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Comment by coliveira | Hacker News Reader

Millions of people, including me, disagree. LaTeX has allowed me to write articles, books, and other documents for decades, and I have not to worry if it will be there in 10 years or more. It is the work of genius (Knuth), and continues to be widely used.

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It’s used by millions of academics with Stockholm Syndrome.

One needs a different perspective. It is used by millions of academics who did not yet try TeXmacs.

I use LaTeX. I tried TeXmacs out of curiosity. It’s not good enough, by far.

Just out of curiosity, how much time ago did you try it? On the one hand the latest version, 2.1.1, runs very smoothly and has a complete set of features (the extensibility of course allows to augment them, just like in TeX); on the other hand TeXmacs has very different principles than any other document preparation system and need just a bit of time (far less then LaTeX) to get used to. This blog post by Massimiliano Gubinelli may be a good introduction: https://texmacs.github.io/notes/docs/art-of-math-writing.htm...

Have you tried to write any non trivial document with MS Word? It is infuriating. Even the simplest tasks don't work reliably, like placing a picture with a caption. And oh my god if you try to Google for your problem you end up on outdated MS doc pages or what the pages describe only works in the desktop app and not the online version.

> Have you tried to write any non trivial document with MS Word?

The last bullet point in dash2's comment specifically says "markdown". Why would you bring up MS Word?

There aren't many academic articles written in markdown. Most major conferences only accept word or PDF files, so it's a reasonable assumption to make.

And since you brought up Word, I'll add that it has never in 30 years done numbering right, whether sections (like legal numbering: 1, 1.1, 1.1.1 etc.) or lists. In fact I think it's worse than it used to be; I was tearing my hair out recently trying to get it to number lists, which is such a simple thing.

It's used by millions of academics because it is literally the best option, warts and all.

Markdown is vastly under-powered for a lot of things people need to do. Word is a hot mess for the same. Etc. etc.

ReST has TeX level of power and it's internal data structure maps mostly 1:1 onto DocBook if the native output capabilities of docutils aren't good enough. It's a shame Markdown took over the mindshare for ASCII markup.

LaTeX is not made by Knuth, it's from Lamport.

LaTeX is just a set of packages that run on Knuth's creation.

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