[nohaydeprobleme]

If you need to share a professional document that involves mathematical expressions and equations, LaTeX is very helpful as a tool to use. The need arises if you are a professional or student registered in a course in mathematics or computer science. It's much easier to type multiple lines of equations, with the equation signs aligned, in LaTeX than in Word.

It's a bit of a grind, but you can learn the fundamentals of LaTeX in less than a week if you have an hour a day. It was actually a requirement to learn LaTeX well enough to submit a basic report within 1-2 weeks, as part of a first-year computer science course at the University of Toronto.

The course instructors provided a basic LaTeX template (which included some instructions as a guide to how LaTeX worked), and also linked to free online tutorials for more in-depth instructions, which included LaTeX Tutorial from memory, at https://www.latex-tutorial.com . I wrote out notes from articles 01-09 and a few others on the website (as the other articles were less relevant to my purposes) to learn the basics, and then reinforced and developed my understanding of how to use LaTeX by writing future assignments in the course with it.

As an illustration for how LaTeX solves a nice problem, a recent popular submission on HN explored the complexity of typesetting a mathematical document (named "How did Dennis Ritchie produce his PhD thesis? A typographical mystery"): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35177110 . You might not have as much of a need to learn LaTeX if you don't regularly share lots of mathematical equations, but it's relatively quick to learn. LaTeX has also been quite useful to me for writing a professionally-formatted resume, which has been much easier to update than when I formatted my resume using Word.

[magicalhippo]

Yeah for math stuff I loved LaTeX. I even solved large equations directly in the document, was so easy to read.

But once I had to write some pseudocode, make some larger tables, or embed images I suddenly longed for Word. Word certainly can make me curse, but it was still far easier than getting that done in LaTeX.

[shuntress]

I used LaTeX in school too and I agree theres probably no better tool for math-heavy documents.

I stopped using it for my resume because I was too frustrated with essentially re-learning latex basics every time I wanted to make minor changes to content or format.

[jcparkyn]

> It's much easier to type multiple lines of equations, with the equation signs aligned, in LaTeX than in Word.

I actually disagree. The equation editor in word is really quite good (if a little laggy sometimes), once you learn the shortcuts. Being able to see your fractions laid out properly is a massive productivity boost, and makes it much easier to quickly find the part you want to edit. The dealbreaker for me is the lack of equation numbering, without doing quite a few hacks.

Personally, I'd still take the LyX math editor over Word though, for the macros and better performance.