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One of Words big issues is that very few people know how to use it. It's such a massive program, with an absolutely insane feature set. Still you see people manually doing stuff like setting font size to do headings, rather than actually using the feature to set and style headings, but now they can't use the automatic index, so they also do that manually. It's also funny to me that companies will complain about UI changes, because that will force them to retrain staff, but most companies don't do training on Windows, Word or Excel to begin with.
LaTeX is stable, most people I know who still use it have templates they made at college and they've been using them for 20 years. They can just sit down and start typing, not having to worry about leaving their preferred editor or styling. Anything can be looked up in their old worn out copy of "The LaTeX Companion" (To one with the St. Bernard on the cover. Retraining to use Word would be a major hassle.
This seems equally applicable to LaTeX, though, at least once you start adding in a handful of modules. Like with Word, most people I know seem to learn the subset of LaTeX that solves their immediate problems, and then have to Google random snippets for anything outside of that range. You say people have templates that they've used with no changes for the last 20 years, but in my experience that's because they don't remember how half the things they put in there work, and so any change would take days to implement.
I think LaTeX is a great example of the difference between inherent complexity and added complexity in software development. Typesetting is an inherently complex problem, and LaTeX is excellent in that solves this problem very well, although to a certain extent users of LaTeX will always need to understand that complexity somewhat - it is inherent in the problem they are dealing with. But it also creates added complexity by providing this solution in the form of the TeX language and the various macros and components that make up LaTeX. This added complexity is not needed to solve the inherently complex core task, but the best tool to solve the inherently complex task includes this added complexity.
I don't mean this comment to be a defence of Word, which has its own issues. And I love reading a well-typeset document, and LaTeX does an excellent job of that. But it is also the sort of software that is long overdue a replacement.
But there's certainly a good amount of cargo cult in many or most LaTeX templates as well.
Latex books (even those that only talk about one aspect of it such as graphics) are +900 pages!
My point is the marginal benefit of using Latex to make documents slightly prettier is negligible. The focus of the researcher should be on the content.
Don't use Latex for 6 months and see if you still remember all the necessary syntax.
Like I said, you can do it. That’s why I said ‘by default’: the defaults clearly show how LaTeX is optimised for high-quality typesetting to a greater extent than Word is.
> My point is the marginal benefit of using Latex to make documents slightly prettier is negligible.
I disagree with this: it’s not just a matter of being ‘slightly prettier’. I will make the claim that, if you care about typography, LaTeX is easier to use than Word. Given the same amount of time and effort, a document created in LaTeX will look better than one made in Word.
For instance, take the paper you linked. You mentioned that, in order to create it in Word, you needed to make ‘lots of Word styles’, etc. etc. By contrast, simply retyping the text into a minimal LaTeX document will result in an output which is as good, if not better. I’m not going to bother wrestling with Word styles and whatnot, if I can create a far better-looking document in LaTeX with less effort.
> The focus of the researcher should be on the content.
And it is, when I use LaTeX. The whole point of LaTeX was always to separate design from content, and I feel it succeeds pretty well in this.
All of that is done just once (one fixed cost). I've been using the template for years now.
I think it's a matter of taste as well. I prefer WYSIWYG; Tex users prefer to see this instead:
\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
\begin{itemize}
\item \textbf{TEXT}
\begin{itemize}
\item TEXT \textit{TEXT} TEXT
\item TEXT \textit{TEXT},$\Phi(\lambda$) \textit{TEXT}
\end{itemize}
\end{itemize}
\end{document}My personal experience with TeX is kinda similar to HTML: you still remember some parts even if you don't write it for many years...
2. The inset used by the headings is jarringly big.
3. The text is too wide for comfortable reading.
4. The fonts used in the body and in the figures don’t match.
Other than that, it’s probably the best-formatted Word document I’ve seen.
I wouldn’t want to use Word, because in my experience even outside of maths its UI is working against me. In particular it’s hard to recreate the same document in two different major versions of Word. The spacing, the sizes are always off. Moreover, I don’t like how formatting is very sticky based on where you position your text cursor. I constantly need to disable styling copied from some text nearby.