I hate LaTeX, I love LaTeX (opens in new tab)

Academia. At least, its widespread (almost universal) where I am studying. Mainly to manage citations, figures, and tables of contents automatically. Tools like Sharelatex are used for collaboration on papers.

We use a lot of LaTeX to make the midterms and final exams in the math department of my university. Everyone knows how to write in LaTeX, so if I make a internal helper package or a bunch of macros, then everyone can use it with minimal training.

The problem with wysiwyg word processors is that people get creative and it's very difficult to enforce the same style for all the material.

I use it for stuff more than a couple of pages long, because:

- I can use my text editor of choice

- I don't have to worry about messing with the formatting by accident

- It goes through git easily

Anything shorter and I just use a word processor, it's not worth the time messing with the boilerplate.

I do use it for writing letters - I have a template I just fill out and it spits out a nicely formatted letter with an envelope.

It's also handy for when I need documents in multiple languages - you can make one change to the formatting and it changes them all.

Laying out books. The fact that all of this can be done in a text file, without hidden codes and being tied to this file format or another, is extraordinary. Images are easily handled, fonts simply work (XeTeX & friends work well for me), and — with sufficient warnings — these files can be handed over to an author and edited without messing much, if anything, up. The PDFs generated work well with all the PDF tools I've attempted to use on them, and there's none of the weirdness that too-often shows up in Word or other WPs. If all you want is good-looking text, generated from truly basic documents, it will give it to you without effort.

LaTeX is particularly suited to print (and by extension PDF). When you get into writing your own custom LaTeX macros/commands, yes it's difficult. However, the vast majority of users are simply consuming these sorts of custom commands in the article, not producing them. This leads into environments where people writing papers or articles just use what's handed to them.

LaTeX works out amazingly for two very specific use cases: 1) Large, collaborative documents and 2) producing the exact same, highly structured print document over and over. I have pretty extensive experience with the second use case.

When I was Secretary for a non-profit organization, I had an entire little personal library of macros that sat on top of the minutes[1] package. I could open an empty text file, type in \attendee{Name} as people arrived. Type in \maketitle and do a quick preview and the document would instantly build out a front page that included if we had quorum or not, etc. I typed the document exactly as the meeting happened while marking up things like tasks (and who they're assigned to), decisions made (with voting tallies and who motioned what), and so on.

All that data would get duplicated to the end of the document in nice lists for quick reference. It had consistent formatting. The build system (a make file and latexmk iirc) would wrap my new file in the basic boilerplate and spit out the PDF for me to email. I consistently had the meeting minutes published an hour after every meeting whereas my predecessors often took 24 hours or more to publish meeting minutes due to Word being Word. Those documents also lacked a table of contents or the various appendices with summary data.

That said, there were things that I tended to avoid doing, like complex tables or something. There's something to be said for staying inside the box of what comes built into LaTeX. I recall giving up with floating an image to the left of a table on our title page and just plopping the image inline in a horizontally centered paragraph and then putting the rest of the title content beneath it.

Also, many documentation frameworks (sphinx comes to mind) use LaTeX under the covers to produce their PDF output. So you might think you're just using markdown or RST, but somewhere someone is converting that to LaTex or TeX in order to leverage a very good typesetting engine.

[1]: https://www.ctan.org/pkg/minutes

I'm a professor and research mathematician, and I use LaTeX for nearly everything I write. In addition to what others wrote --

- The way I conceptualize it, LaTeX is a word processor. So, for example, if I'm writing a rec letter and I choose LaTeX over Word, I'm thinking "I like this word processor better than that one."

- LaTeX/PDF is often criticized for being static, but in my experience, this is a good thing in most cases. If I am discussing the contents of a file with someone else, it is useful if we are both looking at exactly the same thing.

- I don't try to do any significant programming, or extensive customization of how my documents look. I agree that trying to do so would be annoying, but this is not part of my use case. If you look at a random selection of math papers, say here

https://arxiv.org/list/math/new

you'll notice that all of them look more or less identical.

PDF is unfortunately still the preferred format for sharing research papers.

And you're right, single file HTML with embedded images would be a much better format, but I assume publishers are preventing this.

> What is the intended use for LaTex these days?

Writing anything with complicated mathematical typesetting, for one; their have been improvements in word processors and thinks like MathML/MathJax, but they are still behind.

Works pretty well for autogenerated docs with more going on than is easy in Markdown, also - but that's often a bit of a wash.

Anything where decent typography is desired. Also, of course, mathematics. Mathjax is very good, but we sometimes want a canonical version of a document that looks the same for every reader, and doesn’t depend of the vagaries of constantly evolving browser engines. This means PDF.

I use it for puzzle books. Things like suduko, cryptograms, criss-cross, etc.

I have various custom C++ programs to generate the puzzles. But, getting the results to a formatted PDF was nearly impossible.

I use LaTeX as I can have my C++ program output a text file which, when compiled with LaTeX, creates the pretty puzzle books.

Essentially, I can press a button and “poof” I have a print-ready puzzle book ready to go up on Amazon.

My use case was for getting easy marks for proper APA formatting, which Zotero/EndNote and Mendeley don’t quite cover in one pass.

Word processor does not work with git and group collaboration and versioning properly.

HTML is not an authoring tool. Maybe pandoc or sphinx or other system would compete.

Master/PhD theses and papers in the sciences, particularly if formulas are involved.

Gold standard equation editing.

Out of all the problems of TeX/LaTeX, the worst I found is that subscripts and superscripts visually dominate the line noise when they ought to be less visible than the main content. I think your example helps to illustrate that by the equations I tended to typeset where way worse for that problem. (But I only dipped my toe in properly programming it like OP, which I realise is even worse.)

This is really solved by the graphical equation editor in LyX. I wrote my master's thesis and PhD thesis using it, having previously written an undergrad thesis in raw LaTeX. When I switched, I was part way through writing up notes for a masters course and ended up rewriting them in LyX (sadly its LaTeX import is terrible). I found that I was able to write notes faster by a factor of 3! And I honestly was no LaTeX novice, it just really is less efficient. I shudder to imagine how long I would've spent on my PhD thesis without LyX.

The mistake people make with LyX is assuming it is for beginners trying to avoid LaTeX (and it does partly market itself that way). I consider it the opposite: it's best suited to those who already fully understand LaTeX. You still need to dip into it occasionally to edit the preamble or stick in the odd little snippet of manual LaTeX (that's ERT in LyX terminology). And while typesetting errors are much rarer with LyX (it's much harder to forget a closing brace when you don't put them in in the first place), when they do occur it's because something has gone really wrong so you better know what's going on.

I agree that TeX sources are often damn near impossible to read. That stuff is... ugly. But at least it's there. You can see it. You can manipulate it. You can understand it (though it sometimes takes more time flipping through the TeXbook than any sane person is willing to spend). In comparison, WYSIWYGgery is like boxing with an invisible opponent. Where do I click, what magic check box three levels deep in dialogs do I need to check? Why does that word come out in a different font? How do I move the cursor across the italic/roman boundary? Why is there extra space here, but not there? How can I interact with things that I cannot see?

> \sigma _{I}^{2}=a^{2}s^{2}+\left( 1-a\right)^{2}S^{2}+2a\left( 1-a\right)\sigma.

I'd write the above expression as the following:

\sigma_I^2 = a^2 s^2 + (1-a)^2 S^2 + 2a(1-a) \sigma

The only thing you need to know to understand it conceptually is `_ -> move next character down`, `^ -> move next character up`.

I am with you for all* of it. The Stockholm syndrome bit is oh so true. But I take exception with the math, Latex math is its only redeeming quality (with Adobe FrameMaker coming in a distant second).

I agree that LaTeX has not the best syntax, but that is a better alternative?

I mostly write in Word and I can tell you that it is not that much better than LaTeX. Sure, the editor is WYSIWYG so you can see right away the title, abstract, text, etc.

The problems I have with Word are mostly solved in LaTeX. For example, references are automatically managed in LaTeX. In Word, that's mostly a manual process (I know there are integrations with Zotero/Mendeley/whatever, but those are a little wonky on a long paper---I have never used the built-in citation manager). I sometimes feel bad for the editors that have to check all my reference lists. They usually find 1-2 papers that are either missing or included and no longer cited.

Tables are also a problem in Word, especially if your collaborators use an older version that breaks the formatting (Moving between Google Docs -> Word -> Google Docs also breaks a lot of things). I can't tell you how many times I had to reformat tables that a collaborator broke. Making complex tables is also wack sometimes, like adding a simple sub-rule between cells requires some column hacks in Word.

Table/figure numbering is also another thing that I loathe in Word. Manually renumbering is a pain and the automatic numbering always breaks for me in a way or another (maybe still thanks to my collaborators).

All those things work pretty well in LaTeX with some backslash commands.

What Word really shines is track changes and commenting. I don't know if there is a LaTeX editor where you can track changes and comments like in Word (I know that Overleaf has something that kind of works).

Powerpoint vs. Beamer is a whole different ball of wax. Both have pros and cons. But with presentations with a lot of equations, beamer is definitely better but, as you point out, it doesn't play well when you want to put an equation in a specific spot in the slide. In powerpoint, you can just click and drag and you are done.

I agree. LyX is a much better alternative to LaTeX. It's a sort of GUI front-end to it, but it lets you do all the normal editing in normal WYSWYG way (but without the "is the space bold? why is the font of this blank line different?" you get with Word). Most importantly it has a really amazing equation editor.

Honestly, do you have any idea how to improve the math mess? I did use both Word and LaTeX für equations, the latter is much faster for me. So WYSIWYM seems to have its usecase. But I agree, reading that equation is just awful. My idea would be tooling to partially render tha equation, e.g. rendering sections the cursor is not in.

The equation example is artificial. In practice there will be no curly brackets around these single-token sub/superscripts, nor should the \left / \right present in this example. With properly added whitespaces this equation becomes quite legible.

For more complex equations people use line breaks and indentations, and/or macros.

I want to use latex while using your attitude! It has to be simple and the syntax out of the way, almost like Markdown

That equation is easily workable with the code as is, and that options block is also fine. My bigger concern is someone coming in without enough experience and trying to disrupt the whole academia. Yes, the learning curve is steep - can anyone even say they finally know TeX? Aligning stuff and other things may take time. But if you're writing papers, the output quality is amazing and, what is important, consistent - light years ahead of WYSIWYG editors. I'd rather edit my equations manually in TeX rather than, say, popular office suites. And why would anyone want to do presentations in TeX anyways? It's like using a spaceship to shop for groceries.

As a physics postdoc I have to say that is quite a simple equation

> You always feel like you are trying to trick the system into doing something it was not designed for.

This is one of the hallmarks of human civilization.

Your hands were designed for throwing a stone at the eye of a mammoth. But you can play the violin with them! Yes; it is totally awkward and anti-natural for your hands, obviously not their intended purpose... but so beautiful!

My main issue with LaTex is that you can't take a perfectly correct piece of markup, insert it into a container like a table, and expect it to work.

LaTeX makes it difficult to compose stuff. Even HTML did this better.

Yes! Plain python is almost always crystal clear and self explanatory. But "idiomatic python" which people seem to compete to be "more idiomatic than thou" is none of these things. It's actually a barrier to learning the language.

> There is never a keyword that does what you want

Clearly you haven't seen https://github.com/mscroggs/realhats

> I always find this a bit sad, because it seems to take away the idea that programming is about assembling composable parts

[OT] Concerning "programming is about assembling composable parts": I always find both sad and ridiculous when self-proclaimed software developers bash Unix because they are not able to appreciate its philosophy.

Another good WYSIWYG front end is LyX: www.lyx.org . I've written a few hundred physics lecture notes with it, as well as a number of Beamer presentations. I find it much easier to use than TeXmacs (mainly because of keyboard shortcuts), and the output is excellent. And yes, it produces true TeX/LaTeX.

>Try TeXmacs, it's neither TeX nor it's Emacs clone.

Seems to be about the worst name they could have chosen then

Any published papers that use this?

I recently converted myself to using TeXmacs. I did it because I was constantly getting lost in the minutiae of proofs of a large paper I was working on [1]

The WYSIWYG aspect of TeXmacs was crucial for me because I was able to "think about math" while working on the PC. When doing things in LaTeX I always found myself thinking on paper and then writing down in TeX.

I personally believe that "thinking on paper" is still better for me at the starting stage of mathematical research. However, once the outline of the proof was clear and I needed to clean up details and to write technical proofs then working directly on the PC helped a lot

Another fantastic feature of TeXmacs is the "preview on hover" package. If you have a reference to an equation and you put your mouse over it, TeXmacs can show you the equation in a popup. This was very important when I was going over the draft once I have written the proofs and when checking for correctness. I have hundreds of numbered equations and checking that I was citing the correct bound in a proof of a lemma was made much easier by this feature. Before passing to TeXmacs I tried to find way to do this efficiently using LaTeX. Intrestingly enough very few PDF's have a "breadcrumbs" feature for you to be able to jump to a reference and then go "back" to your previous position in the paper. The closest I came was Emacs+Auctex+preview. Since Emacs is scriptable and already has the notion of "mark ring" that is essentially the "breadcrumb" feature, that helped a lot.

TeXmacs also has some shortcomings. While it is written in Scheme, I found discoverability and documentation lacking. However, there is a very friendly community of people that are very active on the forum. Any question I had about how to do something was usually answered in at most a day. This is actually great because the "basics" that one needs to work immediately are actually well documented. The things that are hidden are more advanced features. For example, there is math folding [2] that I accidentally discovered browsing the menus and then figured/asked on the forums. I had to ask about how to remove sub-sub-sections from the TOC [3] but, to be fair, even in LaTeX you cannot figure it out unless you know the macro.

The thing that I miss most from Emacs is the "self-documenting" nature of all the Lisp (Scheme in the case of TeXmacs) code and functions and the somewhat quirky search/replace functionality in TeXmacs. Honestly, the regexp search and replace (especially with a visual help package) in emacs was very powerful. But I believe the community is actively working on the former.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.09851

[2] http://forum.texmacs.cn/t/folding-computation/551/5

Please no. Stop replacing useful tools with "opinionated" ones. Nothing makes me nope out of using a tool faster than hearing it described as "opinionated".

You can embed CAS-generated equations and computations in LaTeX[1]. This came in handy for undergraduate linear algebra homework that combined proofs (where I could use my existing LaTeX macros) and computations (where we were expected to use a CAS). Mathematica or Jupyter notebooks would also work, but I prefer Emacs over the notebook UI (and Jupyter didn't actually exist at the time).

[1] See, e.g., https://github.com/tmolteno/SympyTeX/

> Make sure that figure is never out of date

For anyone with a software background, this is pretty straightforward - once you start thinking of the latex file(s) as source code rather than the document, it's a short jump to setting up a build environment...

> something faster

I don't know that this is the major pain point. The thing is, writing complex-structure/programmed documents is not something which needs immediate re-rendering with every character - just like you don't recompile your program with every character you change.

This would, however, be very useful for syntax and compiler-detectable error. You would have an effectively-immediate indication of warnings and errors per line in your document, like an IDE. So it would be Java-like compilation speed rather than C++-like compilation speed...

> safe

LaTeX programming is basically sandboxed, or at least you have to work _very_ hard to do dangerous things.

> latex is still very good at what people want it to do

That's not it. It is actually usually pretty bad in doing what we want it to do (e.g. tables. Oh, the pain!) ... but what it has going for it is that you can do almost anything you want?: It will take effort and the "source code" will be ugly, but it'll work.

> we could have a much better document format and publishing system around it.

TeXmacs (http://www.texmacs.org/ and http://forum.texmacs.cn/), and it happens right now!

What is LuaLaTeX?

It's great for writing papers. I can crack open vim rattle off an essay throw in some \par s and some \cite{sho0ngle} s, and then let all the typesetting, citation management, and whatnot get handled by the compiler.

For STEM classes, the LaTeX defaults are perfect, and I can insert tables and images and such that can be in flux over the course of writing the report, importing then from external scripts that part of my data analysis.

LaTeX only gets hairy when you start trying to fight it. If you want some that looks exactly as you imagine it, you're going to be fighting an uphill battle trying to specify exactly what you want, and constantly re-compiling. If instead, you just care about a clean, consistent, and presentable end product, then LaTeX gets you there with minimal fuss.

An article about how word processors are superior to LaTeX by someone who has never written anything with LaTeX, not even finished a single paper.

It's like writing an article about how walking is much faster than cycling, because 'I tried cycling once and fell over, so clearly all those fetishists are wrong, the suckers'.

I learned about Latex in physics 2 in college and started taking my notes that way in class. I could quickly make quick notes for anything that would take me too long to input and then I'd go back and actually review my notes to fill in what I hadn't formatted yet. I think it helped a lot because I actually reviewed my notes after class. I had a discrete math professor that offered extra points if you did your homework in Latex. I have shitty handwriting so I was already doing my homework on the computer anyway so it was easy credit. I got to be the favorite in my intro to astrophysics class because I turned in my papers in Latex, professor went out of his way to find me after class and complimented me. Haven't touched it in years since college.

Why is it not good at separating content from style?

Having written a report in Word that was about 1/4 of the size of my dissertation, but had some of the same content, and then the dissertation in LaTeX, I can say that as much as LaTeX wastes your time, it's by far the least wasteful option.

Same, I just did my resume in LaTeX, it's such an obtuse and painful tool, yet nothing even comes close to the control it gives you.

Hey btw, I'm looking for contract work! https://github.com/1player/resume/blob/master/resume.pdf

This anonymous, undated article was written by me, yesterday. The strong backwards compatibility of LaTeX(2e) [0] make it so that the date is not especially relevant (since I'm using primitives); in any case my point was pedagogical, in the sense of diving into the operational mechanisms of (La)TeX to develop a better mental model of what's going on. And while Pandoc is very nice, if you're in academia none of your alternatives are viable, since LaTeX is a de facto standard for most journals.

Fun fact: the article was written in Markdown, with some front matter for metadata!

[0] https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/247524/do-i-risk-bre...

If found “TeX by Topic” a great introduction, it's less overwhelming than the TeX book. Also really helpful in wrapping your head around macro expansion is the `texdef` cli tool, which allows you to quickly evaluate a line of macro code. Finally, https://www.tug.org/utilities/plain/cseq.html is nice for reference.

I can only hope to curse you with a TeX nerd-snipe :) I can recommend reading the first few chapters of The TeX Book (it's a genuinely fun read) followed by the links in the article's footnotes for more operational information.

I found The Advanced TeXbook by David Salomon to be helpful. It shows how to make your own format on top of plain TeX, including table of contents, page numbering, cross-references and insertions.

I also found A Beginner's Book of TeX by Raymond Seroul and Silvio Levy helpful as a quick reference.

Also I have an anti-recommendation for Knuth's TeXBook. I did not find this book helpful at all- too much information buried in exercises (which I don't think is appropriate for a reference), and not enough directly said on how to do useful things. Figure out how to make a table of contents using only the TeXBook..

I find Word is only tolerable when used like Latex. I.e., extensive use of Styles. Define a Style for every object type in your doc. Also, carefully choose the Next Style option. Define Sections if columns or pagination vary across the document. With that in hand, it is now just a matter of plugging in text and images. If something isn't working quite right, edit the Style instead of macdinking the text on the screen.

You are still left with formatting equations, but Word lets us use Latex-ish syntax for that now, so you can keep the fine control of Latex within the GUI context.

Don't get me wrong, I hate Word, but it is required in many environments. Adopting a rational use strategy helps a bit.

https://www.wordsense.eu/macdink/#English

I have the exact opposite story to tell. A friend of mine asked me to convert a 300 pages Word document to LaTeX, because Word couldn’t handle it. It was text, mostly, so it worked out quite well.

People write dissertations in Word all the time. How painful it is depends a bit on how complicated the dissertation is as a document.

This is of course only an anecdote, but I know many people who started in word, gave up on it and moved to Tex/Latex, but nobody who went the other way (that is to say, I know people who tried to give up on Tex, but eventually went back - not anyone who actually published with it). This might have quite a bit to do with subject matter - Word has always been an awkward fit for mathematics.

I have never met someone who use Latex who wasn't a mathematician, CS, or older (elderly?) engineer

Which LaTeX package are you using for old school D&D?

I feel the same way! I also feel like the LaTeX crap on top of Plain TeX is crap and it fills me with rage when I try to find info about TeX and always get back something assuming LaTeX.

Your stuff looks cool, I will take a look!

> It has superb output quality but the programming is awful

TeXmacs (http://www.texmacs.org/) has better output quality and nicer programming (it is Scheme :-) ) and it is easier to use.

I don't mind Beamer, there's some boilerplate but it is like a once-per-institution setup so it doesn't seem like too big of a pain. It was hopefully done by someone else, and if not, I only have to do it once for myself -- and then I can share it.

However, drawing figures in TikZ seems to be the main way of getting figures into a beamer presentation. This is a total nightmare and not really worth the effort, IMO.

If you have a lot of time on your hands, nothing makes your math/cs hw look quite as slick. Was fun to play around with in undergrad for sure. I've forgotten all my LaTeX skills since though.

Hi! Author here. This is a cool idea for a vector implementation, but you still need to work around the fact that the command definition can come after the \get

There's no such thing as Python because other people write code that imports dependencies.

I gave a cursory look at it and it's really too niche, complicated for its own good IMO.

Your comment made me want a modern TeX, written in Racket/Lisp.

  #lang latex

  (documentclass "article")
  (document
    (section "Chapter 1")
    Welcome to (LaTeX). Here is some (textbf "bold") text.)

How does this not exist yet??

Interesting, I hadn't seen this before. How does it differ from LyX?

Is a Windows build planned?

Yes :) https://github.com/mikeevmm/nobeamer

> Very honestly, part of the reason I don't bother with any new "LaTeX reimagined" projects is because either (a) they are written by LaTeX nonbelievers who don't understand the complexity of beautiful typesetting, or (b) I don't want to learn another markup+ language or mental model. The latter is increasingly annoying to me.

Then you have to try TeXmacs http://www.texmacs.org/. It is completely independent from LaTeX and TeX and has - beautiful typesetting (better than LaTeX) - it is fully WYSYWYG, so you don't have to learn a new markup language - yet it affords better document control than LaTeX

Same. I'm a PhD student in CS and manage just fine with embedded latex in word documents and a reference plugin (I use zotero). There's definitely pros/cons. Imo biggest con is the absence of something like overleaf and biggest pro is ease of use.