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Comment by stusmall | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 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'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.

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.

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).

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.

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