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Comment by shp0ngle | Hacker News Reader

Oh I remember my CS years, when all the professors were raving to me about LaTeX, and I never understood why.

Sure, it might be marginally better than just using Word, although - not that much; and it’s horrible to debug, it’s horrible to actually automate, it’s horrible to actually “separate content from style”…

I thought that maybe something is wrong with me and over time it will “click”… it never did.

But, this article made it click. (but that’s after I already got my degree…)

http://www.danielallington.net/2016/09/the-latex-fetish/

LaTeX is not actually good for writing papers.

It’s good for typesetting. And that’s it. It’s good as a type-setting program, that’s what it is meant to be. It’s definitely not good for separating content from style, or some kind of meta-automation or macros.

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It's great for writing papers. I can crack open vim rattle off an essay throw in some \par s and some \cite{sho0ngle} s, and then let all the typesetting, citation management, and whatnot get handled by the compiler.

For STEM classes, the LaTeX defaults are perfect, and I can insert tables and images and such that can be in flux over the course of writing the report, importing then from external scripts that part of my data analysis.

LaTeX only gets hairy when you start trying to fight it. If you want some that looks exactly as you imagine it, you're going to be fighting an uphill battle trying to specify exactly what you want, and constantly re-compiling. If instead, you just care about a clean, consistent, and presentable end product, then LaTeX gets you there with minimal fuss.

Why do you use \par?

> LaTeX only gets hairy when you start trying to fight it. If you want some that looks exactly as you imagine it, you're going to be fighting an uphill battle trying to specify exactly what you want, and constantly re-compiling.

'fighting' as you describe it is the reason why people use latex. They want more fine grained control over the doc.

I work in STEM, every publisher has their own formatting style. My pubs would get rejected if I submitted a default style.

What you're describing is, in essence, using MS Word with defaults. Might as well use Word.

I work in (non-CS) STEM, and not fighting Word is a big reason that I use LaTeX. I find it really distracting how word automatically reflows text while writing, references are always a pain, and it’s a hassle to update figures after re-running analysis scripts. With TeX none of those things are painful

Collaborative writing is often a bit difficult, especially with bigger groups not comfortable with overleaf. But Word is not great in that setting either, it usually ends in a zillion emailed versions. (365 doesn’t seem to have feature parity, and usually doesn’t cut it. Track changes doesn’t work the same way, it’s a mess)

An article about how word processors are superior to LaTeX by someone who has never written anything with LaTeX, not even finished a single paper.

It's like writing an article about how walking is much faster than cycling, because 'I tried cycling once and fell over, so clearly all those fetishists are wrong, the suckers'.

I learned about Latex in physics 2 in college and started taking my notes that way in class. I could quickly make quick notes for anything that would take me too long to input and then I'd go back and actually review my notes to fill in what I hadn't formatted yet. I think it helped a lot because I actually reviewed my notes after class. I had a discrete math professor that offered extra points if you did your homework in Latex. I have shitty handwriting so I was already doing my homework on the computer anyway so it was easy credit. I got to be the favorite in my intro to astrophysics class because I turned in my papers in Latex, professor went out of his way to find me after class and complimented me. Haven't touched it in years since college.

Why is it not good at separating content from style?

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