The only problem: he's right.
He doesn't say "Never use Latex!". His opinion is that those who are picking it up under the false illusion that latex gets out of there way better than MS Word are doing themselves a disservice. Seems to me to be a fairly uncontroversial opinion. The latex document, especially one that's big, is not trivial to parse and edit. Making sure the 'flow' of the text is right is infinitely easier with WYSIWYG.
He absolutely seems to be OK with people who use latex because they care deeply about the beauty of the resulting document, and himself advocates for a post-writing conversion to latex. Markdown>Pandoc>Latex even. I feel many here are not reading the article in context.
I have an aside of my own to add to the "latex gets document design out of your way" crowd. I can bet any money that the types of people who will fiddle a lot with the typeface settings on MS Word will fiddle with themes/linespacing/monospaced font-du-jour on their text editor too. It has less to do with the writing environment and more to do with personality. I would know since I'm one of those people.
I don't even have the impression that his proposed alternatives (conversion changes from other formats to latex) are really used by him.
Ah, I like writing documents in Docbook, so I am not even that kind of a latex enthusiast. But his criticism is kind of really off.
One of the main things he does point out is that the justification often used to promote LaTeX is complete bullshit. "You should use LaTeX because you spend too much time trying to worry about what size your title should be in Word." No, I don't.
He also points out that, even if you prefer writing markup yourself to WYSIWYG, LaTeX isn't exactly the simplest markup. Stuff like restructured text or markdown (hell, even HTML in many cases!) has much less intrusive formatting information than LaTeX does. LaTeX is designed for final typesetting, and it has too much overhead for the majority of writing cases where you don't care about final typesetting at all.
The larger hurdle (IMO), is that TeX can be extremely finicky even compared to HTML. To get a document that looks mostly the same as the one you got out of Word takes time and a fair bit of setup. I went through this same process with my CV after I finished my MA.
Once it's done however, updates are quick and require almost no effort.
This isn't to say that there are not benefits to word/wiki, mind. Just, "where everyone else is" is not the most satisfying of reasons.
Using the "print" @media type and converting from px to inches only gets you so far. For something that I expect to be printed at some point, TeX is a much better place to start.
That said, the stability of the flow of TeX and friends lets me not worry about anything having changed on me in the past few months/years. I think this has gotten better in the HTML world, but it is still a much shakier foundation.
I think the blog post was okay, but could have used some editing as I ended up skimming some of the points he was trying to make but that's kind of what blogs are about.
Agreed, people are having a strong reaction to a criticism of LaTeX that the author isn't actually making.
> I can bet any money that the types of people who will fiddle a lot with the typeface settings on MS Word will fiddle with themes/linespacing/monospaced font-du-jour on their text editor too.
It pains me to agree with you, but I'll agree that at the end of the day, being concerned about typesetting is probably a bit superfluous.
I think you're missing the point though. There's a strong value to standardization in formatting when it comes to typesetting, can you imagine how annoying/distracting it would be if serious journals had minor differences in formatting? I'm not being sarcastic here, it's a necessity when it comes to any kind of repeated publication. LaTeX solves this problem better than anything else in existence, way better than the limited themes and styles available in WYSIWYG text processors.
I made a nice fancy template with tcolorbox for q/a homework problemsets and now that's a solved problem for me. It looks better than anything you could possibly make in Docs or Word, it looks exactly the same every time.
It's also scriptable. For example, I was working on an amateur radio and I needed to save off the calibration settings before I worked on it. I took a video of myself scrolling through the settings, watched it once with mpv repeatedly hitting 's' to take screenshots, and then was able to interpolate the screenshots with the actual content of the Yaesu manual, producing a beautiful manual that described the setting in question, as well as showing what it was set to before I started working. It took me like 15 minutes, and I'm glad that I did it because it saved me a lot of time later on. Try doing that in Word, Libreoffice, or Docs!
Either way, I'll back out a bit and ask a more elementary question. Is a workflow possible wherein one writes in anything-but-latex (Word/Markdown etc) and then uses latex to typeset? Because I (and the author) agree with you that a) standardisation is a good thing and b) latex is excellent at typesetting.
What latex is weak at is me writing my paper in it, and then trying to read back whether what I wrote flows well.
Pandoc is a good tool for automating workflows that start with some other format and end with LaTeX.
Another good option if you like Emacs is org-mode, which has a LaTeX export, among other things.
Another very neat feature is Org-Babel, which allows you to write code in (almost) any language that is then replaced with its output, which is great for example code. It can even pipe stuff through PlantUML, allowing you to embed your diagrams into the source code rather than having to manage them separately.
As an example of what it looks like at scale(-ish), I used this to write my thesis paper[1], and all the other related documentation[2].
[1]: https://gitlab.com/PicoNodes/PicoNodes/blob/master/docs/Repo...
[2]: https://gitlab.com/PicoNodes/PicoNodes/blob/master/docs/Pico...
That is to say, yes, there is a workflow. It is basically to build the prose out separately from the layout. Latex is used to typeset the document you want to do. Not to author it. By the time you get to it, you probably should be at the point where the markup is what you care about.
That make sense?
Yes, there will be times where you care about how the document looks. That is likely an iterative process and many of us find value in separating the quibbles over the look from the authoring of the content. Both are valuable. Doing them both at the same time is ridiculously hard.
However, this won't always be the easiest method. For example, anything math-heavy will almost certainly be easier to type directly in tex markdown.
When people argue that latex gets out of the way, the road being spoken of is the one leading to a beautiful document, so the author is expected to care about the final appearance. LaTeX and Word both come with learning costs, the initial effort in to just bang out some words is clearly higher in LaTeX, but they will look good from the start.
Yes, if you don't much care about the looks of the end result, Word is more expedient, but then so is notepad.
Tl;dr, That is ugly.
Next, I googled "russian pension reform pdf", and in the top three hits there were two reports with various levels of depressing Word defaults, and one that I'll give be benefit of the doubt and say was actually a conversion from a web page.
I'd say this is a fairly typical look for any report that isn't super official or actually a magazine trying to sell something.
The IIHS report honestly isn't bad looking. To my eyes, it could be done in TeX or Word depending on how complicated the styles actually are.
I view the two tasks as very different. One of the reasons I dislike Word and other Word Processors is that they crowd my writing views with formatting tools and suggestions.
A plain text editor is far more comfortable for me when I'm writing and Latex allows me to tackle the layout and typesetting work as a separate step.
I get the argument that people -- that is to say, programmers -- like to write in their text editor of choice, too. However, I think that's what it is: preference for the familiar. Writing LaTeX feels like you're programming and lets you use tools you're familiar with, so it appeals to people who like to write programs. That doesn't mean the extra effort is really paying off.
I think arguments that the results from Word aren't good enough or professional enough don't really hold water, either. Take a look at any of the opinions from the Supreme Court of the United States [0]. Download any of those opinions and look at the metadata. Some of them are scanned documents, but many of them say: "Application: Acrobat PDFMaker N for Word". You'll find the same thing if you look at petitions that have been filed, and they get quite complicated [1].
[0]: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/slipopinion/18
[1]: https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/18/18-306/63707/20180...
It may have gotten better I haven't actually used Word in probably 10 years or more at this point. The fact is that I can edit my document in an editor I'm comfortable with and I can typeset it with a tool I'm comfortable with and the two steps are pretty distinct from each other and I like that explicit separation.
But it doesn't really make a LaTeX user more qualified to criticize Word any more than OP is for criticizing LaTeX, does it? Is "I just don't like chasing down the various toggles for it all" really a better argument than "I find reading all those codes aversely difficult"?
Contrast this with the current Word system. I have had a non-trivial number of times where it will start doing things and I have no idea why. Probably logical, but I can't see the inputs to the logic. Only the output, with some idea that I should be able to drag things. Doesn't always work, and sometimes "undoing" the drag of an items is a non-trivial task.
To write a conference paper for submission, the steps to start it out are generally:
a) Copy the journal's LaTeX shell file.
b) Copy some other Makefile to actually convert TeX files into PDFs. (Because it turns out that this is simply too complicated to actually make a single command, especially when you have a bibliography and several images to import).
c) Okay, now we can go through the process of actually setting up the master TeX file, separate TeX files for each chapter and start typing text.
d) Include an image. Weep at how annoying this is, and how inconsistent documentation is.
e) Time to tweak the article to get it to fit the page count. Don't you love all of those little cycles where you have to wait for a half-dozen commands to run to figure out if you've shortened a single paragraph enough to pull the section header up to the previous page? And this is assuming you have a PDF viewer that will automatically refresh the display for you if it detects the PDF file changed.
In my opinion, the two great things about LaTeX are its syntax for math and BibTeX. But I wouldn't contend that these are unimprovable (particularly BibTeX). But it spends too much time making you concerned with publishing concerns that trying to just jot down notes or other early document planning is surprisingly difficult.
Whereas I (not claiming a universal) can only use Word for small documents; when they get big, with revision tracking, chapters, etc etc I've found it becomes fragile. We had a 1600 page FDA submission garble itself shortly before we had to submit and had to go find older versions from backup tapes (!), re type stuff from old printed out copies, and check every number in every inline data submission which caused major panic and stress. Everybody we asked for help said, "don't use word for a large document"
Maybe some people are able to do it.