Comment by OkayPhysicist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by OkayPhysicist | Hacker News Reader

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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.

> 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.

'fighting' as you describe it is the reason why people use latex. They want more fine grained control over the doc.

I work in STEM, every publisher has their own formatting style. My pubs would get rejected if I submitted a default style.

What you're describing is, in essence, using MS Word with defaults. Might as well use Word.

I work in (non-CS) STEM, and not fighting Word is a big reason that I use LaTeX. I find it really distracting how word automatically reflows text while writing, references are always a pain, and it’s a hassle to update figures after re-running analysis scripts. With TeX none of those things are painful

Collaborative writing is often a bit difficult, especially with bigger groups not comfortable with overleaf. But Word is not great in that setting either, it usually ends in a zillion emailed versions. (365 doesn’t seem to have feature parity, and usually doesn’t cut it. Track changes doesn’t work the same way, it’s a mess)

Why do you use \par?

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