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Comment by aceperry | Hacker News Reader

I tried to learn LaTex a long time ago when I was just getting started with Linux, but gave up when I found that I could use MS Word and get what I needed, without the steep learning curve. I'm sure LaTex is much better than Word for some things, but I've never needed anything as specialized as LaTex. In fact, I don't use 99% of what Word is capable of and most of the time I'm using a simple text editor or vim or atom.

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LaTeX was never meant to be used as a word processor. It's amazing for Math and other scientific writing, but apart from that, it's just much faster to open up your basic Word Processor and get on to playing the keys.

The problem is that a lot of LaTeX zealots and fanboys tell you to use it as soon as you mention Word/Pages/Google Docs/etc. This can confuse beginners and the public in general as to what LaTeX is for.

Meh. The public, in general, has a hard time with Word, too.

Which isn't to say that word processors aren't nice. I actually held off on learning LaTeX years ago because I didn't see the point. The fact that I can still reliably open my documents is huge, though. And it only takes training to learn to use it. For transient things that just don't matter? Yeah, they work fine.

What irks a lot of us is how we typically are given yet another document sharing method for documents that have to be kept in sync with source.

Worse, a SharePoint or workdocs link that only works from one of my browsers correctly and has horrendous correspondence features. So bad that collaboration typically is, pick someone from the team and they will completely own this.

>The fact that I can still reliably open my documents is huge, though

I've had multiple instances where a document that compiled with one LaTeX installation didn't compile with another. It was always possible to fix after a certain amount of head-scratching, but LaTeX is a twisted network of packages that interact with each other in unpredictable ways, and there's no real guarantee that your LaTeX will still compile in 10 years.

This is not that surprising. But I usually limited the packages I would use. Certainly didn't use too many in one shot.

I've toyed with the idea of going vanilla TeX for most things. Haven't done it, yet. Org-mode has made it so I really like the source format.

Word processor file formats lack diffs that a human can read. And nobody has had show codes since WP died. LaTeX is a mystery, but it rewards the curious.

Word itself will diff Word documents beautifully, and there are alternative solutions as well (Workshare/DeltaView, Change-Pro, etc.) that are even more powerful.

It has certainly gotten better, to say it is beautiful is a stretch.

Seems invariably, someone doesn't realize which is the old and which the new. So, when someone finally "accepts" the changes, something if getting lost. Worse, the folks that never accept and just keep passing the review docs.

And heaven help you if you want to preview style or layout changes.

(And please don't take it as this being fixed by other toolchains. Not my intent.)

If you just want to put words on a page and print it out, sure, use a word processor.

But if you have to generate more than one document with the same formatting, or a very large document, LaTeX is the way to go.

I use it, interfaced with SQLite-generated CSV files, to compile 50 page reports for work with no effort at all. This process used to take hours.

Another thing I do for work is using SQL to actually generate LaTeX documents programmatically, using premade macros that are stored in a class file.

The power and consistent behavior is what makes it better than word processors.

Interesting approach. You imply that your output is not printed. It seems to me that HTML with style sheets would be an equally good approach? Not telling you, just curious about your workflow. Any browser can handle a 50 page document without breaking a sweat.

It is printed, in fact, so browser stuff wouldn't work.

It could. I have a couple of apps that will render HTML to PDF server-side for users to download.

Rendering LaTeX to PDF would be far less fuss, however, when you already have the HTML templates it is the path of least resistance.

True, it would be easier, but a common person can do the same thing in Office much faster. Linking Excel columns to fill a Word document doesn't take that long. I've seen a few places use Excel as a billing software with a little bit of VBScript. Outside of the tech world, I don't see it gaining traction. At the end of the day, we all need different products for different kinds of users. If you're wondering, I'm the LaTeX kind, used it everywhere I could.

As someone who writes "word process" documents using XeLaTeX: no it isn't. It's MUCH faster to spend one day of your life setting up a good preamble, and then never using Word and friends ever again.

However, that one day is filled with rage and confusion. Then again: if you're serious about writing, is it worth it? Absolutely.

If you ever want easy-to-update, high quality documents, LaTeX is what you want. You simply see the difference between word and LaTeX. With microtype, you can easily reproduce the quality of highly paid typography-experts.

Not to speak about versioning! I can easily git diff my LaTeX plain text files, but doing so with Word files...

Versioning is where the Microsoft world, and probably all graphical word processors suck big-time.

The world of pain I go through when I have to collaborate with partners in government or defence, sending back and forth word files from various word versions and tracking comments and changes leaves me losing the will to live.

Oh if we would only have the GitHub GUI for Office files!

Word itself provides a compare function that works very well, and there are alternative tools that also provide versioning functionality that can be combined with various document management tools, essentially providing GitHub for Word files (see, e.g., Interwoven iManage, etc.).

Unless you work with different Word versions, and different people across different organisations and send Word documents back and forth, trying to keep a workflow going...

Also commenting sucks, in some versions replies add a comment (which renumbers them all..), and in the next version the comment numbers are not displayed. It's a mess really.

Add-ons like iManage are relatively useless if you work with multiple orgs.

With a caveat...

LaTeX is great for a lot of things... but you might want to look at ConteXt too. While it's less sophisticated in many ways, but way way more advanced in others, like color-handling and inline figures and images, and better support for advanced PDF features.

It's also a little bit lower level... whereas LaTeX has a lot of opinionated defaults, ConteXt tends to expose a few more of the primatives.

Basically - if LaTeX is the better Word, ConteXt is the alternative InDesign.

https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/4987/why-should-i-be...

Check out TeXmacs, it's amazing - powerful and easy to use.

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