[qiu3344]

LaTeX is quite underrated these days. Even though alternatives like Typst are popping up, LaTeX is also pretty convenient and powerful if you get past the crude syntax and obscure compilation errors. I sill remember my disbelieve when I found out that I can change my article into a presentation just by changing the document class to "beamer".

These days I usually default to pandoc's markdown, mostly because the raw text is very readable.

[fsh]

Please nobody actually do this. Good presentation slides have almost zero overlap with the corresponding article since they serve completely different purposes. In my field, seeing beamer slides is a huge red flag for an imminent terrible presentation. Slides are an extremely visual medium, and WYSIWYM is a huge hindrance for designing appealing slides.

[jraph]

> WYSIWYM is a huge hindrance for designing appealing slides.

I don't know, if your slides are just a few keywords in a few bullet points and the occasional picture / diagram, WYSIWYM is great.

I agree that you shouldn't turn an actual article into a presentation though.

[mgaunard]

Good slides is about good diagrams.

LaTeX has all the tooling to write high-quality ones.

[fsh]

I disagree. LaTeX is very good at layouting test, and can also (reluctantly) put figures into the text. Anything else is a huge hack (like TikZ), and one constantly runs into crazy limitations such as the fixed-point math and the lack of a decent visual editor. Slides should never have paragraphs of text on them, so the layouting is not very useful, but the other limitations are very annoying.

[goku12]

TikZ and Asymptote are more or less the only general-purpose modular illustration markup languages we have around. Anything better is welcome, but graphical editors are not an alternative in some cases.

[mgaunard]

The whole point is to focus on the data and how it is connected, not on the rendering. You want the ability to model your figures as a program which can be tweaked and extended as needed, used as a framework throughout the deck.

Drawing every single figure by hand with a graphical tool is not at all something I'd even consider.

[JohnKemeny]

I wouldn't say underrated. Literally every single research article in maths and cs, every PhD dissertation and master thesis in these fields too, are written in LaTeX.

Most students, and many researchers use Overleaf nowadays, though.

[Gualdrapo]

> I wouldn't say underrated. Literally every single research article in maths and cs, every PhD dissertation and master thesis in these fields too, are written in LaTeX.

Usage level is not correlated to "rate". Sometimes people use stuff because they have to, not only because they like it. See the Microsoft Word case.

I'd agree that LaTeX has fell a bit in popularity this days against Typst - but not much in its usage. It is still the de facto standard of scientific and technical document typesetting.

[JohnKemeny]

I've never met anyone who's used Typst, I've only ever heard it on HN. And I meet a lot of researchers, teachers, and students.

Perhaps it's a programmer thing.

[goku12]

One reason is that many journals supply LaTeX templates. And I find them easier to apply compared to their Word templates. I wonder how much support Typst has from these publishers, considering its relatively young age.

[mr_mitm]

> I can change my article into a presentation just by changing the document class to "beamer".

Don't you need to insert tons of `frame` environments to get anything worth looking at?

[thangalin]

> LaTeX is also pretty convenient and powerful ... pandoc's markdown

Have you considered writing pandoc-style Markdown that's converted to TeX for typesetting? If not, have a peek at my text editor:

* https://keenwrite.com/screenshots.html

* https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB-WIt1cZYLm1MMx2FBG9... (see tutorials 4 and 9)

KeenWrite basically transforms Markdown -> X(HT)ML -> TeX -> PDF, although it uses ConTeXt instead of LaTeX for typesetting because ConTeXt makes separating content from presentation a lot easier.