[abritinthebay]

I love the output of LaTeX but the language itself (and it’s dependencies and packages) are an absolute horror show.

I’ve never understood how people can learn be it so, writing it is painful, it’s tooling is abysmal, and it rarely seems to work except on the person who wrote its machine.

We’ve got to be able to do better.

[mkl]

> it’s tooling is abysmal

It seems like you haven't tried many editors. Have you tried TeXStudio (https://www.texstudio.org/)?

> it rarely seems to work except on the person who wrote its machine.

I and many others edit the same documents at the university where I work, without significant issues. Distributions like TeXLive (https://www.tug.org/texlive/) provide a consistent all-inclusive cross-platform solution.

[abritinthebay]

TeXStudio would be a perfect example of its abysmal tooling. It’s better than the CLI tools but it’s an awful editor and highlights how incompatible with a good writing experience LaTeX is.

Yes, many people produce good work in it - it’s output is fantastic after all - but an editor that would have been a substandard user experience in the 90s is the best LaTeX has in tooling.

That’s exactly what I mean!

[diffeomorphism]

Can you try to phrase that more precisely/constructively by including a reason why it is "awful" or give an example of "good tooling"?

As far as editing goes, latexmk, syntax highlighting and good shortcuts are all I ever use and am perfectly happy with (emacs+auctex). It is a different paradigm than WYSIWYG, but different does not say anything about good or bad.

Now writing new latex classes, I agree. That is very unintuitive and would greatly benefit from simplification, templates and tools.

[abritinthebay]

I could go into a long, detailed, breakdown of how bad TeXStudio is but, frankly, if they want UI/UX work they should pay for it. Which they clearly don’t.

It’s... decent enough in the pack of “open source UI” but that isn’t a high bar.

Here’s the thing about that (oft repeated) line about WYSIWYG vs WYSIWYW: it’s bullshit.

There’s no justification for it other than the deficiencies of the tooling and tool chain. It’s an excuse.

[notthemessiah]

A task easier said than done.

Also, it should be considered that it's impossible to make breaking changes in the LaTeX language otherwise you lost the ability to compile a paper from 30 years ago.

But if you're trying to do something simple, I would say go for pandoc and use whatever format you're comfortable, then convert it to TeX: https://pandoc.org/

[abritinthebay]

At that point... why use TeX at all?

[diffeomorphism]

Because it looks much better. If you want proper kerning, ligatures, spacing, layouts etc. just reusing all the work that has been put into TeX is much better than trying to catch up.

[abritinthebay]

Hmmm the Windows API strategy? That’s not super convincing.