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Comment by markbao | Hacker News Reader

Not an academic, but I used LaTeX for years and it doesn’t feel like what future of publishing should use. It’s finicky and takes so much markup to do simple things. A lab manager once told me about a study that people who used MS Word to typeset were more productive, and I can see that…

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100% completely agreed. It's not the future, it's the past.

Typst feels more like the future: https://typst.app/

The problem is that so many journals require certain LaTeX templates so Typst often isn't an option at all. It's about network effects, and journals don't want to change their entire toolchain.

I've had some good initial results in going from typst to .tex with Claude (Opus 4.5) for an IEEE journal paper - idiomatic use of templates etc.

Latex is good for equations. And Latex tools produce very nice PDFs, but I wouldn't want to write in Latex generally either.

The main feature that's important is collaborative editing (like online Word or Google Docs). The second one would be a good reference manager.

Academic here. Working on MS Word after years of using LaTeX is... hard. With LaTex I can be reassured that the formatting will be 95% fine and the 5% remaining will come down to taste ("why doesn't this Figure show in this page?") while in Word I'm constantly fighting the layout - delete one line? Your entire paragraph is now bold. Changed the font of the entire text? No, that one paragraph ignores you. Want to delete that line after that one Table? F you, you're not. There's a reason why this video joke [1] got 14M views.

And then I need an extra tool for dealing with bibliography, change history is unpredictable (and, IMO, vastly inferior to version control), and everything gets even worse if I open said Word file in LibreOffice.

LaTeX' syntax may be hard, but Word actively fights me during writing.

[1] Moving a photo in Microsoft Word - https://www.instagram.com/jessandquinn/reel/DIMkKkqODS5/

Agreed. Tex/Latex is very old tech. Error recovery and messages is very bad. Developing new macros in Tex is about as fun as you expect developing in a 70s-era language to be (ie probably similar to cobol and old fortran).

I haven't tried it yet but Typst seems like a promising replacement: https://typst.app/

That study must have compared beginners in LaTeX and MS Word. There is a learning curve, but LaTeX will often save more time in the end.

It is an old language though. LaTeX is the macro system on top of TeX, but now you can write markdown or org-mode (or orgdown) and generate LaTeX -> PDF via pandoc/org-mode. Maybe this is the level of abstraction we should be targeting. Though currently, you still need to drop into LaTeX for very specific fine-tuning.

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