Comment by klyrs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by klyrs | Hacker News Reader

I'm more of a leather gal, but... cough I think that's more of a fashion choice

I've been using LaTeX for over a decade and I've never heard/made these arguments about LaTeX "separating formatting from content" except when a colleague has painstakingly written a torturous macro to accomplish some fussy layout. And then we happily \include{their code} so that we don't need to look at that godawful mess mixed in with our prose. (okay that's a lie, my prose is interspersed with tikz arcana to make coauthors weep with pain and readers delight over the beauty of my figures -- yes there's some sadism and masochism involved, let's not deny it)

Latex gives a powerful basis for document editing that can be learned in hours. It's not special in that regard, and easier markup languages abound. For me and others, LaTeX is a turing-complete, flexible, high powered typesetting engine with good defaults and no handrails. We're programmers, not graphic designers, so we can handle a little (well, a lot) of flagellation to build intermediate tools in the language which accomplish repetitive tasks.

All that shit about the language being easy and helpful? It's written by fetishists for sure. Knuth is a big fan of literate programming but the code he writes is a godawful stab through the eyeball. Maybe somebody with more refined tastes in code structure could do a better job. But they haven't and we use LaTeX, so buckle up kiddos you're mathematicians now

Precisely. The actual structure of working LaTeX documents contains plenty of code to just make stuff look right. The "separating formatting from content" crowd is, in my opinion, actually inexperienced in the language, or being intellectually lazy.

The article also seems to focus on the distinction between TeX and LaTeX, which is kind of pointless. Apart from extensions such as ConTeXt, nobody advocates for the use of raw TeX. Just use LaTeX (unless you have a reason not to).

The actual reason to use LaTeX, in the professional scientific research community, is that it is more of a lingua-franca, just the way things are done, similar to how lawyers hold the Blue Book dear, and researchers in the social sciences swear by APA.

There are some clear advantages to using LaTeX: (1) It gracefully integrates with version control (similar to Markdown and LyX, but unlike, Word docx). (2) Entering mathematics is, after the learning period, painless, even more so that Markdown, and only somewhat less than writing material by hand. (3) Large library of classes and styles on CTAN. Everything from bibliographies to figure drawing to colour to typesetting presentations. (4) The core is mostly stable. TeX certainly, and the LaTeX macros almost. In any case, if the system explodes, the original sources are not usually corrupted.

Of course, just like the Blue Book and APA, the system has its warts: TeX-the-language is hideous, and the multi-pass build system archaic, even if the markup is mostly unobtrusive after one gets used to it.

I will also agree that LaTeX is often fetishized, though not in the manner the author describes. I have in mind college professors who mandate that homework assignments be typeset in LaTeX. This is a waste of time. Let the students use whatever system they find most convenient, as long as it is submitted as a legible PDF: Word, LaTeX, scanned handwritten pages.

After you enter the fold as a professional researcher though, the convention of using LaTeX is the easiest way to progress. It's not as bad as you initially think it to be.

It's unfortunate that I don't see what I think is the killer app of LaTeX mentioned as prominently in this thread as I'd like. LaTeX has first-class support for text substitution macros, which even pandoc doesn't seem to have. If you use macros liberally and semantically, documents requiring the same complex kinds of data or notation in multiple places can be controlled with just the one macro definition. This especially helps you maintain a single style throughout the entire document where another word processor may not have the ability to replace formatting throughout.

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