[RodericDay]

I tried to explain to a historian with an open source textbook initiative the basics of latex. As soon as I opened the demo page that had looked nice enough, with him by my side, my heart sank. It's just so far away from being usable by non-technical users.

It's too bad, really.

[baldfat]

A good theme and sharelatex.com can go a long way to get someone to use it. I usually only get Math Majors to invest in it.

I did almost all my Master Theology papers in it. Just difficult to use different languages. I usually have to use one or all of these Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Latin, Danish or German in my papers. Latex didn't make that easy. Actually nothing does.

[RodericDay]

I used sharelatex.

the notation full of \, {, }, etc. is just too confusing for people.

[Jach]

What isn't too confusing then? Markdown and HTML are just riffs, it's all based around the idea of opening/closing tokens and special tag names that do different things. I think if there is in fact a technical barrier, then it's the underlying fact that your representation of a document has a separation of content and design/layout. If people can't deal with that, then they can only use WYSIWYG (and not the hacks of rendering to the side while you still type in TeX), and there's no point in trying to update LaTeX's notation to fit people who never will get that underlying separation.

[sokoloff]

Markdown has fewer ways to inexplicably (from the point of view of a naive user) munge text.

If you type plain text, it mostly comes out as plain text.

I've paid John $4.50 for a sandwich.

Renders fine in Markdown. Renders like crap in LaTeX.

[ams6110]

Markdown has its own magic incantations that can infuriate if you don't get them just right. GP is right: most people can't handle markup languages, period. Or, they can, but vastly prefer WYSIWYG text formatting.

For me, if I'm writing something for a web page, I use HTML in a decent editor (emacs). Markdown, reST, or anything else is not easier, just different.

If I need a really nice-looking document, I'll probably use LaTeX. But for a simple document or one that I'll work on with other people, I'll normally just use google docs.

[Jach]

34 renders fine in LaTeX, in Markdown when you then do 28 it's oh-no. (See this and many other HN comments.)