[joshuagross]

I still haven't figured out if the general trend is up/down for LaTeX (I have a vested interest, CTO of SpanDeX.io, but I'm not sure).

My argument against "give it another 10-20 years" is that LaTeX has already been around forever. I know people even in math, physics, and CS that never use LaTeX (in favor of Word). Which I find silly and strange, but it is what it is.

Of course, I'm hoping that new online editors like SpanDeX.io and LaTeXTemplates are the adrenaline shot that LaTeX needs for wider adoption.

[jlgreco]

If someone makes it to graduate school without knowing LaTeX, I would suspect chances are high they don't really have any interest in changing their routine then. They're busy, and hey, word has been working in university for several years already!

If I wanted to increase LaTeX adoption, I would get undergrads hooked on it. I bailed to LaTeX my second year of undergrad and never looked back. Even with papers for the english department it was great, if only because it just looked that much better than all the Word formatted papers from my peers. The fact that it made bibliographies dead simple was just icing on the cake, it practically felt like cheating. Get undergraduates to understand those "sly" benefits and they'll be willing to take a night off from binge drinking to learn it. At least more willing than a grad student anyway.

[saryant]

My CS department (undergrad) pushed LaTeX heavily. It was required for all senior thesis projects and we had this one Unix guru of a professor who seemed to know every there is to know about LaTeX.

Some of us even became proficient enough to take notes real-time during discrete math and numerical calculus lectures.

> Even with papers for the english department it was great, if only because it just looked that much better than all the Word formatted papers from my peers.

Back in college I used to get compliments on how good my papers looked from humanities professors just because it was typeset in LaTeX. Fun times.

[twog]

If you dont mind me asking, where did you go to school?

[anders0]

I'm not saryant, but the school of CS at St Andrews (UK) briefly teaches us LaTeX in second(?) year, and encourages us to use it to write all our reports, essays, etc.

(OT: I also got complimented in high school for my physics coursework being typeset nicely. :D None of the other teachers seemed to really notice, though.)

[saryant]

Trinity University, San Antonio.

http://cs.trinity.edu/

(Yes, their website is ancient)

[pseut]

I've used plain TeX for my christmas letters for years because it looks so much better than word. LaTeX feels like overkill if I don't need to number equations and floats.

[anonymouz]

> Of course, I'm hoping that new online editors like SpanDeX.io and LaTeXTemplates are the adrenaline shot that LaTeX needs for wider adoption.

I am a long-term Latex user and have recently tried one of those online editors. I have two basic gripes with all of them: It's not vim and I don't want to put my papers onto someone else's cloud. Except for that, it seemed nice but the editor itself was a bit sluggish compared to a local program. Continuous compilation is also a good idea, but compared to compilation on my local computer it was just slow enough to drive me insane (wait around for 2-3 seconds every time that I want to see a change...).

But I can imagine that, if they can be made snappy, they would be quite a nice starting point for novice users and people who don't want to maintain a local installation.

[lutusp]

> I am a long-term Latex user and have recently tried one of those online editors. I have two basic gripes with all of them: It's not vim and I don't want to put my papers onto someone else's cloud.

Fair enough -- use Lyx. It's free and open source. It doesn't require you to take the security and other risks of a cloud scheme.

http://www.lyx.org/

I don't understand why more people don't use Lyx for Latex production. It's not as slick as some Web-based apps, but it also doesn't have their drawbacks.

[adimitrov]

> I don't understand why more people don't use Lyx for Latex production.

LyX is still not Vim. Or Emacs, for that matter. That may sound a little closed-minded, but when you basically spend your entire life in one editor (as a programmer) adapting to a different editor is a big pain, and very frustrating, because nothing works the way you expected it.

In my experience emulation of these editors in others is shoddy at best (I'm looking at you, SublimeText.) Not to mention I'm losing my favorite plugins, that I've grown used to. The only acceptable Vim emulation I've seen is Evil — for Emacs. And even there I couldn't stand to use it.

[lutusp]

> LyX is still not Vim. Or Emacs, for that matter.

All true. It took a while for me to be productive with Lyx -- it's too different from most other editing environments. In fact, one of the first things they say in their documentation is that Lyx isn't a text editor -- it's really meant for document creation, not everyday editing. So that's an entirely valid criticism.

Nevertheless, after one ascends the difficult learning curve, the results can be beautiful, classic LaTex output, with little effort.

[jahewson]

I used LyX for about a year and in that time it tuned from a dream into a nightmare. The problem is that at some point if your typesetting is complex then you need some LaTeX package that LyX doesn't support and have to resort to inline TeX code. The horrid LaTeX code that LyX generates does not play nice and a huge amount of time gets wasted trying to find a LyX-friendly way to express something which would have been a few lines of LaTeX. Don't even get me started on Lyx's Rube Goldberg support for custom document classes.

[lutusp]

Your use of Lyx is of longer duration and at a deeper level than mine, so ... thank you for posting.

[Surio]

I don't have a problem about "geeking out" with LaTeX `\' slashes, but frankly, what you mention about LyX is right. Thought you might appreciate this writeup by someone else who also agrees on your LyX viewpoint....

http://yihui.name/en/2012/10/lyx-vs-latex/

Enjoy the read.

[pseut]

When I used LyX (years ago) typing in equations was slow and buggy (slow means anything longer than typing in text). Plus it doesn't/didn't export very clean source code and, for people who have used latex in a text editor even for only 3 or 4 years, the menus and toolbars are completely unnecessary: I know 99.9% of the macros I use and the ones I don't know are esoteric.

    latexmk -pvc 

gives continuous compilation from the command line FWIW.

[einhverfr]

> I still haven't figured out if the general trend is up/down for LaTeX (I have a vested interest, CTO of SpanDeX.io, but I'm not sure).

It seems to go around in cycles. There is a very heavy anti-LaTeX movement that I occasionally run into. There are also a lot of people who use it and would not recommend anything else.

> My argument against "give it another 10-20 years" is that LaTeX has already been around forever. I know people even in math, physics, and CS that never use LaTeX (in favor of Word). Which I find silly and strange, but it is what it is.

This is very true. And what I find more annoying is the argument that we need to move to DocBook because somehow that's more accessible (and yet it isn't either as accessible or as powerful).

There are a few things that hurt LaTeX adoption in some environments though and I want to mention here. These are generally from my experiences participating on various TeXLive-related email lists.

There is an expectation at least in the XeTeX community from what I have seen that everyone will manually upgrade to the latest and greatest quickly. With many of the TeX distribution, there isn't a lot of thought given to long-term support. This makes things like running hosted services for mission critical apps which use LaTeX somewhat problematic.

I ran into the dreaded "we can't start because you are using something 7 years old" message and the only help I could get was "upgrade." Not helpful when trying to package software that people are running on production services. Not helpful at all.

I will follow up with you on email (from my personal account, [e-mail]). I think that one of the things that LaTeX really needs to get wider support is a set of community resources for longer-term support, for people who are happy to accept workarounds if it means being able to support earlier versions etc.

I am in the process of trying to get a hosting service up for LedgerSMB and we use LaTeX for a lot of stuff internally (the hosting solution will use XeTeX). I think a rising tide here would help both us and the community out.

> Of course, I'm hoping that new online editors like SpanDeX.io and LaTeXTemplates are the adrenaline shot that LaTeX needs for wider adoption.

I think it may help. It certainly comes along at a good time.

[pseut]

The advice to "upgrade" for LaTeX is pretty disappointing given the heavy, heavy emphasis on long-term compatibility for TeX itself.

[_delirium]

In my corner of CS (overlap w/ computer-music, game development, and HCI), the trend seems to be down.

One reason is that Word is actually decent for writing papers these days. I still use LaTeX mainly because I prefer to write in vim rather than in a WYSIWYG editor, but the difference in output quality is much smaller than it was 10 years ago. For example, Word does auto-hyphenation now (though it's off by default), which is necessary to make the common 2-column justified conference-paper format look at all decent. The kerning has also improved, and the reference-management story is much better than it used to be (there's a built-in reference manager that works ok, and Zotero integration is very nice). Figure placement still sucks, but it sucks in LaTeX too (in a different way).

Another reason is that when collaborating with people outside academia, they rarely know LaTeX. So I find myself writing my own papers in LaTeX, but collaborative papers in Word. Many people from industry really like Word's "track changes" mode as well.

[krupan]

I think where LaTeX still wins over GUI tools such as Word is once you figure out how to make it do what you want, the method you used is now documented right in the LaTeX source. With a GUI tool, it's hard to go back and remember exactly where you clicked and what setting you changed, especially when you pick up a document months later and ask yourself, "how did I make it look like that?"

[ht_th]

You might be interested in pandoc: it allows you to write your documents in LaTeX or Markdown and then it can automatically convert it to docx, odt, html, LaTeX, Markdown, and more. For straigtforward[0] documents this works great.

[0] documents containing text, headings, notes, figures, tables, code listings, mathematics, hyperlinks, lists, references.

[_delirium]

Interesting, thanks for pointing out the updated version of what "straightforward" means. Last time I looked at Markdown you couldn't do a lot of things I needed in it, such as figures, footnotes, and references, so I didn't give it very serious consideration. But it looks like pandoc has extended the original Markdown into some kind of Markdown++, which covers just about everything I usually need.

[Riesling]

In pandoc you can also use raw mode, which will just pass through all tex commands you use in your markdown file.

    pandoc text.md --parse-raw -t latex -o text.tex

Then you can proceed to compile this to a pdf with pdflatex.

[churreiro]

After some time using LaTeX I think is a very useful tool and probably online editors will help to the wide use of it.

As I see it now, the variety of editors for Mac, Windows and Linux may cause problems when migrating from one environment to the other. Hopefully this will be over with tools like SpanDeX.

BTW, congrats for your tool, have been using it for few hours and feels awesome.