But it is the one used by my coauthors, the one accepted by most publishers and it is the one that I am sufficiently proficient with.* Something that is marginally "better" is not going to change those facts.įor me, a better question in 2019 would be "Is it worth to learn LaTeX given that Microsoft Word is quite good and you can use a subset of LaTeX math with it?" This comes from someone who has hated Word with a passion because it used to suck (I am 48-yo, so I am talking mostly about 90s and 2000s). LaTeX is not necessarily the objectively best programmable markup language available. Not condoning that either.įor me, a part of the answer is path dependency. I also know that sometimes LaTeX users fetishize their tool, and look down on users of other tools. Since even if we agreed with that I think there is an argument for using LaTeX. I am not going to argue the validity of your point about TeXmacs being better, although I vehemently disagree with it. Perhaps another annoying thing is creating new packages themselves, because the syntax can admittedly get extremely cancerous. And there are dime a dozen packages for that, too, from tabularx, tabulary, tabu, booktabs, etc. Honestly the only really annoying thing about LaTeX is tables. Strongly discouraged for large documents.ĮDIT: To really answer the question: the real power of LaTeX comes in its programmability (yes-TeX and LaTeX are full-fledged programming languages in their own right), its immense variety of packages, which do things including changing your document's typeface, typesetting SI units easily, to typesetting chemistry, drawing picture-perfect, scaled, programmatically-driven, vector images, drawing graphs, referencing external data to draw said graphs, importing images, importing other PDFs, using microtype features, making bibliography, references, self- and external hyperlinks extremely straightforward. You can save your document, and every time you save, the binary re-compiles your document.
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If you want semi-WYSIWYG, either use OverLeaf with the auto-recompile option set, or download a TeX distribution, and set your build to latexmk with the pvc command-line option. If you're still stuck, give lshort a peek. If you have written programs in C, C++, Java, etc and seen some HTML, LaTeX is like the strange love-child of both. I am hardly in a position to research, let alone submit papers (sophomore year, computer science and physics double major), but I use it fairly frequently for things like lab reports, homework assignments, etc.
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