[IshKebab]

That's not why people use LaTeX. I doubt most users even know about it. The standout feature is fantastic support for equations and figures.

That and Computer Modern. I bet a significant number of users use it because of that!

Personally I would just use LyX. Its equation editor is actually fantastic.

[creata]

> That's not why people use LaTeX.

Many people say that they use LaTeX because it produces more beautiful output. Microtypography is one of the reasons for that. It's especially noticeable when microtype pushes hyphens or quotes at the end of a line slightly into the margin. (A nearby comment mentions that Typst has this feature, too.)

[croemer]

TFA dedicated one of the book's 11 chapters to it. Doesn't matter whether most users know about it or not.

[IshKebab]

A feature can only make LaTeX stand out if people actually know it exists.

[croemer]

Nope, people don't need to know that something is done to appreciate the outcome. You might not know that modern MacBooks use ARM processors, but you might still appreciate that they have a long battery life.

[naikrovek]

Computer Modern is the very last thing I will ever want in a document and is the first thing I change in every LaTeX document I create. It is easily one of the ugliest fonts ever created.

It has a lot of good things going for it, but it is the least attractive font that I think I have ever seen.

[IshKebab]

I think it's quite attractive, but its attractiveness isn't really why it's desirable; it's because people know it is the font used by proper fancy scientific papers. It's like the opposite of Comic Sans.

[billfruit]

But latex support for tables are very unergonomic.