Ask HN: Do people lose interest in TeX/LaTeX after leaving academia?

I tried to use it in my business. I wrote contracts, testing reports, and even slide decks with it. Eventually, I decided the friction to be too much.

My partner (lawyer) didn't want to spend any time learning it as Word is the de facto in her field. So I had to either maintain also Word, or be on my own.

Testing report template consumed a lot of time to construct. I didn't have enough iterations generating reports to reap benefits from codification and git version control. Adequate Word templates on the other hand were easy to outsource for $100.

Slide decks were beautiful to me as an engineer but they didn't seem to convince the buyers (usually non-technical). I'm not super keen on presenting and the added stress from unfamiliar presentation tooling didn't help.

I have only used it for academic papers, which I still do every so often, so I would the answer is mostly yes. I tried using beamer for presentations but it was too much effort for not enough gain. I use tikz for diagrams and graphs in academic papers, really useful for updating graphs by just ruining a single script. But outside of that, again, it was too much effort for not enough gain, when I can just print out jupyter lab output..

Pretty much, I only care about typography when it comes to academic papers, so that’s the issue. If I care about it in other contexts, I probably would use latex.

In my case yes, because back in the 90s I had to write Word files at work, when I had to write something. More recently because I write inside any tool my customers are using and in md files for myself.

Obviously none of my customers nor myself are writing academic papers. If we did maybe we would be using LaTeX, but the chances to have to write papers in normal companies are slim.

I used LaTeX extensively at uni for my BSc/MSc then took a 30Y+ break to earn a living, now I am back using LaTeX for journal papers for my PhD.

I didn't stop caring about good typography and typesetting, eg I edited a supercomputing trade rag for a while.

And I don't like flaky WYSIWYG editors, so have preferred (say) HTML over Word for most of my text output.

But I just didn't have cause to use LaTeX or maintain that toolchain for decades away from academia, so I didn't.

Still writing all my letters with LaTeX (using DINBrief).

They don’t lose interest, they lose the need to use it. And then they forget how it works.

what’s that about high quality typography? People generally don’t use TeX for its awesome typography. They ude TeX cause someone told them to

> Ask HN: Do people lose interest in TeX/LaTeX after leaving academia?

I wrote my diploma in LaTeX. I would use it today, after 30 years, if i had to write a long text. Word was, and still is, horrible. (i use it everyday at work)

Left academia, still using LaTeX for about every document (not counting org-mode documents for my own use).

At this point, using "common" text processors (Word, Writer, ...) still (?) feels like torture.

I think so, at least for myself. I think this is a habit formed with conventions, industry has its own conventions different from academia and more driven by productivity and ROIs.

If high-quality typography is so important why are web pages so prevalent?