Why is TeX still used? What are some good, modern alternatives?

The reason TeX is still used is because it is open source and beautiful, because it is the best at handling mathematical notation, and because of its inertial dominance in math and the hard sciences in Academia. The reason TeX has so, so many fixable problems after 30 years is because there is no financial incentive for anyone to fix it.

The answer is not to find a TeX alternative. This will not be possible in Academia for a very long time. The answer is for someone to plunk down a million dollars to hire some full-time developers to fix it. Honestly, the TeX language is wonderful; it's the editors which are terrible. A TeX editor should...

[] seamlessly hide the compilation process

[] feature a modern debugging environment

[] make 99% of commands (including everything you can do in MS Word) discoverable within the editor, rather than sending the user to the internet or some pdf guide, and

[] robustly handle all modern image types

...without becoming an unstable WYSIWYG hybrid like LyX. The only thing about the language itself that might need to be changed is some standardization of common packages. I shouldn't need to download anything to get appendices and sub-figures to behave sensibly.

The amount of professor, post-doc, and grad student time wasted on TeX is staggering, and easily justifies paying for an overhaul...if only the government or some benefactor would step up.

LuaTeX can be used as a PDF writing library that has a "perfect" line breaking algorithm inside along with many other nice features. We use it as a base for our database publishing tool. Its absolutely reliable, has modern features (unicode, OTF) and can be programmed in a very decent language (Lua). You need to know TeX if you want to unleash all the power, but you don't need to program in TeX's macro language (which is fun but also a PITA).

I think that a new generation of TeX based applications will show up in the next 10 years.

Edit: some links:

http://luatex.org/ - official site

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LuaTeX - wikipedia

http://wiki.contextgarden.net/LuaTeX - LuaTeX is now also the base of ConTeXt, a LaTeX alternative

For my usage, I came to conclusion that HTML is the solution. When I need formulas, I may use TeX, for graphs I'll use Excel most of the time. For pictures Gimp etc. HTML is the glue I now use:

- You can reuse it everywhere, publish it on the web, print it

- It's easier to generate

- You can combine it with code much more easily

- Semantic tags in HTML5 (<article>, <section>) remove a big feature gap with LaTeX

- You can reuse your HTML skills for much more other topics.

I use LaTeX quite a bit, still use it for special goals (resumes, articles), but outside the scientific crowd, I don't think it is the best solution any more. I know the typography is better there than on most other software, but on that I rather wished browsers and HTML got better.

FWIW, I and my coauthors are writing "Clojure Programming" for O'Reilly using asciidoc[1]. Our source ends up being converted to a beautiful PDF using a post-commit hook that performs a translation from asciidoc -> docbook -> PDF.

I've enjoyed it so much that I'm now using asciidoc for my github readme's and such, and will likely use it for future documentation-generation requirements (e.g. generating PDF and HTML versions of library developer guides and such). For those that need mathematical notation, it appears that asciidoc just uses passthrough blocks of LaTeX math notation (or direct MathML if you're so inclined)[2].

[1] http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc

[2] http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/userguide.html#X78

I feel that the OP misunderstands TeX's virtues: it is a very powerful typesetting system whose macro system happens to be Turing complete. Typesetting is the hard problem and TeX has solved it so well that most people wanting to build a text-driven typesetting system has built on top of TeX rather than trying to replicate it. This is especially true for typesetting equations.

If you try to use TeX as a programming language, you're going to be disappointed, as the OP seems to have been. The macros work well enough for saving typing by making simple substitutions, which is what most people use them for. But using them for anything more complicated is a bit of a black art. Somewhere I read that Leslie Lamport wrote out LaTeX in pseudo-code first and then translated it into macros. Knuth was impressed by what Lamport was able to do with a system which was not meant to be a general-purpose programming language.

In the end, I think Knuth was correct to make TeX's input focused on document entry and not on programming. I've never used it, but LuaTeX seems interesting because I think it's better to use an external language for programming rather than one embedded in a document layout format.

TeX is great for typesetting but it does very little else. It's a nightmare to parse and analyse. The equation language doesn't convey any information about the equation other than it's appearance (eg syntactic scope, semantics). This makes it really hard to build things like search engines or screen readers (screen readers for LaTeX tend to end up saying things like 'sum-symbol subscript x equals zero superscript infinity x subscript one superscript two plus x subscript two superscript two' rather than 'the sum from x = 0 to infinity of x one squared plus x two squared).

I spent months building an equation search engine for Springer's math/science corpus so I've experienced the pain and horror of parsing LaTeX first hand. HTML + Semantic MathML is so much easier to work with. Its easy to parse, it allows the author to easily convey scope and semantic information and it can handle resizable displays. It just needs better tooling (eg a sane macro language which outputs MathML).

I use LaTeX for something people usually never think about: critical editions of ancient and medieval texts. A good critical edition has many typographic details (say: parallel and aligned text, apparatus, typefaces & styles, footnotes, endnotes, margin notes, eventually hundrends of bibliographic references) difficult, error-prone or even _literally_ impossible in word processors.

Of course learning to typeset this kind of work in (La)TeX is not a walk in the park, but as a professor once told me it was easier (for a skilled operator, of course) to typeset a good, not to mention beautiful, critical edition with a Lnotype machine than with Word and similar software.

I do agree that TeX could be more "programmable", in the sense at least of integration with scripting languages; however, there still isn't a better tool and LaTeX 3/LuaTeX might indeed become a solution in the foreseeable future.

I do a lot of math. That makes LaTeX much faster to write than any alternatives. At this point, in math classes, I can take notes in real time. A properly written LaTeX file is also much faster to modify -- if I'm giving a presentation, and I have an arrow between two equations on different lines, when I rearrange things, that arrow keeps pointing between those two things. I can generate LaTeX programmaticly (e.g. tables of results). I can keep it in version control and have sensible differences between versions.

My major problem is that it does not handle animation and video well. Those are increasingly coming to be critical parts of presentations, and are the major thing pushing me towards OO.Presentation or PowerPoint or similar.

I very much agree with the sentiment. LaTeX works well and it produces the best technical documents of anything I've seen, but the world could really use a modernized replacement. The syntax is a pain in the ass, the error messages are horrible, and it takes documentation to figure out how to do anything new. If it could be made more user friendly I think something like Tex would be used much more widely as well. (It works with version control, unlike word docs which are hell to manage in group collaboration.)

There are good alternatives, depending on the type of document being written. For instance, for technical documentation that does not contain to many equations[1], DocBook is often used. Since DocBook uses XML (or SGML previously), it is easy to transform with XSLT. The DocBook project provides excellent stylesheets for xhtml and xsl-fo output, making it easy to target the web and printed media. It is easy to customize output, by overriding templates in the default stylesheets.

Also, DocBook documents can be validated automatically using DTDs or RelaxNG schema. (Yes, XML is full of buzzword bingo :).)

[1] Equations can be typeset with MathML, but since most software only supports presentation MathML this is not ideal.

I got tired of OpenOffice's IMHO clunky formula editor, so I thought: "Ah ha! Pros use TeX! So should I!" Then I saw how much fingertyping is necessary to reproduce what I was doing in OO, and I went back. Of course, I was trying to kill a field mouse with a nuke, so I should have expected to be disappointed. Any recommendations for a math-friendly TeX-lite for those of us who don't need all that power?

Why I still use TeX? First of all, it still compiles my documents and samples from 1998. Try that in any other equally sophisticated system.

Second, it is the only system where I can expect a constant error rate. No feature is "done in no time", but can be solved in a rather constant time using Google and some TeX knowledge. In other systems, I am usually lost, because most of the stuff has not been tried or is not intended.

Also, it is actually quite fast in batch usage.

If you want to have a look at what can be done with TeX, have a look at the PGF documentation.

Also, don't mistake TeX with LaTeX, there are other TeX environments around that are better in certain regards.

I've recently taken to MultiMarkdown + HTML5 + CSS3 + MathJAX.

As CSS3 support gets better and libraries like MathJAX brings beautiful math to HTML, I see less and less reason to stick with TeX.

One of the remaining issues I'm struggling with is margins which browsers unfortunately seem to have real problems with. However, if you can do with just default margins, MultiMarkdown -> HTML in your browser -> PDF works perfectly.

I use LaTeX in an academic setting (theoretical linguistics) which only occasionally requires a lot of math, but I'm still saving tons of man-hours by using the LaTeX + Emacs + AUCTeX combo. Here are some frequent use cases where LaTeX blows a text processor out of the water.

* Bibliography. The median article length in our field is 30+ pages, with reference lists of 60+ not uncommon. Maintaining these in Word/OO is a nightmare, even with (non-free) bibliography software. RefTeX allows me to find and insert citations in a matter of three keystrokes, and whenever I reshuffle the reference list I'm 100% sure it's in order (i.e. everything I cite in the text is in the references and there are no uncited references)

* We don't use math, but we do use a lot of tree-like diagrams. Drawing these by hand is a chore; using logical markup to get trees which need zero to very little tuning saves enormous amounts of time and frustration.

* Floats and numbered examples. TeX floats are notoriously unreliable, but seriously, are Word's any better? And it gets worse with numbered examples (and pictures in numbered examples). For instance, a frequent feature of linguistics papers is an interlinear gloss: two or three lines of elements that have to line up with each other. These involve tables or tab stops in a word processor, and are notoriously fragile (e. g. if your sentence doesn't fit on one line, you get horrible issues with breaking lines).

All this is in addition to the common advantages like keeping track of numbering. These are all things that can be done with a word processor, but usually require significant amounts of time and self-discipline.

A lot of people in our department use LaTeX; most are not of the "programming" type, and are not deeply "into" LaTeX, interacting with the very basics and using some googling and copy-pasting. They still get much more satisfactory results in a shorter amount of time than the Word people.

Pandoc is another alternative that uses Markdown for syntax and converts to a variety of formats (html, epub, rtf, odt, docbook, pdf, LaTeX, etc.):

http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

Works quite well. If you known LaTeX, it allows you to customize your output template, while still composing in Markdown.

WYSIWYG editors are not an example of intuitiveness either, most people don't get the concept of Style in MS Word like editors.

For that, I find the hierarchy macros of Latex much simpler to apprehend as well as lot of goodies: footnotes, references, hyperref, mathematic mode, bibliography management…

Also, and it's blocker for lot of my use cases, Latex is version control friendly. The WYSIWYG editors are not.

Changing fonts may become a PITA and I recommend to use the koma-script classes for that (btw, the whole system of packages and the build system are a mess), but at least people can't use Comic Sans.

Off-topic, but the closing of interesting open-ended discussion points is one of the reasons I avoid stack overflow.

Independent of the elegant typesetting it produces, TeX contains well-designed notation for mathematics, reflecting the algorithmic bent of its author, Don Knuth.

Mathematics doesn't change as frequently as desktop publishing, so it's a good bet that the TeX (e.g. $\int_0^1 \tau \, d\tau$) is going to be around as long as people talk math online.

That said, I think there are much easier-to-use and less error-prone desktop publishing tools (e.g. Scribus) for less math-heavy domains, like magazine layout.

Nearly all the most beautifully typeset documents I've ever seen have been typeset in TeX. Also, it's probably the only way I can type in a mathematical formula without going crazy.

That said, I never use TeX. It's too much work. Bean.app is more than I need.

I argue that TeX isn't widely used in nearly all of academia. Microsoft Word is awkwardly common, for what I've seen. The likelihood of TeX use grows with the probability of having to include complex equations into papers. This will emphasize—with perhaps the notable exception of CS—the sciences without the word 'science' in them.

Generally, it's easier to write logically structured text rather than physically structured text. Thus, instead of battling with physical layout people have a subtle incentive to try to let a computer automated some of that work for them in hope for productivity gains. Various text authoring tools and word processors can help with that to some extent.

The differences come into play as different software start cracking broke in different ways. Some people are never able to cross the border to something more complex and powerful and are thus forever limited to pixel-perfecting their MS Word layouts, equations, and formatting—quite complex and powerless in itself! Now, TeX has that power but comes with a steep learning curve and a significant load of archaic baggage. This means that, for people with certain inclination, it will be at some point be easier to battle with TeX than with other typesetting or text authoring programs.

TeX users don't probably drool its unlimited awesomeness. It just means that for many of them TeX is the best known tool for the job. If there ever is an another tool that allows them the power of TeX and yet comes with a good library of facades that shield them from the inevitable ugly innards it will probably win over many people over time. Nobody likes to write HTML/XML and MathML but think something like Markdown with cross-references, TeX-like equations, a good chaptering markup, and you're close.

I have used LaTeX, TeX and ConTeX for years as my only programming language for writing beautiful docs and I think that nowadays there isn't a good alternative if you write technical documents that have math inside.

Today I use XeTeX together with the swiss-knife memoir class and a huge preamble that I have built over the years. XeTeX is modern and lets you write your docs in UTF8 with ease. I have stopped writing a lot of commands by hand cause there are a lot of modern editors out there (TeXShop on the Mac, TeXworks/TeXnicCenter on Windows, Kile and a bunch of others in Linux.)

When you enter the TeX world you cannot go back cause you start to see typographical errors everywhere: wrong kerning, missing ligatures, wrong align in formulas, wrong page dimensions and others. As Don Knuth says: "I can't go to a restaurant and order food because I keep looking at the fonts on the menu."

The beauty of LaTeX (XeLaTeX in this case): http://nitens.org/taraborelli/latex

People that suggest this usually don't have experience using Tex. Tex may be hard to learn, but it is the best solution for the problem it is supposed to solve: high quality technical documents. Of course you can create something easier to use, but to achieve the same fine quality you'll need so much control that the system will end up more complicated than Tex.

If you really want Tex quality without much work, one can just use Lyx, a gui application that uses Tex as the backend.

It's good at what it does. We need useful layers on top of it.

We need a simple, hot-key friendly outliner that persists to something very much like docbook. Then you'd transform to TeX when you need something printed, and to html if you want the same content on the web, and to some sort of braile engine if you want blind people to interact with it.

A major obstacle to better document production is the WYSIWYG is a bad but strong meme.

I think Tex is wonderful just as it is. It does have a learning curve, like any powerful system, but so does e.g. html+css or any programming language. Emacs is a great editor and I run it with a simple inotify script to get automatic compilation. The error messages could be better, but that too comes with experience; I can almost always tell exacty what is wrong from the error message. Tex is so well suited to the purpose of producing mathematical documents that I really think asking for a modern replacement is like asking for a modern replacement for HTML. If you are not interested in becoming an expert user, go with a front end (the equivalent of frontpage or dreamweaver or similar). For the heaviest users, learning Latex is not a big deal relative to the other arcane knowledge one must acquire to write something worthwhile with it. As others have said, the investment is paid off in beauty, speed, and control.

If you have to ask why TeX is still used as a tool, then you don't understand what TeX is. You should not view it as a program or a fad that gets outdated when the latest version of BozOS Release 9 comes out. TeX is a theoretical solution to the problem of computer typesetting. As an article ages but still remains a reference until the science has advanced, TeX stays the same until somebody discovers something that makes it a footnote in history.

The fact that you can install a program called TeX on your computer is marginally irrelevant.

The question you want to ask is: after Knuth has solved to the best of his ability the general problem of computer typesetting, why hasn't anyone bridged his theory with the front-ends that everyone uses? My take is: the shiny tools that exist were good enough for most people to toy with.

Summary: someone is too lazy to do some studying in order to take advantage of (La)Tex's awesomeness.

I have written a few books using LaTex: in my experience way nicer than using a word processor.

I think TeX notation for maths is still very good, sometimes you just need that bulk to properly handle equations, though finding symbol keywords can be a pain.

I recently released a web editor for Markdown/LaTeX mix (http://notepag.es/introduction) using Showdown/Mathjax. Have found it very useful for quick technical docs (assignments at university primarily). Though it still needs some smoothing between markdown and tex.

Could have been "Why is C still used? What are some good, modern alternatives?" heck this works too "Why is HTTP still used? What are some good, modern alternatives?"

Because, sometimes, someone gets something right and a lot of people build some exceptional infrastructure around it and then it lasts.

The answers on HN are better and have more variety than SE!

why is it still used?

WYSIWYW >> WYSIWYG

modern alternatives?

nothing i can think of.

Part One

I can respond here in sections:

I. My Background.

II. How to Use TeX.

III. What TeX is Good for.

IV. Warnings.

below:

I. My Background.

I was an early member of the TeX user's group (TUG) and have been a serious and happy TeX user for 15 years.

I use TeX itself just as Knuth wrote it and rarely have anything to do with LaTeX or any of the other extensions or preprocessors.

The TeX installation I use is ProTeX 1.2, which now is relatively old. From ProTeX 1.2, beyond TeX itself, I make heavy use of three more programs: (1) The screen preview program YAP (yet another previewer). (2) The program DVIPDFM.EXE for converting TeX output files with extension DVI (device independent file) to PDF. (3) The spell checker Aspell.

I type my input into my favorite, general-purpose, programmable editor KEdit. Nearly all my typing for anything goes into KEdit -- blog posts, e-mail, notes on cooking to car and house maintenance, programming in ASP.NET, Visual Basic .NET, C, PL/I, Fortran, Rexx, etc. And I use Aspell for essentially all my spell checking.

Point: My means of input to TeX is just this general purpose text editor. I do a lot of typing, use this editor heavily and have for 25 years, and, thus, have good facility with it. So, I minimize typing into anything else and am pleased that for TeX I can type just into this same text editor. In particular, for entering TeX I want nothing to do with any other tools for typing. I would consider converting to an editor better than KEdit, but I see no candidates.

I have a Ph.D. in applied math, and for me TeX is one of my most important professional tools. Why? A crucial reason is, for typing math TeX is well designed.

Since TeX has high quality in many respects, I also use it for nearly all my higher quality word processing -- letters, foils, technical documentation, business plans, etc.

II. How to Use TeX.

There is a book, Knuth's 'The TeXBook'. It is polished documentation, very carefully written to make first and easy things easy but still contains a lot of detail. Really you need a copy of the book and to read at least the easier parts cover to cover.

In its internal design as software, TeX makes heavy use of the idea of 'macros'. The main idea of the macros is just string substitution. The main use of the macros is just to replace some frequently used long patterns of typing with short patterns.

The macro language is powerful enough that TeX is really a programming language. Yes, the language supports arithmetic, string manipulations, if-then, loops, and reading and writing files.

The language also has an elegant 'architecture' of scope of names. So there is the nested and static scoping of what is typed in and also the nested and dynamic scoping as the macros execute. For this scoping, there is memory management with a push down stack with some enhancements.

So, a good TeX user will write some macros, and I have over 100 that I have used for years and write new ones occasionally. I have macros for tables of contents, automatic numbering of chapters, sections, tables, and figures, cross referencing, bibliographic entries, simple lists, ordered lists, and lists with bullet points, putting TeX annotation on figures, using some of the special math fonts from the AMS (American Mathematical Society), more in memory management, etc.

TeX has a concept 'verbatim' which means to produce output 'just as entered' and that might contain characters such as '$_%\' usually treated in special ways in TeX. I have several macros for verbatim, and some of these are good for listing source code and TeX macros.

To create a new document with TeX, I make use of the windows in Windows: So, I have one window with KEdit with the document I am creating, one window for the screen preview program YAP, and one window to run the TeX program itself. These three windows work well.

So, I type in my document, run TeX, and look at the output in YAP. The process works well.

If there is some tricky TeX usage in my document, then at the tricky part I repeatedly execute a fast loop of type, run TeX, and look at YAP.

TeX is so efficient that on a PC with a 1.8 GHz processor, usually TeX is done in less than two seconds, maybe less than the time it takes for me to get my finger off the Enter key.

I have enough experience with TeX that now I rarely have to look at my copy of 'The TeXBook'. E.g., my main collection of TeX macros are all in one directory and have documentation, and I have a KEdit macro that displays the directory of TeX macros so that I can easily check details. I have many examples of TeX usage, and for something tricky I've done before I just look at the old example.

Generally in my computer usage, I want to script things; TeX is easy to drive with scripts, and I do that.

Going back at least to Xerox PARC, there is a 'paradigm' of computer 'graphical user interface' (GUI) based heavily on buttons like on a kitchen appliance and a mouse for pushing the buttons. Microsoft's Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are based heavily on this paradigm. There are 'integrated development environments' (IDEs) for writing software that make heavy use of this paradigm. There are Web browsers, and now there is more with 'smart phones'.

GUIs have revolutionized computing: E.g., on the Internet GUI Web browsers are one of the main differences between the current Web which is changing the world and various 'bulletin board' systems that came before which changed little.

But GUIs have some problems; TeX is not based on GUIs, and I don't want it to be.

There is an old description: "With 'what you see is what you get' (WYSIWYG), what you see is all you've got.". To see the importance of the difference, with TeX your input is explicit, in text, in a file, and, if you wish, with some documentation of any tricky parts. E.g., my simplest verbatim macro has 54 lines of documentation and 7 lines of TeX code. So, with the 'explicitness', you know what you did, can copy it, use it again, document it, modify it, etc., and all such things are more difficult to worse with GUI WYSIWYG approaches.

When you solve that one, you can try to figure out why people still listen to Chopin's music, or read Shakespeare.