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Comment by indralukmana | Hacker News Reader

i am considering learning latex, but it looks like it has a steep learning curve compared with markup language like rst or markdown and also it seems very verbose i.e, presentation and content are written whole/completely

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Not at all; LaTeX is a wrapper over TeX made exactly to hide all formatting routines behind structural declarations like \section, \itemize or \emph. To this end it is not really different from Markdown; yes, tokens require slightly more keystrokes, but you get something way more powerful and predictive -- Markdown won't give you nested enumerations, tables, references, footnotes, automatic TOCs or figure lists... Niether BibTeX which will happily eat your Mendeley of Zotero library and compile a perfect bibliography, includes that allow you to split your work into several files or macros that can save you from re-typing certain things over and over.

LaTex is not a writing application, it is a typesetting application. LaTex should be your last stop before publication.

You can, of course, write natively in LaTex but the program wasn't designed for that.

> You can, of course, write natively in LaTex but the program wasn't designed for that.

Hard to know precisely what you mean by this, but if you mean that you shouldn't be writing things like

    \documentclass{article}

    \begin{document}
    Hello world.
    \end{document}

then you are mistaken; the LaTeX book (and many other documents) describes what to do. If what you mean is that a person is somehow meant to use a front end such as LyX, then you'll get a lot of disagreement (such as from me).

What I mean is that in your example the only content is "Hello world." The rest is typesetting. The original question asked, "what tool should I use to write?" LaTex answers the question, "how can I typeset what I have written?" BTW, Lyx is a terrific program. My only complaint with it is that I haven't found a way to mimic a word processor's tab behavior consistently. The tabbing package doesn't do it for me. \qquad does, kind of, but that's six keystrokes. The problem is that in some kinds of writing text placement may have meaning and this conflicts with LaTex's underlying paradigm of automating typesetting decisions.

LaTeX was certainly intended for a document such as I wrote so you are wrong, as documented in Lamport's book.

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