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Comment by louhike | Hacker News Reader

Relative to LaTeX:

Has anyone heard of professional use of LaTeX outside of the scientific fields?

I've seen a lot of good examples of the power of LaTeX but all seems ot have been made by scientists. And I tried to convince my girlfriend who is in the edition/layout field (not sure of the correct name). she already knew LaTeX (at my surprise) and she thought the examples were unimpressives. She doesn't anybody in her field using it professionally.

So I was wondering if her experience was specific or it was really unused outsite science. Any feedback on this one?

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The answer is a resounding 'no'. Typesetting is something that is nearly completely done by InDesign at large shops — the advantages of LaTeX just aren't appreciable when laying out photo-heavy books that use layouts custom to each book. 99% of the things InDesign can do are definitely replicable in LaTeX, but it'd be a ton of work and would require one hell of a knowledge of LaTeX libraries. Contrast this with the fact that a competent high schooler with some knowledge of design can pump out great looking layouts with InDesign. LaTeX is great for personal documents and publications where layout has been wholly standardized, but those situations are quite rare for publishing firms.

LaTeX is pretty dead outside of science, and it makes sense that this is the state of things.

Using LaTeX effectively requires the same ways of thinking needed in order to write code. For people who aren't used to doing this, adjusting from Word to LaTeX is not going to be easy.

In the professional publishing fields, editors have overcome the shortcomings of Word in a completely different way - using advanced GUI tools that have hundreds of options and settings that you have to learn, but that let you have instant feedback on your decisions. Admittedly, programs such as InDesign can actually make prettier documents than LaTeX, but the comparative amount of effort you need to invest makes it rather a bad tradeoff for someone who already knows LaTeX.

LaTeX is good at making consistently beautiful documents fast, while professional publishing tools let you invest lots of effort into getting something even more beautiful, or downright ugly. For the scientist, LaTeX wins easily, but for someone whose primary job is to make things as pretty as they can be, it is not so.

What real-life scientists do: write their paper in Word then change the font to Computer Modern. (I'm not joking in the slightest.)

There's a lot of unprofessional behavior and software practices in the "professional" publishing field. Many authors refuse to write in anything but MS Word, and companies rely on Track Changes for version control of manuscripts.

I'm definitely not an everyday user of Track Changes, but isn't that the very use case for it, version control inside a manuscript?

The biggest caveat I've seen to its use are ballooning file sizes (meh), and (more importantly) leaking information. But I also thought recent versions of Word made it more prominent to discard tracking information when doing a Save/As.

Why is that unprofessional?

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