It would be much easier to get better if you could view other's latex code.
Becoming more proficient with TeX saves time and makes for more re-usable typesetting structures, which allow you to accurately do what you want faster and faster.
It's similar to using emacs or vim. You could say, "Why should programming devotees expect others to adopt those editors?"
It's about productivity. I'm a productivity devotee and when I hear people use short-term thinking to discount how valuable the up-front costs for learning TeX (or emacs/vim, etc) are, it motivates me to help them see why it's not true.
Of course, I don't want to be dogmatic either. If something works for you and your personal utility function discounts the value of things like TeX or emacs, that's fine.
Not necessarily, there's an opportunity cost to all the time you spend become proficient with TeX. If there are other products that offer sufficient control over typesetting with less time and effort, and you don't anticipate needing the advanced features that are unavailable in competing products, then becoming a TeX expert is a complete waste of time. I'm happy to concede that it's probably the best tool and certainly the best value for money, but if someone's needs are quite limited then an adequate-but-easy-to-use tool may be preferable to the superior-but-user-unfriendly one.
Actually, that's a great comparison. I don't use either of those (yeah, I said it) because of their arcane interfaces. I don't doubt for a second that wizards with those programs, and LaTeX, can do great things, but IDEs exist for the same reason word processors do - to make it easier to focus on creating.
IDEs exist for the same reason 7/11 exists. Convenience. You pay a higher price (lost productivity) to experience certain comforts (clicking a button instead of issuing a keystroke command).
My experience has universally been that IDEs only get in the way of focusing on creating. They might be necessary when you are literally just beginning with software and you need a lot of scaffolding to help you -- and I don't think anyone would begrudge university students using IDEs.
But not using a power editor once you are an experienced programmer is hard to understand. I mean, it's so important that it was even included as a whole chapter in The Pragmatic Programmer.
Paying the up-front costs of proficient editor usage is like paying the up-front costs of wearing braces so you can have straight teeth or wearing correcting shoes so you can walk properly. Of course it's more convenient in an absolute sense to simply not wear braces or corrective shoes. But that's not the point. The point is that the value you get from the outcome (e.g. straight teeth, proper walking, or dramatically increased productivity when developing) is far greater than the cost.
In other words, I think you're using a hyperbolic discount function. You are placing such a high value on absolutely immediate "focus on creating" that you incorrectly discount how much more focus on creating you would be able to do with the power of a real editor framework.
For the 90%+, it's an arbitrary checkbox requirement to be checked on the path towards something else.
No it is about aesthetics, which are mostly irrelevant for 99% of all research papers.
Unless you think that reading red text on a blue background in payprus would be an equally enjoyable reading experience it more than simple aesthetics.
> Fine, TeX is an ugly language that only a programmer could love, but in over twenty years nobody has yet been able to replace its expressive power and flexibility
Which doesn't make it less ugly. If we can't cure common cold yet, that is no reason to praise it and making it sound as if it's a great thing. It is a problem and so is the need to use ugly language to produce aesthetically pleasing papers. The fact that we don't have solution for this problem yet does not turn it into non-problem. It just says nobody yet was good enough to solve it.
> It's similar to using emacs or vim. You could say, "Why should programming devotees expect others to adopt those editors?"
Exactly. There were times when I wrote emacs lisp and vim macros, and had time to dive into arcane mechanics of it. I don't have that luxury anymore. I need the editor to just work and do what I need to be done, without me investing significant time into it. Maybe if I spend couple of days on learning stuff about vim I could do in one minute when now I do in ten, but I'm not sure it pays off anymore, and frankly I have more interesting things to learn. I do use vim (not emacs anymore) but for me I came to the conclusion that added value of diving into the arcana with the goal of being more efficient later vs. brute-forcing through the immediate tasks is just not worth it. Later you'd need a different thing than you thought you'd need anyway.
And, note, I am a programmer. I can imagine how less interested would be a person who does not spend their days digging into the code anyway.
The joy of LaTeX is that it handles the aesthetics for you. You can focus entirely on structure. Or that's how it works when you have good boilerplate to start from.
One LaTeX-agnostic example is when people abuse hyphens-like this-which makes it impossible to parse the sentence without reading it several times.
I'm one of the founders, and we're also making it possible to directly submit projects from Overleaf to repositories such as the arXiv and bioRxiv, and to traditional journals, to help speed up the submission and publication process.[2]