| > 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, chris.travers@gmail.com). 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. |