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jovas | 1 year ago

LaTeX.

I LaTeX, Git, and emacs every day.

discuss

order

nephanth|1 year ago

Honestly TeX/LaTeX the engine is a marvel of technology,

But everytime i see a \makeatletter or get a runaway argument it reinforces my belief LaTeX the language was a mistake

isametry|1 year ago

(La)TeX is an example of a very enlightened _idea_ that offed itself \footnotemark{} with a spectacularly cursed user interface. It is simply gross to write, and it's difficult for frontends, converters and GUIs to make it much better.

Yes yes, I can already hear the cultists chant "YoU dOn'T wRiTe In LaTeX" but this mentality is precisely the problem. If I can't write directly in your typesetting system nowadays, then I'm sorry, your system probably sucks.

You could unfortunately write an article or thesis quite comfortably in Word or even InDesign, while formatting as you go. (I say "unfortunately" because from a business-model and hacker's perspective, these tools suck.)

\footnotetext{not implying that LaTeX is dead, but referring to how it sentenced itself to the academic niche, in which case it might as well be dead…}