newen
I wrote my thesis (200 pages) in LaTeX and I cannot imagine not having to do
the final touch ups in LaTeX. You tend to get lots of line break issues,
figure location and orientation and spacing issues, vertical spacing issues,
that you have to touch up to make it look nice. It sounds incredibly
impractical to do your writing in markdown and then use pandoc to convert to
LaTeX, do dozens of touch ups, and then get your final output, send to your
reviewers, get your reviews and recommended edits, do more edits (okay, now I
can't go back to markdown anymore and redo the whole conversion process), more
touch ups, rinse and repeat a few dozen times with your reviewers. Might as
well stick with LaTeX in the first place.

------
ddavis
When I was an undergrad at UT Austin I remember hearing someone who worked
with Steven Weinberg mention that Weinberg told people that he “thinks in
TeX”.

One of the things I love about TeX is I can write it in my editor _without_
WYSIWYG. The tooling in Emacs to write TeX is amazing. I can never go back to
a graphical writing tool.

~~~
gnulinux
100% this. Nothing I tried even comes close to Emacs + TeX. It's exponential
improvement in productivity.

------
gumby
Oh yawn. Use the tools that work for you.

I write primarily in Emacs and use markup. I don't try to convince anyone else
to do the same. If MS Word (or TextEdit) work for you, great! I tend to write
large documents for which I find those tools to be clumsy, but if your milage
varies, no problem.

------
mlthoughts2018
This article is embarrassingly bad. It attempts to do a literary critique of
written statements of the benefits of latex, and analyzes zero actual use
cases or implementations.

Tex is such a powerful tool. It makes me sad to see someone dismiss it likely
because of unpleasant first learning curve, which is also why a lot of people
dismiss vim or emacs.

When I was a freshman in college, an upper classmen friend advised me to learn
TeX, and helped me through writing several documents. That advice & help was
absolutely priceless.

Today I work in a typical tech company environment, and my team writes most of
our technical documentation, sales engineering presentations, in-house tech
presentations, and even recently some supporting documents for patent
applications, all in LaTeX, all stored in version control in one of our
repositories.

We can do real code review on technical documentation changes, have the power
of many latex packages, beamer, etc., and even build versioned PDFs via our
continuous integration tooling.

In some cases we also combine latex source with Mako templates and have actual
software that can “push button” update all sorts of charts for new data,
client-specific requests, etc.

It is a very powerful tool.

~~~
exergy
I would say your comment is more embarrassing than the author. Your comment
smacks of "I know latex, so I'm chomping at the bit to drown out any voices
against it!" It seems to me that you didn't fully read what the author wrote.
Your entire comment is about your workflow, without much in the way of
engaging with what the author wrote.

He is not arguing that latex is useless. Not even that isn't supremely
powerful. His argument, in essence, is that a word processor is superior for
writing and editing what you wrote than latex is, because there is nothing but
text on the screen to get in your way. So, editing is easier.

He directs this argument in direct opposition to those who tout that the
_main_ benefit of latex is that it lets you forget about formatting. The
author is NOT contesting the typesetting benefits of latex. Nor is he saying
"Only use a word processor, version control be damned". He is perfectly happy
with markdown, for instance.

He is merely saying don't write in latex just because you think it's better at
getting out of your way.

~~~
mlthoughts2018
> “He is not arguing that latex is useless. Not even that isn't supremely
> powerful.“

I did not presume the author made either of these points. However, the scope
of latex’s capabilities does undermine the author’s point about editing in a
traditional word processor — that is an argument someone unfamiliar with
latex’s capabilities might make, and so referencing the fact that latex is a
more powerful tool than this is a valuable perspective for refuting the
author’s hasty dismissal.

> “His argument, in essence, is that a word processor is superior for writing
> and editing what you wrote than latex is, because there is nothing but text
> on the screen to get in your way.”

I actually dispute what you claim here, because the author spends a lot of
time talking about the claimed benefit of TeX that it decouples presentation
from content, analyzing it linguistically from written statements of that
benefit rather than pragmatically (for example, like separating written text
out entirely and using \include or other features to inject text into
formatting code).

I think you misunderstood the article because one of the weakest points about
it is that it starts by discussing this idea that TeX has a benefit from
decoupling the visual presentation, but then the article conflates that topic
with the topic of what is on the screen while you’re editing the source. Those
two things are not actually very related, and you can edit content in TeX with
as much or as little interlaced formatting or style commands as you please (in
fact, that’s the whole point).

Not to mention that it facilitates actual code review as a means of
collaborative editing of either content or presentation logic or both.
Something quite hard to achieve with wysiwyg editors.

Your comment reads like a classic knee-jerk HN contrarian response to me.
You’re in a rush to criticize.

For example, you say,

> “Your entire comment is about your workflow, without much in the way of
> engaging with what the author wrote.”

as if this invalidates any points or makes the original post less
embarrassing. But that was my whole intention. I was trying to explain how TeX
is useful, because readers of the post might mistakenly think that editing in
a traditional wysiwyg editor will be easier based on this post’s mistaken
complaints.

A useful reply to a post like that is to talk about how the tool can be used
productively, so that people may feel it’s worth trying to edit latex source
directly (since that works really well in practical cases, like my workflow
which I wrote about).

You seem to have some strange internal standard that the only type of valid
critical response has to break down the OP directly and isolate responses to
specific points.

Not so. And in fact, this post isn’t good enough to warrant that. It’s a lot
more efficient to just say, “nope, you’re wrong, here are real world workflows
where, had you believed the advice of the post, you’d be in a much worse
situation.”

Further, while even after self-reflecting on the tone of my post (i.e. the
choice of “embarrassing” to hopefully connote how short-sighted the OP’s
perspective really is), I feel confident that my post was fair, not overly
harsh, and useful. Meanwhile, the tone of your post feels like you’ve just got
an ax to grind for some reason and want to be negative.

You’re certainly entitled to that, I don’t mind. But your post definitely
entrenches me further into the position that my post was pretty fair and that
it’s reasonable to characterize the OP that way.

------
billfruit
I do feel there is bit of Latex worship going on. Now I think,
markdown/asciidoc that boils down to DocBook is better that latex for most use
cases. Markdown more clearly seperates logical formatting, from the rendering
dependent physical formatting for different kinds of output. Moreover latex
tables are a pain.

Maybe I this is my misunderstanding, is something the wrong with
'composability' of constructs in the LaTeX language? A concrete examples
eludes me presently, it is like the latex functions/forms cannot be nested
arbitrarily like normal programming language blocks/constructs.

~~~
sonderb
I agree. I use and like LaTex but also use other things as well and am a bit
surprised something better hasn't come along.

My overall sense is that the underlying reason for this is that supporting
math in typesetting is an extremely difficult problem, much more so than
people realize. Most typefaces don't come anywhere near being adequate for
math, and those that are functionally ok are often really not very good
aesthetically speaking. The equation typesetting can also be really difficult,
in terms of "under the hood" implementation issues as well as the
specification of standards. etc. etc. etc.

As a result, it's not so much LaTeX is good, as much as it is that it's been
around for so long, and the domain is so much of a slog, that it's hard to
develop something better.

I think a lot of people have a limited vision of what things could be like,
and tend to base impressions on limited experiences with alternatives. The
proprietary nature of Word does create problems in sharing written documents
sometimes; the "black box" nature of WYSIWYG programs in general can be
infuriating when you need to be careful with typesetting equations. On the
other hand, constantly having every typesetting detail in your face with most
LaTeX implementations can be intrusive and leads to "forest for tree" problems
sometimes.

There are lots of beautiful texts typeset in LaTeX. But there's also a lot of
LaTeX documents out there containing correctly typeset equations that are
nonetheless really unpleasant to read or look at, for visual design reasons.

------
vkazanov
The article is very, very misinformed. Word processors are good for text..?!
Pure text markup formats are bad? Oh, really-really?

I suspect the author never really wrote anything reasonably complicated.

How about:

1) can't have proper a version control with those binary documents word
processors generate.

2) no easy way to split huge papers/thesis/book into manageble pieces

3) conversion between formats is a nightmare, with formatting falling apart
all the time.

4) typing formulas in Word (and Libre/OpenOffice) is a torture.

5) diffs

6) ...

that's just off the top of my head.

~~~
mnw21cam
I have to say your points 1 and 5 (which in my opinion are the same thing) is
the killer reason why I write stuff in LaTeX (apart from the fact that I hate
Microsoft Word with a loathing and find LibreOffice even worse). The other
thing is that a LaTeX document is text - I trust my text editor to not mess it
up - if I make a mistake with the format and break the document, all the text
is all still there, so I can go in and fix it. With a Word/Libreoffice
document, the software is doing all sorts of stuff behind my back, so I have
no clue what it may have broken, or how to fix it.

~~~
vkazanov
yes, all those things are just... Enraging.

Having a nice diff-based change history and being able to ignore formatting
issues when writing is a blessing.

------
jhfdbkofdcho
I didn’t find this article helpful. But one of my math professors in college
quipped,

“LaTeX, never has so much bad math looked so good...”

~~~
phalangion
Similar sentiment to this comic:
[https://i.imgur.com/NwNPU.png](https://i.imgur.com/NwNPU.png)

------
dpwm
> There were also some development effort to “easy” LaTeX typesettings (for
> instance ConTeXt) but they not became widespread as “WYSIWYM” editors such
> LyX or TeXMacs, IMVHO because they are in fact less flexible than plain
> LaTeX and plain LaTeX is easier enough, at least it’s give you a easy and
> simple “learning path”.

ConTeXt is a substantially different beast to LaTeX. It's not LaTeX, although
there are some LaTeX-inspired packages and tools to help migrate. A lot of
ConTeXt is now written in Lua, and the versions in TeXlive are now
sufficiently up-to-date to work from the manuals.

ConTeXt takes the view that it will start with sensible defaults and allow
nearly all to be customized. Modules tend to play nicely together in an
orthogonal way, but a lot of documents can be written without importing any
modules.

The one thing I wouldn't say about ConTeXt is it's easier – you probably won't
find the answers on stackoverflow like for LaTeX. It's a much more complicated
system and you need the reference manual. But if you know how you want the
page laid out and don't want to have to hack away at a style file, then it's a
very powerful tool for serious typesetting.

~~~
fusiongyro
I have used ConTeXt a fair amount and I like it quite a bit. I would actually
say it is easier than LaTeX, in the sense that it is more discoverable. After
you use it for a bit, you see that the macros are all built on each other in
predictable ways, so they all tend to take the same options and achieve
similar effects. In LaTeX, the answer to your questions is usually "there's a
package for that," whereas in ConTeXt, the answer is often "this macro takes
the same options as this other macro, so just pass them in."

What is different about ConTeXt is the prevailing attitude towards using plain
TeX from it. LaTeX really seems to consider plain TeX quite unsafe. I suspect
this is because it is hard to build a resilient declarative system on highly
weird and procedural TeX. ConTeXt, on the other hand, kind of encourages you
to use TeX directly. So that led me to learning more about plain TeX, which
now seems much less scary to me than when I was using LaTeX.

~~~
dpwm
> I would actually say it is easier than LaTeX, in the sense that it is more
> discoverable.

Agreed. I think what I was trying to say is that LaTeX will have more answers
on Stack Overflow. However, once you've found the command (and you can get an
awful long way with the ten listed at the beginning of the reference manual)
then the options are well documented.

> What is different about ConTeXt is the prevailing attitude towards using
> plain TeX from it. LaTeX really seems to consider plain TeX quite unsafe.

This is very interesting. I've found the same difference but in the opposite
way. I've had to resort to using plain TeX in LaTeX quite a bit, usually
buried in an environment or a command, to achieve what I want. And yes, it can
be fragile, but sometimes it is the only way without using KOMA-Script.

I've found that ConTeXt has usually already considered what I want to do as a
use case, because its scope is quite a bit more broad than LaTeX.

~~~
fusiongyro
Most of my questions on tex.SE are about ConTeXt, simply because all paths in
ConTeXt are less explored than LaTeX. The frontier is nearer. But I have never
failed to get a useful and informative solution from one of the handful of
experts.

I wish I had sources for my other comments handy. If I have time I will try to
dig some up.

------
choeger
The author is right but IMO totally misses the point. When you do serious
writing, you probably do not want to maintain the content in LaTeX. But not
because LaTeX is difficult per se, but because there is, for instance, no way
to put the content through a decent grammar/style checker and get back some
useful annotations.

This is simply because (La-)TeX is not a context-free language. If it was, you
could parse all the paragraphs of content and feed them into, say, grammarly.
Then you could correct your issues and automatically apply the fixes. As it
stands now your only choice is to use a spell checker that already
"understands" LaTeX. Unfortunately, that understanding is guaranteed to be
wrong at some point.

Regarding the typesetting aspects: I always wondered how much performance one
could get out of a "modern" replacement for TeX. Asides from the time it takes
to typeset a 100+ page book with some TikZ elements, the results are already
quite close to perfect, IMO.

~~~
ummonk
Yeah, I’d love to see an a modern cleaner language that fills the same role as
LaTeX. Markdown + CSS doesn’t really fit the bill for a multitude of reasons,
but markdown is a good example of how easy it should be to cleanly write
simple content.

------
lewis500
Latex lets you write equations quickly. Whether that makes it worthwhile to
learn depends on how many equations you write and how quickly you want to be
able to change them.

I also like being able to write my papers in vscode, with all the shortcuts
and vim settings that I’ve gotten used to from coding. If Vim is second nature
to you, it’s frustrating to have to switch over to ms word. Vscode has a good
latex plugin.

That said, it did take some getting used to. Anything hard and potentially
useful can become a “fetish” whereby we fool ourselves it’s the usefulness
that motivates us but really it’s the hardness. I recall a time when I tried
to use matplotlib to format all my plots, with labels and such. Horrible
experience but I was really proud of these ugly graphs I’d make entirely from
code. Then one day i just started saving them and opening them in illustrator
for all the bells and whistles. Haven’t looked back.

~~~
wenc
> Latex lets you write equations quickly.

This is often underestimated. It is possible to write complicated equations
more quickly in LaTeX than in handwriting. I have done it.

However, to achieve this, there are provisos: 1) Macros already defined for
commonly used structures; 2) Lots of repeated elements that can be copy-
pasted; 3) Fast typer with a good text editor. 4) Keywords from amsmath, etc.
committed to memory.

~~~
singhrac
In college I sometimes livetex'd a class, i.e. wrote (full, not terse) notes
for a course while the professor was drawing on the board. The above is all
necessary, but this is easier than it sounds because speakers pause to let
words sink in and to write on chalkboards.

The only thing I've found missing from the Word equation editor is: 1) macros,
and 2) the output just looks less nice than in PDF form. To be fair I've never
exported but I still think Computer Modern has better glyphs.

~~~
wirrbel
I really don't like the Cambria Math font, alternative ones are

* XITS [https://github.com/alif-type/xits](https://github.com/alif-type/xits) (port of STIX, kind of looks like Times New Romans which is not my preferred style but still better than Cambria Math) * [https://github.com/firamath/firamath](https://github.com/firamath/firamath) for Sans Math font

In generally I think Computer Modern is okay, I am not enthusiastic about it.

------
CarVac
A perfect example of the Blub Paradox wherein the author cannot realize the
power of a tool superior to what they're used to, and dismisses it as useless
because "I don't need those features".

[http://wiki.c2.com/?BlubParadox](http://wiki.c2.com/?BlubParadox)

~~~
Topolomancer
Counterfactually speaking, how do _we_ know that we are not the ones looking
'up' the power spectrum, as it were?

(I am joking of course; even though I would not say that LaTeX is the 'best'
solution for all use cases, I can at least state with confidence that it
satisfies some properties that traditional word processing tools do not have.)

------
stared
Yes, it takes much more effort to write in LaTeX than in a "normal" word
processor.

Though, for managing complex things (e.g. citations, equations, being able to
change formatting of everything in a consistent way), a typical word processor
is not enough.

And when it comes to typesetting, people - show me something even close to the
level of LaTeX beauty. I bet that with LaTeX default(ish) settings I can
create a book with better typesetting than 90% found in a bookstore.

Disclaimer: wrote quite a few dozen things in LaTeX, my PhD thesis included.
For casual writing and blog posting I use Markdown or Google Docs. But for a
book, I would go for LaTeX (or at least - convert to it at some point).

~~~
moonbread
Would agree here. Use it for certain types of documents like company RFP
responses/bids and formal policies & procedures, etc. Creates a sleek,
professional-looking document where features such as "Confidential" watermarks
with opacity over downsized and embedded PDFs within the document become
possible.

It took a while to put together the initial template, but being able to reuse
it has provided value despite syntax quirks.

------
ecshafer
as a physics student I learned latex and became pretty proficient in it. I do
write in latex often and the author misses a few major points. The main point
it misses is the issue of how to write a paper fluently if i have a lot of
equations or symbols. Here is the case when just write in word is not
sufficient.

~~~
ModernMech
How so? The equation editor in word is great and even understands LaTeX
formatting. I too write scientific papers with lots of equations and find Word
more than sufficient.

~~~
mturmon
I'm surprised to hear this claim: about equations being easy in Word. I've
written long documents in both, and (1) the math layout in Word is
crude/inelegant; (2) there seems to be no easy way to change notation in Word.
If you define macros for variables in Latex, you can change notation as needed
by changing a couple of macros.

This pair of problems has driven me away from writing any but the simplest of
mathematics in Word.

I've also found the symbol set in Word to be too small, but maybe with the
universal adoption of Unicode this has been fixed.

~~~
ChrisRackauckas
It's not just in Word, it's Unicode in general. Unicode doesn't even have all
of the letters available for superscripts and subscripts. I think q is one
that doesn't exist as a subscript in Unicode. It's a good system but isn't
math-ready.

------
mnl
People use LaTeX because they have to write equations —besides referencing and
quoting them, such a pleasure without it— and the alternatives suck. If the
author of this obtuse rant doesn't need equations in print and to begin with
hasn't bothered to ask anybody about their reasons for using it before making
assumptions, I don't understand what's interesting about his personal views on
something he can't get.

Too bad, because making references/bibliographies in LaTeX also sucks less
than the alternatives. Yeah, it's not WYSIWYG, if you need WYSIWYG use
something else. I hate clicking for hours in WYSIWYG equation editors, I can
say that because I've had to do it too many times and it's soul-crushing. BTW,
your old Equation Editor objects can't be opened anymore using supported
Microsoft products. There are millions or hundreds of millions of those out
there but they couldn't care. This might teach us something etc.

There's also a fish story about the reasons for arXiv requiring LaTeX back
then: besides looking nice it really is a crackpot filter.

------
yesenadam
(2016)

I read this in 2017, and..early in 2018 spent months getting good at
LaTeX/TikZ (using TexShop), and getting some idea about TeX. It's been
amazing, well worth the time invested already. For the first time, I have
organised notes on everything, including my programming. And it looks lovely,
it's a pleasure to look over, makes me want to do more.

------
cschmidt
What a weird argument. It seems to me that LaTex is used so much because it is
the fastest way to type math equations, once you get good at it. If you don't
have math in your paper, then maybe he has a point. But whenever I have lots
of equations, there is nothing better. He kind of ignores this part, as far as
I could see.

------
man-and-laptop
I use Markdown with an HTML preview. I don't have to punch the wall because of
syntax errors, unlike with Latex. I use Pandoc to make it look the same as a
Latex-generated PDF.

I'm thinking of switching to AsciiDoc as I'm running into some of the
limitations of Markdown.

------
superfist
I fully agree with this article. Let say it clear, LaTeX is so old fashioned
nowadays.

Lack of default UTF8 support. Even if you will fix it, good luck with
additional tools like BibTex. For God's sake how this can be still an issue in
XXI century?

Lack of TrueType Fonts support. Have to use tools like XeTeX.

Beamer? Give me a brake, look at all those tamplates. Almost all of them looks
like from 90ths

LaTeX scripting language is so verbose and odd that after few weeks of not
using it you forgot most of the syntax.

Is it so hard to create new tool (LaTeX 2.0) that would base for example on
superset of HTML5, CSS and JavaScript so we can get rid of that crap?

------
yiyus
> Free and open source software has a strong tendency towards being difficult
> to install and get up and running. TeX and LaTeX are no exception.

Setting up a LaTeX environment in Windows can be difficult if you do not want
to install one of the very big suites (although being honest, who is worried
about 2GB when you need more space for something like printer "drivers"?).
However, in most Linux distributions, you just choose LaTeX in your package
manager and it works. And this is the case for most free and open source
software. I do not know about Macs.

~~~
johnminter
There is a recent development that provides a much smaller subset: TinyTex by
Yihui Xie (who has made many contributions to Rmarkdown). See
[https://yihui.name/tinytex/](https://yihui.name/tinytex/)

One can add just the packages you need and it can be installed in user
directories for people who do not have admin privleges.

------
munin
There are cynical and practical reasons to use LaTeX.

The cynical: While most conferences in CS advertise both a LaTeX and Word
template for submissions, if you submit an article in Word, it seems quite
likely it will be desk-rejected for being quackery, possibly without even
being read. Is this fair? No. Has the scientific/mathematical community lost
out on any great ideas due to this prejudice? Probably not. Think of this as
the ultimate, final form of the clear plastic binder from Calvin and Hobbes,
except Calvin was right all along and you probably can get away with saying
that bats are bugs if you write it in LaTeX. This says more about the process
of science than it does LaTeX.

The practical: I can think of three pragmatic reasons.

It seems that nowadays, good science is collaborative. Single author papers
are rare. How is it that multi-author papers are written? Writing in a text-
based markup language allows co-authors to easily send each other changes and
keep a versioned history without having to worry about "track changes" and
using file names as tags, and worrying about cross-compatability between
ancient version of Office on Mac and Windows and that one person who only has
Linux and so opens things in Libre.

In my experience, people do want to get into the weeds with formatting in
LaTeX for many reasons, good and bad. For example, how can we shave off two
lines of text so we're within the page limit (yes, even though the proceedings
will all be published electronically we will get desk rejected for being one
page over the page limit where the only thing on the last page are two lines
from the bibliography, c'est la vie). That is a bad reason. But good reasons
could include improving the look and feel of a document, or controlling where
figures are placed, or drawing figures using TikZ. Additionally, having the
sum total of the formatting in plain text has advantages. Do you think that
undo really un-does everything in Word? Can't you remember some times where
you do something, but then un-do and then do "the same thing" again and a
different result occurs? LaTeX has many foibles but that is not one of them.
Though, of course, sometimes I will wish you luck in understanding exactly why
what you wrote in LaTeX works the way it does now. But for example, it is
possible to define new mathematical symbols, operators, etc. in LaTeX in a way
that is not possible in word processors.

The third pragmatic reason is that everyone else already uses it and some day
or another your text will need to be turned into LaTeX for publication. I used
to keep a lab notebook in Markdown and sometimes I would feel the desire to
copy and paste some text from my lab notebook into a paper (if what I wrote
was particularly lucid or well written, or was at least a good place to start
from). This almost never ended well. If you have a draft of the paper in Word
you might easily spend many days converting it from Word into LaTeX. If it's
sufficiently complicated you might never get it converted. This could be a
barrier to getting collaborators or submitting at all.

I think that everyone that works with LaTeX, knows, deep down, it is absurd,
and the arguments the author runs into are not really arguments anyone would
stand by if pressed. I think if anyone is going to write something entirely in
prose, that they will never care about the versioned history of or want
collaborators on, and don't care if the finished product looks good or bad,
you can use a word processor, or at least, this is my criteria for whether or
not I use a word processor. Am I drafting an outline of how we're going to
write the proposal? That happens in Google docs. Am I actually writing the
proposal? That happens in LaTeX, because I want control over the typesetting
to fit in the page limit, I want it to look good, and I want collaborators to
be able to edit the document and send me plaintext patches rather than docx
with track changes maybe or maybe not enabled.

~~~
ModernMech
> if you submit an article in Word, it seems quite likely it will be desk-
> rejected for being quackery, possibly without even being read.

I've never had to submit source files for review. Maybe it's different in your
field? In my field (robotics) we submit PDFs for review, and only submit
source for publication.

~~~
coughupalung
What journal/conference are you submitting to? I haven't come across any in
CS/Math/EE that even have a Word template to submit with. Every last one has a
latex template.

------
akvadrako
Why would you hand-write LaTeX if you don't like it? You can just use LyX,
basically a structured WYSIWYG word processor.

------
Koshkin
While LaTex is nice (and Texmacs is almost perfect), it seems the future is in
automatic recognition of the mathematical handwriting. (I cannot imagine a
professor giving a lecture using LaTex and a large screen instead of the
whiteboard.)

------
AnyTimeTraveler
I have to confess that I mainly use \LaTeX for almost all my studywork,
because I have my templates for it, automated my workflow with scripts, and I
don't think I ever want to draw an automata again without the tikz package...

------
Madeindjs
I tried LaTeX but I found the import statements very messy. Also I spend many
times to improve output for Listing (for example). So I thinks tools like
markdown or Asciidoctot way more easy and more comfortable than LaTex....

------
jancsika
Why aren't research papers scrolls like the web is?

And why aren't equations animated already? When I mouse over onethere should
be a bunch of example numbers cascading over the equals sign splatting onto a
transient graph.

I want my jetpack.

------
cozzyd
Everytime I try to use a word processor it's full of random j's and k's. Thank
goodness overleaf V2 reintroduced git integration because my collaborators
love using overleaf for some reason.

------
leni536
An other reason to use LaTeX: it's text, so you can throw it in a VCS.

------
lallysingh
Has this guy seen pandoc?

------
cvansiclen
I'm a physicist who writes research papers using the freeware package "LyX"
(based on LaTeX). It's very flexible and easy to use. I highly recommend it!

------
LordHeini
Lets not forget that a lot of people like myself, can not be bothered with
even thinking about design.

The main reason i write stuff in either plain text or LaTex is, that i do not
want to spend even a second on figuring out the height oft a heading.

Especially if you are 2 pages in and have to remember random numbers for text
size in listings or whatever.

Every document looks like crap when i try to do it manually and on top it
wastes my time fidgeting with widths and heights.

I leave the design to people who now what they are doing (not me) and have the
computer do the tedious formatting stuff.

Also you can put those Tex docs in source control.

And if you don't like how the document looks, choose a different theme and
recompile.

------
zapzupnz
> Comparing good use of LaTeX with poor use of word processors is unfair; the
> most that can really be said is that you are more likely to be introduced to
> LaTeX in a class taught by someone who really knows how to use it, and more
> likely to be introduced to a word processor by playing around with it or
> under the informal instruction of someone who doesn’t understand it very
> well, and that, for this reason, the number of people who use LaTeX but
> don’t use its document-structuring features is probably close to zero while
> the number of people who use word processors and don’t is enormous.

I agree with this very much. My husband and I wrote our Masters theses with
LaTeX so that we could support various layout features with relative easy. I
created a LaTeX template, and all we needed to do was write our chapters and
sections in separate files. A bash script parsed the template and chapter
files twice, and spat out a nice PDF.

Oh boy, did I ever get my butt kicked by the hassle of LaTeX support for
custom CJK fonts. Oh good, just use that package. Oh no, that package doesn't
work unless you use that engine. No, that engine doesn't support custom fonts,
use a different one. Oh no, this other engine doesn't support that package,
but here's a similar package whose arcane settings you need to tweak just
right. It took nearly a week for me to get my template to match the university
style guide without throwing hissy fits after each compilation — and then I
added BibLaTeX to the mix, and it's a wonder the wall doesn't bear an imprint
of my head getting my inline APA references to respect those font and layout
choices, too!

For our purposes, just writing our theses in Pages would've been a hundred
times simpler. After we submitted our theses, I created a Pages template,
modified all the paragraph and character styles, set our preferred fonts with
CJK support, checked that the line heights were consistent, double-checked the
paragraph and line spacing, saved the template, and we've never looked back.

I'm with the author in that I'm absolutely fine with sane defaults, and I'm
sure most people are, but sane defaults for an international world. I'm glad
scientists and engineers have an easy way to typeset complicated equations and
what have you, but it's such a pain in the neck to (a) support non-ASCII
characters (b) in a font that you like (c) with consistent line height when
using CJK fonts.

Just my two cents as a non-scientist who really loves the power of LaTeX but
obviously has different needs to most of its users in support of the author's
message that writing documents in LaTeX is not some universal ideal for every
writer.

------
mcguire
(See section 7.)

Yes, I, too, fellow human, like reading rectangular 7.5" × 9" blocks of space-
and-a-half 12pt Times New Roman.

------
sigi45
Had a small CV in latex.

It sucked.

Took too much effort to install it on window. Didn't touch it for a year and
it stopped working on a newer Ubuntu version which I had to fix.

I rewrote it in HTML and css.

Anyway one thing which just sucks: research papers in latex look all the same
and are equally bad to read. Not unbearable bad but nothing for the eyes.

Someone just should write a research PDF paper viewer :-(

------
mettamage
I'll bite as a LaTeX _and_ Google Docs fetishist. Don't worry, I'm not taking
this argument too seriously but if you happen to find some good arguments in
there, please do tell!

> Seriously, anyone who believes that making people type this…

Just an introductory argument against it, not going into that. I'm looking for
meat. Hmm... meat :)

> I know a number of academic authors who seem to spend considerable amounts
> of time doing that. I shan’t say that this is worse, but is it really
> better?

I did that too, but just because I wanted to be geeky. Was it useful? No.
Would I have done this in a word processor? No. But the fact that I get to
enjoy LaTeX by being geeky gives me a good feeling to return to it and write
in it. Sounds like I have a fetish? I do! And not only one ;-)

> When it comes to stopping people from creating documents in purple 28pt
> Comic Sans, teaching them all to use LaTeX is a lot less efficient than
> stating that you will refuse to read anything that doesn’t match the style
> guide.

But LaTeX does have better alignment and justification algorithms. You won't
see the difference, unless you're starting to compare it with a word processor
[1].

> LaTeX does less to prevent authors from getting on with writing documents
> than TeX does. But if neither of the two existed, and you had to come up
> with something, right now, in 2016 – would it really be a markup language?

It depends, I see that people use Markdown for these reasons. And for my
resume writing this is definitely true. The template also looks quite nice and
I wouldn't know how to design a beautiful resume.

> we have LaTeX evangelism and the false implication that word processors
> don’t facilitate structured writing at all.

I wrote big documents in Word, Google Docs and LaTeX. I prefer LaTeX (my Gdocs
fetish is with short documents or any psychology paper I'd need to write
collaboratively).

> In sum, the case for writing in LaTeX is more than a little weak.

My reasons:

1\. Automatic reference list generation (never saw psych. students use it in
Word). I still don't know APA but I never got minus points for my
bibliography.

2\. The ability to comment. This has been huge for me (as in 10% to 20% better
grades in writing huge) Yes, you can do this in Word and yes it also distracts
me, when I do this on Overleaf it doesn't distract me. If I want to read, I
read the PDF, if I want to write or edit and get meta information, I type.

3\. Super quick restructuring thanks to include. There have been many times
where I needed to quickly move +30 pages to a completely different location.
It just takes one line.

4\. Crash resistant: one time there was this psychology student who had her
Word document crashed and unsaved. I had to use the command line to copy some
temporary saved file that Word didn't recognize (apparently...) and tweak it
in order to restore it. It took me an hour. LaTeX is a text file.

5\. Tikz: I needed to create a graph and wanted to do it programmatically.
Tikz is love, Tikz is life.

6\. Knitr: I wanted to be ultra precise and focus on purely reproducable
research, with Knitr you can put R formulas into LaTeX and calculate stuff. I
handed in my source and PDF, my psychology teacher thought I was a wizard.

7\. Different thinking cycle: by hitting compile and waiting for a bit you get
some idle time to mind wander. For me it takes the pressure off and sometimes
makes me anxious to see the result.

8\. Fetish effect: you start to care about typography and the like (see [1]).
Sometimes it isn't the programming language itself but the community behind it
that makes it so powerful (Hello JavaScript! NodeOS is wonderfully hilarious!
;-) ).

9\. Wizard effect: psychology students would leave me alone because they had
no clue what I was doing. It also made me look smart :P Is this an argument?
Hmm... I have a fetish, you pick out the good ones ;-)

10\. Placing images neatly immediately: oh wait, nope this is a downside.
Unless you just put them all in the back which is what I do. It is also kind
of neat because I tell people to print 3 bundles: (1) the text, (2) the images
and (3) the bibliography and put them side by side so they can cross-reference
things a lot faster. And with LaTeX include statements it's easy to create 3
different PDFs as well.

11\. Writing prose: whenever I want the feeling of "ohhh I'm a writer now" I
open up LaTeX get a default template and start writing immediately. It beats
Calibri by a landslide.

12\. Just knowing that I have a programming language on hands. Whenever I have
a programmatic problem, I can immediately use LaTeX. This is especially handy
for: (1) bibliography references (a .bib file is secretly a database in
disguise!) and (2) for making API calls to public data sets (have never done
this but I could see the need to do it).

13\. Oh yea, it's free. Students have no money, err... I meant they are in
debt. So free is nice. It'd be better if they give students money but that's a
utopia for another day.

Let's leave it on 13, consider it my lucky number ;-)

[1]:
[http://nitens.org/taraborelli/latex](http://nitens.org/taraborelli/latex)

~~~
mettamage
Countering counterarguments:

> To cut to the chase, LaTeX documents are very hard to read until typeset,

Not my experience on Overleaf. I compile early and often just like in
programming since it is a programming language.

> LaTeX is, as already noted, a markup language.

It is also Turing Complete and I have used it to do bibliographic database
lookups, replacement and insertions. I used to program a bibliography per
medium item and it would automatically figure out what medium item it was
(e.g. journal, online blog post, online video, book, etc.).

> disruptive of the text for human readers (including editors and the original
> author): looking at the screenshot, we see the text mixed up with a lot of
> symbols that are not part of the text

I'd recommend you to use something like Overleaf and see if that's still the
case (disclaimer: not affiliated with them, I actually used ShareLatex before
that, I only went to them because I had to since they merged -- ShareLatex is
open source by the way, so no internet connection needed).

> By the way, one of the words in the screenshot is not right. It’s a typing
> error that I deliberately inserted. I know where it is because I put it
> there, but looking for it is hurting my eyes.

Again, use something like Overleaf. They have spell-check.

> But that isn’t how most people want to write.

Most people also don't want to program. I won't recommend LaTeX to my
girlfriend either, but to fellow programmers, why not? Maybe they like the
program/debug cycle more.

> Never mind boilerplate code like \documentclass{article} or \begin{document}
> at the start of your document – running into something along the lines of
> \parencite[706]{lena_peterson_2008} in the middle of a paragraph and having
> to mentally parse it into ‘(Lena and Peterson 2008, p. 706)’ interrupts your
> train of thought and makes it harder to do what you really need to be doing:
> reading your punctuated words back to yourself to make sure that they
> ‘sound’ like what you really wanted to say and don’t have any mistakes in
> them.

I disagree. I never wanted to read my citations full out and I'm happy I can
read them by aliases.

> This is what LaTeX is good for: not helping people to compose text, but
> helping them to make it look nice. If that is important to you, go ahead and
> give it a look.

LaTeX is good for long pieces of text. I never need to scroll millions of
pages since everything is in a folder structure that I can immediately click
on. Making things look nice is very important and even a slight competitive
advantage, it makes you look more credible.

> I think you’ll probably agree that the LaTeX version looks better than the
> word processor export version. Whether it looks sufficiently better to
> justify the additional effort is a judgement call that you’ll have to make
> for yourself.

I think that students can invest the time. It took me about 40 to 80 hours to
get a good flow with LaTeX. After that I didn't have any issues anymore. Also,
whenever I got issues it was a fun procrastination activity (students like
that from time to time).

------
jayalpha
TLDR: Idiot tries to write document in Latex, fails, blogs about it.

