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Comment by tinco | Hacker News Reader

No, it doesn't work fine. LateX is slow, inconsistent and needs to be ran multiple times to give a correct result, it has no API, is not extendable in a sane way, it's source code is so arcane there's books written about it, and if you've read the books the only thing you've learned is that trying to reimplement LateX is a fool's errand. And it's syntax is ugly.

Markdown is better. Microsoft Word is better. They just both lack certain things we need, and LaTeX has those things.

Could you not envision things could be better?

A LaTeX that parses to an in-memory tree so it could be transformed before compilation?

A shell that instead of working on character streams worked on structured and annotated data streams, so it could intelligently interpret what is going on?

An editor that does have at its core an expectation that its output is ASCII character commands controlling a 1970s terminal interface?

Of course you'll stick to using Vim to write LaTeX in a Bash shell, I do too. Doesn't mean I'm not mad about it..

View on HN

1) You run latex twice only on really large and complex documents like books, and if you're writing books (not editing, see antipope.org for details) in Word, then you need professional help.

2) Markdown and LaTeX are designed for different tasks. Next you'll be telling me that if you have a leafblower, you have no need for a chainsaw.

3) Find me the structured and annotated data streams first - and show me that the structure and annotations are correct - then lament the lack of a shell that can route them to the programs that don't interpret stdin and stdout and stderr that way anyway.

4) I use vim to write latex when I write latex, but "in a bash shell" doesn't make any sense. You fire up vim from bash, yes, but unless you're trying to do an ex-style editing session, you're not editing in the shell any more than you're editing in the kernel or the tty driver...

One could easily remove then fan on the leefblower engine and add a saw blade.

markdown is perfect for forum comments, but idiotic to extend too far. if you’re a programmer wanting to write a book in markdown, you’ll find yourself thinking of markdown syntax extensions more than thinking about the book.

if you want extensibility and still a rather lightweight syntax, try restructuredtext. it has exactly one flaw compared to markdown, which is the hideous inline link syntax (which practically forces you to use named links). that makes it less suited for forum comments (where you might want to quickly inline 1-2 links), but perfect for books (where you can neatly specify your link targets below the current section)

Or you could just use LaTeX, which has been used for writing books for decades (the word you're looking for is "debugged" and the phrase is either "well understood" or "well documented").

And yes, there are efforts underway to improve it (LaTeX3) but 2e works so well, there's not been much drive there.

And if you find LaTeX is so hard, there's always LyX...

>which has been used for writing books for decades

Well, mostly math and science books. Very few (if any) fancy and well typespeced books by major publishers have been made with LaTeX. I know, because I know that industry. So, while TeX was once created to be a general typesetting solution, it has been relegated to something math and cs geeks use for their papers.

>And if you find LaTeX is so hard, there's always LyX...

A not really maintained, relic of a program, that tries too hard to work around the issues raised by a backend like LaTeX that wasn't really created with such GUI control in mind.

I have to wonder if your average publisher would even know what to do with a book written in LaTeX.

Any publisher that produces books with heavy math will know what to do with LaTeX, and if not then call a vendor that will know what to do with LaTeX.

> A not really maintained, relic of a program, [...]

http://www.lyx.org/trac/timeline

Also http://www.ohloh.net/p/lyx

>Very few (if any) fancy and well typespeced books by major publishers have been made with LaTeX. I know, because I know that industry.

What do they use, then? (I'm actually pretty curious, because I am writing a dissertation that I currently build with LaTeX, but I find it much nicer to write in Org mode. I'm doing whatever I can to avoid a hard dependency on LaTeX for the backend, and to allow exporting to multiple formats.)

Why do they use whatever typesetting solution(s) they use? Does it actually produce better/nicer output than LaTeX (for non-math text)? Does it just have nicer syntax or friendlier error messages? What's the advantage?

Quark Xpress and Adobe inDesign are two I have seen being used. In the past Corel Ventura was wuite popular too.

Well, depends on the size of the leaf blower. If you can blow the trees down, certainly don't bother with the chain saw!

Newton would have some things to say about that, but you wouldn't hear him because of your doppler shift.

I just choked on a glass of water. Thank you for that comment!

You're completely missing the GP's point. Whether or not LaTeX is better than MS Word for task X is besides the point. It's that LaTeX has many obvious opportunities for improvement, ways to drag it into the current age, while keeping all its fundamental strengths. As do many similarly old tools such as Bash, terminal emulators and Vim.

These improvements aren't all that difficult to imagine, but they don't happen, because, well, why? GP seems to think an obsession over backwards compatibility.

Why expend manpower and energy improving a working solution just to do so when you have so many other broken things that need fixing first? That's a fairly self-answering question. There's a reason the expression is "If it's not broken, don't fix it".

We have tools that have virtually been unchanged for over 20 years. While the consistency and stability has been nice, there has been a lot of good things that have happened in software development and technology that those tools could really benefit from. You're honestly going to tell me you don't think that taking a second look at these tools and seeing how we could improve them would be a good thing?

What you're basically advocating is nobody should innovate because things are "good enough". With that sort of attitude we would never have any progress on anything.

That's not what I'm advocating. What I'm advocating is not wasting time and effort rewriting working tools just because the rewrite would be newer.

Which is not what you're saying I'm advocating.

Nobody thinks it's a good idea to rewrite something just to make it "newer". The idea is to rewrite (or maybe just refactor) these tools to make them better.

It's also not "fixing what's not broken", but improving something that could... well... be improved.

While the core interaction remains unchanged, 20 years ago was before bash 2.0. The version running on my laptop, bash 4.2, was released in February 2011. The development speed hasn't been blindingly fast, but it's a fairly mature project with scripting support (so less need to extend the core than some projects have), and there have absolutely been changes even in the last 5 years.

http://tiswww.case.edu/php/chet/bash/NEWS

If you fear breaking it, why not replace / revolutionize instead. See GCC vs LLVM, X vs Wayland, C++ vs Go.

> C++ vs Go

Bad example :P

Agree. Texmacs is a good idea. Unfortunately it don't attract much attention, it is still not very mature as Vim or Emacs. I hope the community could pay attention to Texmacs.

LyX works more reliable in my experience: http://lyx.org

...if you have a leafblower, you have no need for a chainsaw...

Yes, but a leafblower combined with a chainsaw...

I don't know about you, but that's a tool I could find some uses for.

Like scaring children?

Or destroying small rodents, perhaps?

It's not often that I come to laugh out loud while reading (the usually somewhat stuffy) comments on HN.

+1 coffee sputter.

If you are comparing Word and Markdown to LaTeX I think it's clear you haven't really used LaTeX.

Can one not value the simplicity of an apple, the juiciness of an orange and compare it to a Pomelo, wishing the latter had both?

I would say LaTeΧ can be perfectly well seen as a combination of many aspects of Word and Markdown in the sense that it offers the feature set and backwards compatibility that Words offers, while culminating a legacy, complexity and perceived indeterminism that also plagues Word (though in a different way); and on the other side being a plain text format that can be version controlled and taken apart and shared as snippets.

Oh get over yourself. Every one of the criticisms he levelled against latex is spot on, and you pick up on the fact that he mentions Word is easier to use (which, by a long, long way, it it).

> Word is easier to use (which, by a long, long way, it it).

Definitely initially for simpler.

But what about using it collaboratively, merging changes and comparing between versions? Especially large documents with a multitude of authors combined later (think journals).

What about documents with programmatically generated content?

What about consistent formatting for your documents?

What about when Word gets confused by some element in the xml not visible to you?

Sure Word may be easier but there are limitations to it's use.

It's an apples to oranges comparison.

I want to draw a conformal mapping diagram in word and also write a 3-vector of the navier-stokes equations.

Also, I want to do a lot of tensor arithmetic with tons of superscripts and subscripts and arrows.

Tell me how any of this is accomplished in Word please. Saying Word is easier to us is like saying BASIC is easier than C++.

You know what most people would do? Use a dedicated program to create the plots and equations, export it as a PDF, and embed that in Word. Instead of LaTeX being the de facto standard for all publishing, it is relegated to very specialized uses in mathematics and some engineering. If you try to use LaTeX with a biomedical researcher, they will look at you very funny.

Hell, I just had a postdoc send me figures as part of a manuscript draft where she was using Powerpoint to make the figures instead of something more appropriate like Illustrator. Most people who publish don't care about how their documents are created, they just want them to work and get published. Word does a pretty good job for this.

Use the best tools for the job. Most people would tell you that BASIC is easier to use than C++, if you can write your program in BASIC. And if you don't want to deal with learning curve of C++ and you get get by with BASIC, then what's wrong with using a tool that works?

You know what most people would do? Use a dedicated program to create the plots and equations, export it as a PDF, and embed that in Word.

I am not fond of LaTeX. However, for some fields there are simply no dedicated programs, while there are good LaTeX packages. For instance, for my thesis I drew a lot of attribute-value matrices (in the unification grammar/HPSG sense). There is a great packages to draw these structures, both flat and in tree form.

I had some hope that DocBook et al. could replace LaTeX for most uses. It's great in many respects: it's just XML, so easy to machine-interpret. Customising output is easy (via XSL stylesheets). There is good support for producing PDFs (via XSL-FO). And it supports SVG and MathML. There are also great WYSIWYG editors, such as Oxygen. However, that toolchain never became popular, because most people hate XML.

The book that we never got to finish[1] is written in DocBook, equations are in MathML. The Slackware book that I once wrote [2] is also completely done in DocBook.

[1] http://nlpwp.org/

[2] http://rlworkman.net/howtos/slackbasics.pdf

Docbook and DITA are used a lot in the enterprise world.

A good example of Docbook is basically all recent Red Hat/Fedora documentation.

Jesus nothing is wrong. Read my comment again. I'm saying it's an apples to oranges comparison. If BASIC is all you need great. If word is all you need great. If you can get by with importing from gnuplot or R or matlab or whatever great. I'm not saying one is superior to the other. I'm saying that when I want to draw a commutative diagram, I'd rather do it in LaTeX with tikz or the xy package.

I'm sick of the "HN strawman." People on these threads need to read and apply basic critical reading and logical skills.

You don't need to tell ME to use the best tools for the job. I've been telling people that for fucking years. I don't why your comment annoyed me so much but it did.

What I'm trying to say is that for the vast majority of peoe that have to produce documents, it isn't an apples to oranges comparison. For most proe, Word and LaTeX do the same thing. And one of those is vastly easier to use to get their job done. So while LaTeX is the technically superior, Word will still get the job done. And because of the network effects that working with collaborators has, People like me are stuck using Word even if I'd rather have my papers written in something else.

In some fields LaTeX is the easier method to produce documents (good luck with anything more than a simple equation in Word), but those are relatively small niches.

In a similar vein, you might say that to the vast majority of people there is no difference between a screwdriver and a pry bar because most people are content with abusing screwdrivers.

It depends on the job you're trying to do.

But you can't honestly say that Word and LaTeX really have that big of a difference in intended jobs. It seems to me that they are both in the document production business.

And pry-bars and screwdrivers are both in the "levers that provide mechanical advantage" business.

One can be abused to fill the role of the other, and if you look at them both from 1000 feet and squint then both "for" the same thing, but the reality is that when you actually examine what each is designed to do and in which situations each is used, they really have little to do with each other.

You can't honestly believe that pry-bars and screwdrivers are as similar as LaTeX and Word are. It's a ludicrous argument.

LaTeX and Word are for documents - making documents. How they operate is very different. For example, Word includes it's own editor, LaTeX does not. But they are both used for producing documents.

> If you try to use LaTeX with a biomedical researcher, they will look at you very funny.

I'm a biomedical researcher, and I use LaTeX. It's my preferred method of document preparation. I know many others who use LaTeX as well.

I hardly think so. Let's address them:

> "LateX is slow, inconsistent and needs to be ran multiple times to give a correct result"

It is not slow, it runs in under a second on most documents I have authored.

> "Inconsistent"

I'm not sure what tinco meant by this, but it does in fact return the same results for the same file across multiple runs.

> "Needs to be run multiple times to give the correct result"

This is true for things like references, etc. However, this proves to be a non-issue in practice as you are recompiling so often to view changes that references are always up to date.

> "It's syntax is ugly."

I don't see how learning LaTeX is different from learning any other programming language. I don't think that many C++ gurus would call C++ "ugly". Calling a progamming language "ugly" is often the last argument you see when someone couldn't come up with a decent argument against it.

Inconsistent probably refers to the fact that there are subtleties that can mess you up, once it works you are fine, but you may have a blocking issue on the way.

Syntax is important, remember he is comparing it to Markdown, not C++. C++ is certainly ugly and should not be used as the basis for any comparison, certainly not for a word processor.

I think he is just pointing out that general theme amongst these tools. They work for the people using them well enough, so they stay that way forever. It isn't that features aren't added or that they stagnate, it is just that thinking outside of the box is impossible.

>>> "LateX is slow, inconsistent and needs to be ran multiple times to give a correct result" > It is not slow, it runs in under a second on most documents I have authored.

Slow? I don't know about that, but compared to what? Even in word it does need some time to reach the "Save as PDF" menu, right?

>> "Inconsistent" > I'm not sure what tinco meant by this, but it does in fact return the same results for the same file across multiple runs.

Well, there is some truth about this. There is an odd naming scheme if you look at stuff like "enumerate", "itemize" and "description" - beginners get confused by this as they assume it would be called "describe". The same goes for most of the packages. This is somehow historical, but I think it also makes it unnecessary hard to figure out LaTex for beginners, right?

Also the reason why LaTex needs several runs to finally create the full document. Nowadays you would do this differently I guess as there is simply no need to start the program twice if the application would be smart enough to call sub-programs (like biblatex) by itself on the fly. It would still run the same routine several times, but users wouldn't see it and it would be one command for them to build the document. That's another point beginners tend to go crazy about :)

Having said that, I should add that I'm using LaTex (and XeLaTex, etc.) daily and there isn't a single program matching the power and beauty of it - I even design covers for my publications with it. But I'm able to use vim and emacs, right? 90% of the people are bloody beginners and it would be a shame to hide the beauty of a LaTex document from them.

>> "It's syntax is ugly."

Yeah, well...ugly is a bad term to discuss about. I like it and I think the syntax is way cleaner than reStructured text :D

funny that you mention rST. i also talked about it here, and i said that its only syntactical flaw is inline link syntax, and how that’s only a problem if you don’t write a lengthy document with it, because in that case, you don’t want to inline your links anyway.

what is unclean about rST in your opinion?

It is not slow, it runs in under a second on most documents I have authored.

It is slow. On my PhD thesis, it took more than one minute at some point, on an SSD. Not very convenient if you are tweaking figures and equations, and want to preview a change quickly.

I agree that that aspect of LaTeX sucks. That said, as a matter of exchanging practical hints: If you haven't yet heard of \includeonly, you should definitely check it out ;)

Then you did it wrong. You should have just factored your thesis in multiple files, for example used one for each chapter.

That sounds like a workaround.

Actually, it is a pretty useful feature. I break my documents up into multiple files and can compile pieces of them together for different audiences. Want an executive summary of my research just build the abstract + a summary. Want to review the literature with my advisor, build the just the literature review.

However, I will agree that using it to address slowness of a build process is just a hack.

It is, but you have to remember latex is best thought of a programming language that outputs pdfs so splitting into multiple source files is useful, as is source control.

I suppose you would say splitting your C++ into separate source files is a "workaround" for slow compilation times, too? It could be, but both are probably good practice anyway.

My thesis was split in multiple files.

The last time I used Word it was an absolute nightmare to typeset equations in it. In theoretical physics basically every page contains at least one equation, it would be complete madness to try typesetting that in word.

"Markdown is better. Microsoft Word is better." Stop comparing oranges to apples. And there's really no "objectively better", it's two different tools with two different uses. Sure, LaTeX could be better, but it's been working on.

I do what I want. Also, LaTeX is a system for creating documents, and Word is a system for creating documents. There's only four important differences: Word has a more modern architecture, Words compiler is integrated into its GUI, Word is closed source, Words source format is not human readable.

Apples to Oranges? I can compare these Braeburns to those Fujis just fine thank you.

If that is all you need and expect from a replacement for LaTeX, why aren't you just using LibreOffice?

It's not, I need the human readable source part, so I can track my work and cooperate in git :) I use LibreOffice for some stuff though.

Aren't modern word processor formats just zipped-up XML files? I suspect it should be a straight-forward matter to get at least LibreOffice and version control cooperating.

You are technically correct, but not usefully so. The XML is pretty hairy. A VCS that handles XML semantically (e.g. tag-pair oriented, rather than line-oriented) might have some shot....but, basically, merges are more or less not going to work so it's not really version control, just backups.

Versioning of OpenOffice/LibreOffice documents using git: http://blog.riemann.cc/2013/04/23/versioning-of-openoffice-l...

That is really cool, thanks for that.

If we're talking about LaTeX, Word, Markdown and LibreOffice - well, then LibreOffice is a contender for the worst usability, it's superficially similar to a mature product but it's a case of "the remaining 10% of goodness will take more work than the first 90%".

Usability depends on who is using it. I refuse to use LibreOffice because it is so bad, but I would sooner recommend LibreOffice to my father than LaTeX or Markdown.

I don't mean to be a jerk, but how much do you actually use/have used LaTex? They aren't even similar. They have very few similar use cases. One is a typesetting system the other is a word processor. Sure, documents come out the other end with both but the process and targets are very different. One allows you to quickly and easily make a quality document. One allows you to make the document to look exactly how you want.

Java and C are both programming languages but it is still apples and oranges to compare them.

I'm by no means a LaTex expert. I've written a few papers and a bunch of reports, nothing published, just undergraduate stuff. I dropped out halfway through my graduate degree, so I'm not what you'd call an academic. But I've seen and read enough to know that you can do impressive things with LaTex.

I have another question though, how much have you used Word? I have used it only a couple of times since highschool, but it's gotten pretty impressive. I bet that if you really dive into it you could get very close to the power of latex. At least, with regards to the typesetting. The drawing images/formulas/schemas thing is a whole different ballgame I'd agree.

Anyway, my point was not that Microsoft Word in any way is a good replacement for LaTex, I'm just saying that if LaTex could be as well written as Word is, it could have these fancy GUI and fast rendering features too.

There's people out there that think that the power in typesetting that LaTex has is mutual exclusive with the speed and usability that Word has. That just isn't so.

The only reason LaTex isn't fast and more easily extensible is that it was written for the machines of 40 years ago, that didn't have enough RAM to hold the parsed tree of a document.

LaTex could be ten times as fast, were it written in Ruby, the slowest language out there. Just because a modern programmer would make use of the modern hardware and modern design concepts, and just make it responsive. A GUI could be as simple external process that accessed a message passing API, rendering it to HTML and run it through Webkitview.

Overhead everywhere, still ten times faster than LaTex...

(edit: definitely worth a downvote, this comment :P)

to summarize:

you've written a handful of latex documents, so you're now an expert on what latex is used for and what people want out of it. would it help to point out that given latex is more difficult to use than word, I'd bet most latex users have tried and discarded word in favor of latex? Would that affect your judgements about the relative use cases?

   There's people out there that think that the power in typesetting that LaTex 
   has is mutual exclusive with the speed and usability that Word has. That 
   just isn't so.

Since, well, nothing else offers similar typesetting plus mathematical notation / flexibility, your proof is... what exactly?

If you built a better system, you'd find customers for it.

>I'm by no means a LaTex expert. I've written a few papers and a bunch of reports, nothing published, just undergraduate stuff

I had a long talk about something like this with a close friend last night. He has a favorite technology stack that is regularly trash talked on sites like this. From what he's seen its usually from people who have only a passing knowledge of it. Either they worked a job and only had to mess with it for a few months or they worked with it for a long time but never went past just the surface. Almost all the complaints he's seen about it are either extremely outdated, fixable with a little custom code or configuration changes. I think you should spend a little more time with it before you say that developers should feel "ashamed" for using it. Your post falls squarely into the category he was talking about.

I wouldn't trash talk this if it was simply an unpopular way of working. I'm trash talking it because it's the most popular way of working. I don't know anyone that does not write his/her papers in LaTex.

I have a lot of respect for having your own toolchain that's optimized and comfortable for you.

I am sorry I come across wrong, I am not saying that developers should feel ashamed for using it. I am saying developers should feel ashamed that other people are using it.

I'm not saying using LaTex is dumb, I've stated multiple times in this thread that I use it myself. I'm just saying we could do better.

> I'm trash talking it because it's the most popular way of working. I don't know anyone that does not write his/her papers in LaTex.

And you never stopped to investigate why, in spite of the far greater ease of entry that alternatives have?

I have a hard time believing this, to be honest. I know far, far more people who use Microsoft Word, than I do people who use (or even heard of) LaTeX.

Agreed. LaTeX is a very field specific tool. I don't know anyone that has ever used it (other than me, and I'm forced to use Word because that's what all my collaborators use).

It depends on the field. The field I am working in (computational linguistics), virtually everyone uses LaTeX. And with good reason, there are great packages for typesetting stuff that is specific to our field. So, yes, at work I know far more people who use LaTeX than Word.

I disagree that it's the most popular way of working. Perhaps that is true just in mathematics, physics, and maybe even computer science but unlikely to be true in many other fields. Let's be realistic and realize that the majority of people do not use LaTeX. The ones who do use it, use it because they are putting in a lot of mathematical formulae which are easier to do in LaTeX than Word (although Microsoft is making progress with the equation editor) and the formulae look way nicer in LaTeX. Word renders the formulae into an equation that generally looks bad and scales worse.

The things that I use LaTeX for are usually my own writing that I don't have to collaborate with other people for. If I have to work with other people I use Word. The things that I like about latex are that I can have it automatically generate my figures because I can script it, which I can't do with Word.

I agree that LaTeX can be difficult to write but you have to realize that word has it's shortcomings too (put an image in and send the document to somebody else, chances are the layout will get messed up). Tools like pandoc are trying to alleviate both problems so people can work in whatever environment they prefer, which seems like a good solution to me. I could write part of my document in markdown, convert to LaTeX and write my formulae and then convert to Word so my coworkers can edit it easier.

I don't actually disagree with you on most points, but just out of curiosity why do you have the impression that Latex is slow? I used it to write my thesis (> 200 pages, full of images) and was re-rendering all the time, it only took a couple of seconds on my slow netbook.. When I'm working on a shorter paper, I barely notice the time between hitting "render" and seeing the result. (I realize I could even set it up to automatically render while I'm writing but prefer to concentrate purely on the text editor as much as possible and curb my urge to re-render constantly)

I've formatted three books self-published by my wife. The first in Pages (better than Word for nearly everything except document interchange), and the latter two in LaTeX.

I'll take LaTeX. It's more reliably reproducible. Once I got the basic format created (for her second book)—which took about as much time as it took to format the first book in Pages—the third book took about a tenth the time. My tooling was in place.

It's not for everyone, and you really have to either dig deep or find a macro set that does what you want (or both—I'm using a macro set on top of scrbook). There is room for something better, but that something better is not Word (or Pages).

(I'd almost say that what LeanPub does is good enough, but their LaTeX typography sucked when I tried it almost two years ago.)

"I bet that if you really dive into it you could get very close to the power of latex."

I find that very unlikely.

> One allows you to make the document to look exactly how you want.

Are you talking about InDesign? Exact placement of anything is really a pain with Latex, choosing "normal" fonts requires you to switch to a different compiler and the debugging information on all those automatic choices TeΧ and LaTeΧ does for you is abysmal. What I'm saying is that even though LaTeΧ allows you to do precision work does not mean it is a good at it.

I am very confused by the implication that TeX or LaTeX make it easy to create a document that looks exactly the way you want. Unless you want it to look like a paper presented to a publication that has a mandatory style, and a package is available with that style, it's just not true.

And that is almost the whole point. Most people are idiots about how to present written material, so TeX and friends make those decisions for us. It's especially frustrating when you have to dink with floats, because now you're second-guessing TeX, and it exacts a high price.

I've used TeX for over 25 years and I'm comfortable saying that I could produce documents of a similar quality, with better support for collaboration, with Word.

I still use TeX for many projects but the Word style capability is great.

Markdown still sucks, though. :)

with better support for collaboration, with Word

How? This is an honest question. I wouldn't use Word anyway, but I am just not aware of anything that could come close to Git + LaTeX in terms of collaboration support.

Fair question.

I've been doing projects with people who have no technical background to speak of, but immense domain knowledge. They wrote their theses in word (god help them), published in journals that required submissions in word (there are more and more of the things), and include a lot of figures in their papers or grant proposals.

Sharepoint helps a lot with collaboration, but even word's basic change tracking and commenting facilities are good for people working around a document via email, Dropbox, or even git.

Word still creates those weird situations for which it is infamous, but they are generally rare. Also, word has become much more stable, even with larger documents.

Those are just the surface differences. The modes in which you use all of these are very different.

Word: explicit WYSIWYG control over typesetting.

LaTeX: semantic level control over typesetting. Additionally provides explicit low level typesetting commands.

Markdown: given how basic (trivial even) Markdown is (http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax) I'm not sure why it's even in this list.

It's in the list because it's what I would use for my thesis, if I'd do one now :) It's basic, but it has the semantics for most stuff, and can easily be extended for more. I'd do all formula's/drawings in external tools.

Word nowadays has semantic typesetting controls too, I think since they started that ribbon thing that it has become useable. If you stick to using their semantic things I think you can do a pretty good job of properly typesetting in Word.

Writing a thesis using only markdown sounds extremely painful. Are you going to create all your figures elsewhere and then include them as images? How are you going to create your list of figures? And your table of contents? How are you going to create, maintain, and organize your list of references? I could go on.

> Are you going to create all your figures elsewhere and then include them as images?

This is what most people do in physics and astronomy. You make the plot in some kind of plotting package and export it to a vector format. In astronomy, the journals only recently started accepting PDF figures in addition to EPS.

In my experience doing all of my figures in LaTeX is significantly more painful than using a real plotting package like matplotlib.

I wrote a dissertation, two theses, and a bunch of papers in latex and I never ever ever ever did any graphics that weren't imported as eps or, later, png.

I don't know your exact use cases but I am reallyfond of pgfplots which, being based on TikZ, integrates much better than matplotlib. But I also happen to hate matplotlib for sticking with "that" API ...

As long as you can get it in vector format, it doesn't matter.

What about tables? Granted they aren't fun to make, but I am not aware of any methods of creating them outside of a latex document.

None of those features require LaTeX arcane syntax, obscure source code, and multiple compilation steps. reStructuredText is a Markdown-like language containing some of the features you mention, especially with extensions; its syntax is well-defined, and its main implementation is in Python.

The point isn't if Markdown has enough features, but rather that LaTeX lets you a pay a price for those features that you shouldn't be paying, just because it's a 40-years-old software.

I actually had a mini panic attack thinking about that.

The best thing about markdown is pandoc.

Writing my thesis with markdown was one of the best decisions i made. I wrote 99% of my master thesis in markdown (50 pages w/o interviews). 1) I didn't have a lot of images so i just wrote FIXME: Image Foo.png where they belonged. 2) I wrote my Citations Plain in there (e.g. Wocken, 1985, 7 ff.), using a special folder for all sources i really used in Mendeley. 3) Writing in markdown i could just c&p perfectly formatted chapters written with simplenote. 4) i also could seperate the chapters in files and keep everything in a git repo.

When i was finnished writing i exported the markdown to rtf, 1) selected all the h1's via "select all", set them to be a real (word) h1. vice versa with all other styles i used. 2) Then i put in all the pictures. 3) Then i exported the list from Mendeley.

That process - from markdown to perfection - took me less than 4 hours.

I have some experience with latex and especially latex + komascript, but i hated that experience because the latex sourcecode doesn't ebrace readability and you're sure to get obscure errors in the last second. besides stuff like running latex twice for a table of contents.

Writing

  \begin{itemize}
    \item really long line which gets wrangled in my vim 
  terminal, so that i don't see where the second item starts.
    \item another long line. maybe 200 characters long?
  \end{itemize}

is complicated and you can't read it well. this otoh is very easy to read:

  * really long line which gets wrangled as well, but is 
  better to read because it starts with a clear sign which 
  is recognized to be a bullet.
  * next line, which is also very long.

Easy readability is crucial, because i needed proof readers. The young proof readers could actually get the markdown code and correct my mistakes there (or write comments, starting with another fixme). really rocked with diff.

The older proofreaders could proofread it in the final stage in ms word with the track changes functionality.

I put a lot of thought into Design and Typography and i was sure that i could decide better how my document should look, than latex. I agree, that for some people this is not the case.

How do you get pagination with markdown? I would like to switch to markdown instead of using latex, because my needs are simple. But how can I convert markdown into something with support for pagination?

i actually converted it to rtf and imported it then in MS Word (On OS X). I took care of pagination there.

Actually the Plan was to typeset it in Indesign, but as i woke up the day of the final layout i just decided to do it in Word.

Saying that this toolchain is better than using Latex is so hilarious :D

I'll just pretend it's a parody.

Most content can be written in something other than LaTeX, especially in early drafts. I always start drafting papers in Markdown. I cannot imagine going from start to finish with Markdown though. Especially since most papers have fairly strict style guidelines and length restrictions.

After a draft or two, transitions to LaTeX is a must. [Pandoc](http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/) for the win!

Plus there are many advances to doing figures in LaTeX - such as the ability to have you math typeset the same way as in non figures.

Check out pandoc [1], it will let you write documents in Markdown + LaTeX for equations and then convert it to LaTeX, a PDF, or several other document formats.

Also, even though Markdown tends to be fairly easy to write, there are many edge cases where you can't really be sure what the result is unless you try it.

[1]: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/

I do not use any of the mathematical elements of LaTeX and the work I do render using it is exclusively words. Just words. So really LaTeX isn't necessary for what I do. But, I write using MultiMarkdown in Scrivener, using Bibtex citekeys for referencing then export the document as LaTeX from scrivener and then compile using Texshop.

I guess I don't really have a point. Just that if you are writing essays in the humanities or sociology then markdown can have a place in your workflow

LuaTeX is exactly what you’re talking about.

LuaLaTeX is a reimplementation of PDFLaTeX on that base.

ConTeXt is a new syntax/concept based on LuaLaTeX (that doesn’t want to be compatible with LaTeX and its errors)

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That shell is unfortunately MS PowerShell. There are several approaches to do it in a way more familiar and compatible with unix shells. (some of which have been started recently, such as Final Term, and some are vaporware, such as TermKit)

And most editors are like that, some of which even have an optional vim mode for fans of that control scheme (my favourite is Kate)

The by far easiest way to write formulae I've come across is pen and paper. I could imagine a drawing tablet interface with good computer vision algorithms could be nice.

Surface Pro has a digitizer and pen, Windows has math-writing recognition from pen input:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-ph/windows7/use-math-input-p...

OneNote has "insert Ink Equation" (I don't know if it uses the same engine, or has its own).

"A shell that instead of working on character streams worked on structured and annotated data streams, so it could intelligently interpret what is going on?"

I'm not convinced that's worse, but I'm not convinced it's better for the task of being a shell. It's totally, unequivocally, way the hell better when you're trying to build anything large out of it, but taking everything back to byte streams at the interfaces means a huge ability to easily reformulate things to fit them together.

Have you seen http://xiki.org? It seems a good idea for the she'll to know what a directory is for example.

I had not; I'll look at it at some point here.

What do you mean by "know what a directory is"?

> Markdown is better. Microsoft Word is better. They just both lack certain things we need, and LaTeX has those things.

That comparison right there, between systems in entirely different categories, tells me you have no idea about what you're saying.

LaTeX is not slow or inconsistent.

You only need to run it multiple times if you use features that require it, and that is because one pass generates code to be read in a second pass.

The syntax is not ugly. It's a macro programming language.

If you don't like use vim (or emaca with AucTeX) to write it, look at LaTeXila - it's pretty good. If on Windows, notepad++ is also free and has excellent support for LaTeX.

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