Comment by tapia | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tapia | Hacker News Reader

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Reducing LaTeX to the look of the equations it produces clearly misses the point. I use LaTeX because it just formats everything correctly. Inserting figures or tables in word can be one of the most frustrating tasks I can do. Every little change can potentially break the format. Have you ever tried to add a table in word in a double column document? It is madness. The caption system for figures and tables is a joke, too.

With LaTeX your references get updated when you add new figures or tables without having to think about it. The same holds for the references. The formatting of sections and titles is kept (the only way to change the format is that you really want to).

In the Word-templates for papers of conferences there are always so many rules about the formatting. Most of the people never satisfies all those rules, even if they started with the template. I blame word for that, because there is no way to enforce a template (take care of the references, captions, etc.). The last year I just stopped sending word documents to the conferences I go, and instead created an equivalent latex template for them (one of them got even officially accepted). I prefer to invest a few days in making a good LaTeX template than loosing much more days fighting against the Word-nonsense.

It is true that LaTeX requires some time to learn, but it definitely compensates for the time you can loose using word.

> It is true that LaTeX requires some time to learn, but it definitely compensates for the time you can loose using word.

Yes but with LaTeX (or anything else that requires signifcant time to learn) you have to make a noticeable investment of your time upfront. If you already use and know Word you may be aware of its shortcomings but it can still be difficult to justify spending the time required to learning something else.

Especially because while you know that your current system (in this case Word) is annoying, you also know that it works. In the sense that you are able to produce whatever it is that you are using it for. Even though you might also recognize that the result could be better.

With switching to anything new, you don't know

- How much time it will take for you to learn it and become effective in using it.

- If it will solve the problems that what you are currently using has.

- That it won't have other problems instead.

And I think to a lot of people the perceived risk outweighs the potential gain. Especially for people who are working a full time job, have a family etc.

Furthermore, a Word document can be edited by "anyone". If you collaborate with someone else on something, switching to LaTeX means that either they have to learn it too, or they will have to tell you what changes to make and then you must do the editing.

Also, not every document is worth typing out in LaTeX.

I used LaTeX for a couple of years. It has some benefits but I rarely use it myself any longer. Most of my documents I write in Google Docs or in Markdown. Sometimes I use Markdown with a sprinkle of LaTeX and run it through pandoc to produce a pretty PDF with some formulas without having to use almost any LaTeX at all except for in a few select places in the document. For some documents I use Adobe InDesign.

Even one of my best friends who used to be a hardcore proponent of using LaTeX for everything I don't think he's using it that much any longer. Not to the extent he used to back when we were in the university.

In summary, the time cost is a hard sell and it's not given that the time spent learning it will actually be worth it.

I have the exact opposite experience with LaTeX. Looking at a few example documents and trying them out will get nearly anyone started on writing LaTeX documents. For very sophisticated effects (tables, complicated graphics that interacts with the text in a nontrivial way, etc) the time investment is much more substantial but those same effects are just as difficult (if not impossible) to achieve with Word or other WYSIWYG editors. Automatic referencing, bibliography maintenance are quite unique to LaTeX and are easy to use. Tables may be hard but some specialized tools (like Lyx) might help.

Word documents can be edited by people who have access to an appropriate version of Word (I do not, admittedly by choice) but the documents themselves are binary (ok, xml) mess, whereas LaTeX ones are greppable, searcheable, etc. They also 'age' much better. I can still LaTeX most documents from 20 years ago (sometimes with minor changes).

As a disclaimer, I am one of those people who uses (La)TeX for everything. I know TeX intimately to the point that I messed with the source code several times and wrote tens of thousands of TeX macros (this is not an exaggeration). I may be biased but I still feel that learning LaTeX is well worth the modest effort it takes to start writing LaTeX documents. And the typesetting TeX is capable of is still unsurpassed.

> Word documents can be edited by people who have access to an appropriate version of Word ... LaTeX ones are greppable, searcheable, etc. They also 'age' much better. I can still LaTeX most documents from 20 years ago

I really value the fact that LaTeX is free software, but as a matter of practical reality, are old LaTeX documents really more accessible than Word documents? There is plenty of free software with (imperfect) support for Word these days. I recently opened a bunch of Word documents that were more than 20 years old, and I'm sure I didn't get a pixel-perfect reproduction of the original document, but as someone without a strong grasp of the LaTeX package ecosystem, I imagine compiling old LaTeX documents would have been more difficult than just installing LibreOffice or uploading the document to Google Docs.

Agreed. The first time I used LaTeX to write a few documents I spent less time learning it than formatting the 90-page Word document that eventually made me decide to check out LaTeX in the first place.

I never regretted it, nowadays I avoid Word when possible and go for org-mode documents mixed with LaTeX. That gives me all the features and control but with less typing.

As a fellow frequent tex user, I'm curious at the macros you've written. I've found that I've written very few. I believe it is literally one for multi line commenting, breaking up slides in beamer (like 2x2, 3x2, whatever), and dumb things like section titles for homeworks. Do you have anything that you find particularly useful?

I have written a lot of style files (in plain TeX, I am actually a quite passive LaTeX user) for things like handouts and tests I use in my teaching, including my side job as a flight instructor. Some specialized typesetting tasks, like multicolumn dictionary typesetting (was another side project) took a lot of macro writing, as well. I have also written a number of parsers in TeX for pretty-printing code (I use another great Knuth's invention, literate programming, quite a bit). I am addicted to TeX, I can see it now :)

> Automatic referencing, bibliography maintenance are quite unique to LaTeX and are easy to use.

I find that much easier to do in Word. Instead of wrangling with conflicting packages, documented for programmers not users, having to compile multiple times to get the references to actually render correctly, etc in Word I can simply define my references in a structured way and they work perfectly without surprises.

Well, although I personally use LaTeX for almost everything I write (I also use markdown for simple things sometimes), It is clear for me that (1) not everyone who has to write documents has the time to learn LaTeX and (2) that there are some documents for which you can use whatever text editor you can find.

My comment was targeted mostly at the academic writing, where things like references, placing of figures and tables, and formatting are relevant. I really think that formatting documents is kind of a solved problem, and it slightly annoys me when I hear people complaining about the headaches they have when formatting their papers in word.

At the end the problem is that _word_-like porgrams is all that is taught at school and so, LaTeX looks super complex and frightening to a lot of people, even when it actually is very simple in its essence. Maybe the most complicated thing in LaTeX is to start a document, because you basically have to configure how it will look and what packages you will use. Then it is all about \section, \ref and \cite. At the beginning this is certainly a bit confusing, but solutions like Overleaf, which offers different templates at a click distance, are good ways to overcome this problem. I personally don't use it, and prefer the vimtex plugin plus a lot of snippets (certainly not for the beginners).

But just to clarify again, it is clear to me that not everyone have the time to learn it, nor is it always the best tool for a given task.

> Furthermore, a Word document can be edited by "anyone".

All of the people that I have met that could correctly insert an image in a word document were able to learn VBA at some point. I am yet to meet somebody that can maintain a document with multi-paragraph lists, I certainly can't.

>Inserting figures or tables in word can be one of the most frustrating tasks I can do. Every little change can potentially break the format. Have you ever tried to add a table in word in a double column document? It is madness. The caption system for figures and tables is a joke, too.

OTOH, if all you want is a simple table, doing that in LaTeX is horrible, and I'll take Word over it any day. One of the many reasons I fell in love with Org Mode is because of the ease with which you can manipulate tables. Since then, I do all my editing in Org and export to LaTeX.

It is not about the table, but the placing of the table. If you want a table that spans both columns in a double column document, it is annoying to do it in word, while in LaTeX it is as easy as \begin{table*}. Creating a content of a table is something different, and there are multiple approaches. I normally need result from python scripts, so I just export my results to latex format with pandas.

The ability to have your simulation code automatically update the data and figures in the manuscript is hugely valuable.

Another neat trick is a latex package called Catchfilebetweentags. This let’s you have a text file with named data fields that you can insert into your document, like when you want to state a parameter that was used in a paragraph. Generating that text file as an artifact of the rest of the data processing means, e.g., that parameters my paper says I used are the ones that I actually used.

Use minipages. I completely understand where you're coming from. But once I started using minipages I found that it is a great way to hack around almost all of these weird and uncommon placement issues.

>so I just export my results to latex format with pandas.

In other words, you don't do it by hand. I too rely on a tool to create my tables, which was my point. Doing it by hand is painful.

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