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by wahern 2050 days ago
LaTeX and its TeX cousins are the worst document typesetting options except for all the others.

What's fascinating is that this situation has existed for decades. Alternatives have risen and [mostly] fallen, but LaTeX persists. For that reason an alternative would not only have to be better, but significantly better, for me to question someone's choice of LaTeX.

1 comments

This. It's also hilarious how bad LaTeX actually is at maths despite it being overwhelmingly used for exactly that purpose. Instead of worrying about mathematical semantics, you constantly have to make typesetting decisions. There are workarounds (use your own custom, semantic commands), but still. And yet, everything else seems to be even worse.

Disclaimer: I have been using LaTeX (mostly XeLaTeX) for over a decade for most of my writing, mathematical and non-mathematical, although nowadays I often do so via Markdown+pandoc. Also, at my last company we had to parse mathematical formulas typeset in LaTeX and understand their structure... it was a nightmare.