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Comment by wirrbel | Hacker News Reader

He slams Latex usage as a fetish. Then he actually has a hard time putting forth arguments against latex, ends up with very weak ones, for example he compares MacOS vanilla Emacs installation with a weird green-on-black colorscheme with MS Word as if it was the only editor you could use for Latex. In the end I feel I wasted my time reading his blog pot, because he just does not provide any substantial information.

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.

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> Then he actually has a hard time putting forth arguments against latex

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.

> 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.

That last point is the killer feature to me. I haven't updated my resume in years, but when I do, it is quick and I'm not worried about bitrot. The document I'm working on in wiki from last week? Odds are it is already broken. The document in Word that I shared with a friend? Almost certainly not going to be a trivial update.

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.

Before I went the LaTeX route, I tried just doing it in HTML/CSS and although I'm well versed in both, it never really looked right.

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.

Oddly, if you are willing to take complete control over the layout and not rely on any default flow of HTML, I suspect it would be easy enough.

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 he does cherry picking there because among many reasons why people recommend latex this is just one.

It's not a very weak argument to say that learning LaTeX just so you can write your paper is a waste of time. The caveat is that, for some kinds of papers, it is less of a timewaster than other kinds. Especially if they have alot of math, or some wonky tables.

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.

I didn't take the criticism of editing LaTex as anything to do with color schemes, but rather that you had to mentally skip over all the formatting text. For some that will be easier than others, but it's silly to ignore that there are alternatives that don't require that skill.

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