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Comment by azalemeth | Hacker News Reader

I am both a programmer and someone who uses a fair amount of mathematics – I work in medical imaging, and it is not uncommon to have both psudeocode and "proper" equations in a talk.

I _still_ think that Keynote together with a colour-formatting syntax highlighter just can't be beat. Beamer on latex is excellent and listings is powerful – but it takes too long. Keynote's latex engine is 99.9% good enough and being able to arrange things graphically is just a killer feature. This looks like a very fancy, shiny project – but also at some level a bit of a time-sink. I'm really bad at spending effort on formatting instead of content, because I enjoy it, and it's a nice form of procrastination!

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I didn't even realize Keynote had a latex engine. The equation support in Powerpoint results in nice formatting, but Powerpoint doesn't directly support latex format without third-party addins so it gets a bit tedious to use for more than a one-off. I generally end up using the equation editor in Word (that does support latex[1]) as a workaround, and just copying the output into Powerpoint.

Will have to give Keynote a try!

[1] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/write-an-equation...

My experience of the equation editor in Word on MacOS is that it definitely does not support any meaningful degree of compatibility with TeX. Command-alt-E in Keynote works properly and seems to have most of amsmath imported by default: you can \begin{pmatrix} or \begin{cases} easily.

One of my worst weekly experiences is receiving documents in Word, especially papers written by colleagues with maths in them. Writing Markov chains in the supplementary methods section for a recent paper genuinely drove me to distraction; each non-ascii character was a major break from the flow of the sentence and requires a move to the mouse.

I really dislike Word in general, actually: on Linux (my workstation) LibreOffice is integrated well and polished; on MacOS it isn't as much as there's some value in having the 'real deal' product as administrators in my university use it a lot. I don't understand why Word's behaviour is interpreted differently from that of the rest of MacOS: e.g. in Word, clicking to select a chunk of text from the middle of the word automatically selects the whole word the cursor was in, unlike the rest of MacOS. This makes selecting parts of a word almost impossible, and it's not possible (AFAIK) to turn this behaviour off.

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