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Comment by codeape | Hacker News Reader

From https://www.latex-project.org/about/:

"LaTeX is not a word processor! Instead, LaTeX encourages authors not to worry too much about the appearance of their documents but to concentrate on getting the right content."

IMO, the only people that use LaTeX are people who are willing to trade the convenience and productivity of using a sane document authoring format for the warm and fuzzy feeling you get when you use an outdated piece of typesetting software that is a) hard to configure, b) hard to use and c) produces output for the least useful reading platform available (paged pdfs).

And the pronounciation is stupid.

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> IMO, the only people that use LaTeX are people who are willing to trade the convenience and productivity of using a sane document authoring format for the warm and fuzzy feeling [...]

I hope you are aware that literally all research in mathematics and computer science is typed up and published in LaTeX?

Imagine the rapid advancements we could make in those fields if researchers stop wasting time on a baroque, outdated typesetting system.

All you're optimizing for is a learning curve that you should have passed by the end of your bachelors degree.

Alternatively, they're people who write documents in a field where LaTeX is the standard, they're not computer savvy enough to try to even look for something new that might be acceptable or might compile to LaTeX, and at any rate they want to focus more on their research than they do on changing the typesetting norms in their field.

(No shade on people who do decide to use alternatives, and Typst is great!)

The major selling point to me, is that I can write the content I want, in a rather straightforward manner, and then just apply whatever formatting is necessary. It makes a lot of sense in the context of, say, university, where you're taking multiple classes, which each use different formatting guidelines, but those formatting guidelines stay the same for the duration of the course. I could just figure out (either using existing formats, or by hand-rolling my own) a document type for each class, and then never think about formatting again, whereas with a word processor, you've got to keep in mind the arcane series of steps necessary format your document in whatever style you require, and then pray that any modifications you make don't break the formatting.

The other place it's useful is heavily typeset documents, especially those subject to somewhat frequent modification, like a resume.

Using a word processor (MS Word, Apple Pages, LibreOffice Writer) is nearly as bad as using LaTeX (in some cases, worse).

Using a plain-text format like Markdown, ReStructuredText or AsciiDoc is likely better in almost all cases.

Plain text formats like Markdown work great if you don't care at all about the specifics of the final formatting. Tools like LaTeX are for when you care deeply that the resulting document follows a certain format, but don't want to think about that formatting while writing.

Do you feel the same about Markdown?

Just curious.

No, I like Markdown.

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