LaTeX is the standard "plain text" [1] format for academic publishing in STEM. For those (like the author) who were unfamiliar with LaTeX or find it daunting, I recommend LyX (http://www.lyx.org/). Lyx gives you the best of both worlds: LaTeX under the hood, but with a GUI interface.
Also... you should look into BibTeX for citation management. This is much easier than the examples given in the article -- especially with Google Scholar citations pre-prepared in BibTeX format.
[1] Considering the definition of "plain text" very loosely, since markdown and LaTeX include rendering cues.
There's also markdown if you want plain text but just a bit of extra formatting. You can even embed LaTeX snippets in markdown that get interpreted when you run it through Pandoc. Then you can use LaTeX without dealing with LaTeX typesetting.
Latex has some really weird idiosyncrasies and the tooling around it is stuck in the 80s but all is forgiven when you see how pretty everything ends up looking.
The fonts in almost every PDF that I have ever seen created with Latex just look horrible to me. Am struggling to understand why my perception is so much different than most people who seem very happy with the results.
Just googled "latex pdf" and looked at the very first pdf on offer[1], and indeed the fonts look horrible to me, like there is no anti-aliasing applied -- jagged and inconsistent weighting of stems.
Am genuinely confused here, and wish I had an explanation of why my perception of Latex output is so different from the majority.
The original TeX fonts are rendered as bitmaps from an outline format that isn't very compatible with PDF (based on pen strokes rather than outlines). Some older toolchains embed these fonts as bitmaps. It doesn't look particularly good in a PDF.
There now are TrueType versions of these fonts, that are default in modern TeX distributions, but not everybody uses them. (Especially older papers.). There are some scripts out there to do substitution in ps files, but not PDF.
Frustratingly, Donald Knuth still uses the bitmap versions; see any of the TAOCP fascicles. I don't mind the appearance that much, but OS X does a terrible job handling files with bitmap fonts.
Unrelated to the rendering technicalities, I agree that Computer Modern (the default) is not a beautiful font. It's the Times New Roman of the LaTex world, saying "I don't give a shit about typography".
But throw on something like Sabon with a proper microtype config, use some nice large chapter/section headings, and LaTeX will give you the paper equivalent of world class latte art.
Do you mean why is LaTeX the base tools and library of options so large? Because it supports a number of different document types, languages and formatting options. Do you want a mathematical/scientific journal article? Humanities? Is it a short story that you're submitting for review or do you want it formatted for printing? A poster? A presentation? What language(s) will you need? Different fonts for different effects or preferences. Do you want a modern look? To imitate something from a different time?
The bulk of it is stuff you don't need. Most folks probably don't need anything more than the format for the journal they're submitting to or a couple standard formats for books or articles. But your article format and mine might be different, either by aesthetic preference or technical requirement (maybe I'm publishing something on ancient Greek, and you're publishing a paper on some number theory topic).
However, by using a common language/environment we get things like CTAN which help to spread the features we added or allow us to discover features we want so we don't have to reinvent the wheel (though it still happens). It's also probably so large because it's been around so long. LaTeX dates to 1984, with TeX being released in 1978. So we have 31 and 37 years of community contributions to these tools.
When Don Knuth wrote TeX, the engine underlying LaTeX, he made sure that typesetting was a top priority. This includes all sorts of novel spacing, hyphenation, and other algorithms. See some more examples here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX#Typesetting_system
For anyone who appreciates Typography, there are few things out there that can produce aesthetic results as pleasing as LaTeX.
It does have its downsides though, no question, including a steep learning curve, unintuitive error msgs etc.
I've had a go at org mode being a die hard user, but never got past the original hump. Maybe I need something that better reflects my workflow, maybe disorg-mode.
Agreed, but I can't for the life of me figure out how to put tables with first-row headings and ones with first-column headings in the same file. Any ideas?
At the 2014 TeX conference one speaker gave out a MacTeX distributions (that's based on TeX Live) on a 8GB USB stick. Personally I wonder whether putting a lot of effort into creating stripped-down versions is worthwhile.
Unless things have changed recently, MacTex also provided a minimal distribution which was only a couple hundred MB. I used it for my thesis when I was using a space-constrained SSD. You can use tlmgr (texlive manager) to install packages as needed.
actually, i use LaTeX to write and it doesn't solve one of the issues identified in the linked article, namely the distraction of formatting. I spent way too much time trying to make LaTeX work just right: a bullet here, footnotes there, should that be a chapter or a section?
Just writing plain text would help with that... I was thinking of switching to Markdown because of this, but looking at pandoc again is interesting, because of the footnote support. But it's basically "Pandoc's Markdown", essentially...
Too bad we can't seem to standardize Markdown properly... maybe the IETF will save us there? (rimshot)
Also... you should look into BibTeX for citation management. This is much easier than the examples given in the article -- especially with Google Scholar citations pre-prepared in BibTeX format.
[1] Considering the definition of "plain text" very loosely, since markdown and LaTeX include rendering cues.