Instead of perfect looks, we should focus on the content. Formats like markdown are nice, because they force you to do this. The old way made sense 30 yers ago when information was consumed on paper.
Ofc, if we stop really caring what things look like we could save lot of energy and time. Just go back to pure HTML without any JavaScript or CSS...
Having written many papers, reports and my entire Ph. D. thesis in Latex, and also moved between LaTeX classes/templates when changing journals... I'm inclined to agree to an extent. I think every layout system has a final hand-tweaking component (like inline HTML in markdown for example), but LaTeX has a very steep learning curve once you go beyond the basic series of plots and paragraphs. There are so many tricks and hacks for padding and shifting and adjusting your layout, and some of them are "right" and others are "wrong" for really quite esoteric reasons (like which abstraction layer they work at, or some priority logic).
Of course in the end it's extremely powerful and still my favourite markup language when I need something more powerful than markdown (although reStructuredText is not so bad either). But it's really for professionals with the time to learn a layout system.
Then again there are other advantages to writing out the layout, when it comes to archiving and accessibility, due to the structured information contained in the markup beyond what is rendered. arXiv makes a point about this and forces you to submit LaTeX without rendering the PDF, so that they can really preserve it.
Yet simple Markdown documents automatically converted into pdf by pandoc look ten times better than most MS Office documents I've had to deal with over the past couple of decades. Most MS Office users have very little knowledge of its capabilities and do things like adjusting text blocks with spaces, manually number figures (which results in broken references that lead to the wrong figure — or nowhere), manually apply styles to text instead of using style presets (resulting in similar things being differently styled), etc.
In my experience you do that more in Word then in Latex (the I added some paragraphs here and wtf is that picture two pages later doing now problem).
The issue is to some degree quite fundamental to the underlying challenges of laying out formatted text with embedded things, affecting both word and LaTex.
through that is assuming you now how to properly use Word / LaTex if you don't you can cause yourself a huge amount of work ;)
At work I use our ChatGPT page to generate an HTML+CSS skeleton of what I want and tweak that. It's quicker for me than doing the equivalent in word, and easier to manipulate later. Most of the time I don't need anyone else editing my docs, so it works out.
For most documents nowadays it makes no sense to see them as a representation of physical paper. And the word paradigm of representing a document as a if it were a piece of paper is obsolete in many areas where it is still being used.
Ironically Atlassian, with confluence, is a large force pushing companies away from documents as a representation of paper.
For most content this is not the case. It is also obviously easier to go from a page agnostic format to a format which relies intrinsically on page size.
None of the two conditions are reality, of course.
So yeah, that’s not happening.
exactly, and that's great.
do you really think surgeons/nurses waste time getting intimate knowledge of all the machines they use?
Do you really think bus drivers have intimate knowledge of the engines of their buses, transmission lines etc?
come on, be reasonable.
You want to be able to do everything just right for the looks. Because there always will be someone negotiating down because your PDF report does not look right and they know a competitor who „does this heading exactly right”.
In theory if you have garbled content that is not acceptable of course, but small deviations should be tolerated.
Unfortunately we have all kinds of power games where you want exact looks. You don’t always have option to walk away from asshole customers nitpicking on BS issues.
similar if someone random non technical person just needs to write idk. 5 paragraphs of text with a head line, no high requirements for formatting, no kind of templates, no anything fancy why would you force them to not have WYSIWYG if that is the perfekt fit for their use case in every single aspect?
Similar markdown doesn't scale to a lot of writing requirements, like _AT ALL_. I know because I have written pretty much any thesis or larger reports etc. during my studies in markdown. And I had to step out of markdown all the time. Weather that is by using inline latex, or by tweaking markdown to PDF conversion templates (by interleaving non mark down sources with markdown by splitting the markdown into many different files and folders which each could be markdown or anything else, and/or inline latex to include non markdown sources imported into latex) etc. It was a nice pipeline, but it also wasn't really markdown anymore, but instead some amalgamation of markdown LaTex and other things. As a programmer that was fine, but that doesn't scale at all to the "standard" user of office applications.
Many documents are created for looks rather than content.
"Interoperability" is something technical enthusiasts talk about and not something that users creating documents care about outside of the people they share with seeing exactly what was created.
In other words, fidelity to the printed page isn't really as important or as magical today as it was in 1984.
Death to user friendlyness! Advanced users only! /s
I was to 99% bound to editor and terminal and comfortable. In no world would a excel or word fit into my workflow
I still do, but today nobody is expecting me to use specific software anymore so it feels less rebellious