| I just finished a rant on a certain tex forum about how LaTeX adds 10x complexity (to TeX + plainTeX) for making end-user's life about 10% easier. My two cents: - Once you become a moderately advanced LaTeX user, you need more control over your document. - This almost exclusively leads to a preamble that is a complete mess of spaghetti code. - Putting that mess in a separate file doesn't solve the issue, only hides it. - Another view is that if your preamble is a mess, your document is screaming at you to create your own documentclass (or rename the class you're using and modify it). - But that requires you become familiar with LaTeX (and TeX) internals. - But that is way harder than becoming familiar with TeX + PlainTeX. Therefore, as an intermediate to advanced TeX user I'm beginning to believe that TeX + PlainTeX is a much better approach. Although you'd sacrifice advanced functionality of hundreds of LaTeX packages, but people who wrote those packages could've easily written TeX macro-collections. LaTeX is used more only because it has more momentum behind it; otherwise PlainTex is a much cleaner approach. If you're willing to get under the hood of the whole system, I highly recommend Knuth's The TeXbook. P.S.: Just for comparison, LaTeX *.ltx files are about ~10,000 LOCs compared to ~1200 LOCs of plain.tex (which is fully documented in Appendix B of The TeXbook). |