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by adrianN 5203 days ago
Due to its age, there is a massive codebase in TeX/LaTeX. There is literally a package for everything. It would be a massive undertaking to replace the TeX system by something that isn't downwards compatible. And since the vast majority of LaTeX users don't get to see much of the underlying mess the pressure to do so is rather small.
1 comments
stdbrouw 5203 days ago
Not necessarily. New people in academia learn LaTeX all the time, and if more students start getting upset about having to learn it while there's an alternative that, while lacking a zillion of packages, is easy to use and just works right out of the box... then I don't see how professors would be able to hold back the tide. I've seen engineers write papers in Microsoft Word, though they're a minority. And then there's those English majors who just cajole a buddy with InDesign into typesetting their thesis for them.
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coliveira 5203 days ago
Students have always been upset about learning Latex. However, after the first or second paper they realize how much trouble Latex is saving them and become fans for life. I don't see any other system offering the same advantages.
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_delirium 5203 days ago
Around here I've seen a considerable drop-off in TeX fans over the past 4-5 years, with more students opting for Word. It didn't used to be a viable option, but now many conferences (outside a few very-math-heavy areas) offer both LaTeX and Word stylesheets and let you choose, and Word has improved in a few key areas, mainly citation support and auto-hyphenation. Zotero users also seem to like the Word integration. Figure placement still sucks, but figure placement isn't really TeX's strong suit either.

I personally still prefer TeX, but the gap is smaller than it was 10 years ago. The auto-hyphenation is probably the single biggest change, since the easy way to spot 2-column conference papers done in Word used to be the horrible whitespace in justified columns caused by its inability to break words. (This heuristic still words sometimes, because auto-hyphenation isn't on by default, and not all authors know about it or use it.)

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