I'm sure with Sphinx and reStructuredText you can get that large-scale document tracking stuff, but with LaTeX it just works for the most part and you don't need to juggle a bunch of different side-projects and extensions. Plus you get things like automatic index generation (for a physical book).
I wrote my thesis (50 pages) and multiple published papers this way. Maybe it seems janky but honestly my experience with Latex and it's 10 incompatible compilers and thousands of semi-incompatible packages has been much worse.
I also don't understand why (academic) publishing is so PDF focused. It's a horrible format to read on screens (think multi-column PDFs, and scrolling / jumping up and down to find references), and who actually prints stuff anymore?
The thing I love most about Pandoc is that my notes can just slowly turn into a fully fledged document. Like bullet points - The syntax in Latex is far too verbose to make taking notes with it comfortable.
It's also much easier to extend, I wrote a simple tool that automatically converts URLs into full and correctly formatted citations, so I don't even need a citation manager to get the same results:
The GAN was first introduced in [@gan](https://papers.nips.cc/paper/5423-generative-adversarial-nets).
Another great project with similar structure is Manubot [3], though the PDFs there are not generated by LaTeX.
[1]: https://pandoc.org/ [2]: https://github.com/phiresky/pandoc-url2cite [3]: https://manubot.org/
Because academics still often publish physical books.
You prefer to have lots of tools and write custom extensions to programs. And you'll have to maintain those tools forever, and migrate them when the upstream software breaks, or the links you use die. Most academic authors don't want to do that, and with latex they can take the same typeset equations and diagrams (without learning any new tools):
- Publish a paper
- Write a talk
- Publish a book
- Manage a unified bibliography across all of theseMy memory of LaTeX has weakened over the years, since I am not writing long texts with lots of figures and such, but I know it's more than this statement let's on in the article: "Something that is more modern than learning a hundred bits of print typesetting that your student will never, ever need?"
What exactly is, in the end, is 'modern'? Is it because there is less syntax in Markdown to remember and the Modern is syntax-adverse? :D Aren't there editors for these in the first place to avoid the daily grind of remembering syntax?