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Comment by renke1 | Hacker News Reader

I used LaTeX a lot in university, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Even a minimal (and good looking) document requires a lot of (La)TeX knowledge.

You can of course use one of many existing templates, but you will quickly feel lost when you have to customize things.

These days, just go with Markdown (or the like) and just include assets (say graphs) as SVG and be done with it.

For scientific papers (especially with two columns layout) you probably have to go with LaTeX though.

Edit: By the way, my take at minimal LaTeX templates: https://github.com/renke/latex-templates

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I used to write my resume using Latex, there is a pretty good lib for this. However, moving from windows to OsX forced me to spend some time and money in order to make it compile again. I also had to tune up some details with a pdf editor. I don't remember which ones, only that it was easier to modify the document by hand rather than modifying the pdf lib.

In the end, I gave up. My profile is on LinkedIn anyway and I have an out of date version in google docs. I don't have as much control on the document, but it takes me a couple of minutes to add a new entry and get a good result.

I used it for the language manual used on our compiler design lectures, thesis monthly reports and final thesis.

Nowadays I just use Markdown, Word or Libre Office.

In some projects at work we used Docbook and DITA, coupled with text processor like applications.

Where Latex really shines is writing papers full of mathematical or scientifical notation, with a huge references section at end.

I don't see a place for it on the office workflows.

I don't know, I don't find Word or LibrePffice documents to be very visually appealing. Maybe I spend a lot of time reading nicely typeset documents, but MS Office just doesn't cut it any more.

You can compile from markdown to LaTeX, getting nearly the best of both worlds.

In 5 minutes you can configure your word document to look just like something LaTeX would output.

It is interesting that learning LaTeX is a completely reasonable thing to spend time on but learning the basics of styles (surprisingly similar to how styles work everywhere else) is thoroughly unacceptable.

Licenses of office are pretty expensive and the software is extremely bloated. It is also proprietary and not on linix

Latex has bloat problems too but there must be some lightweight distribution i just didnt find

Same for libre office, extremel bloated, but i still work sometimes with it. Latex has also better support in a lot of communities and a ton of packages.

What do you do in your first five minutes in a new Word document then? Or do you have a go-to template?

LaTeX is a more developer friendly tool than Office is, so it makes sense.

If you used Latex a lot, isn't it worth learning it well? It's like somebody using python a lot for science work, but just copying things around, because they don't bother to learn the language.

Don't get me wrong. Learning TeX is probably a worthwhile experience. I was actually trying to get a deeper understanding of TeX, but – to be honest – it's not that easy to get started and thus I gave up pretty quickly. Mostly because there is not that much you can do with TeX even if you mastered it. It's "only" a typesetting system and not really a general purpose programming language (although it is Turing-complete).

>but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

surely you're not being literal, or you meant "wouldn't recommend it to just anyone" - for example for setting mathematical and physics formulas, wouldn't you still recommend it?

Yes, of course, you are right. I forgot about formulas altogether! That's where LaTeX really shines!

But even then you could probably integrate MathJax or KaTeX with Markdown. That would give you the best of both worlds.

Yeah, LaTeX is great, but mostly you won't need the superpowers that a document-programming language gives you. When Markdown doesn't quite do what I need, Asciidoc usually does (Pro Git 2 was written in Asciidoc).

I'm a big fan of Asciidoc. It's nice to have the option of advanced features, while still dealing in text.

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