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Comment by redacted | Hacker News Reader

I love LaTeX, I wrote a physics PhD thesis in it and many papers as well. It works phenomenally well up until the point it doesn't work at all. And when you need to go fix something it is a deep and frustrating rabbit hole in my experience.

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The point where something is unfixable in LaTeX is much more complex than the point something is unfixable in Word, where I seem to jump down the rabbit hole on relatively simple documents.

That is a matter of opinion. I think the lack of source code is a problem of incredible complexity, in that overcoming that hurdle would require one to somehow force MS to fix something.

I think LaTeX starts marginally easy, gets complex and fiddly but then pretty much just stays at the same level of complex and fiddly. Word starts very easy, gets complicated quickly and eventually presents un-fixable problems, no matter what your skill level.

That's where version control helps. Save and commit frequently. It is much easier to go back to just before the problem and insert smaller chunks. Found many an error this way. Selective cutting of sections and stashing them in a text editor works as well.

Me too. I'm currently using it for the second time for a large multilingual dictionary. Both dictionaries are the first produced for these languages. People are thrilled at the results. It is so easy to create something beautiful with LaTeX.

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