[qiu3344]

LaTeX is quite underrated these days. Even though alternatives like Typst are popping up, LaTeX is also pretty convenient and powerful if you get past the crude syntax and obscure compilation errors. I sill remember my disbelieve when I found out that I can change my article into a presentation just by changing the document class to "beamer".

These days I usually default to pandoc's markdown, mostly because the raw text is very readable.

[fsh]

Please nobody actually do this. Good presentation slides have almost zero overlap with the corresponding article since they serve completely different purposes. In my field, seeing beamer slides is a huge red flag for an imminent terrible presentation. Slides are an extremely visual medium, and WYSIWYM is a huge hindrance for designing appealing slides.

[jraph]

> WYSIWYM is a huge hindrance for designing appealing slides.

I don't know, if your slides are just a few keywords in a few bullet points and the occasional picture / diagram, WYSIWYM is great.

I agree that you shouldn't turn an actual article into a presentation though.

[mgaunard]

Good slides is about good diagrams.

LaTeX has all the tooling to write high-quality ones.

[JohnKemeny]

I wouldn't say underrated. Literally every single research article in maths and cs, every PhD dissertation and master thesis in these fields too, are written in LaTeX.

Most students, and many researchers use Overleaf nowadays, though.

[Gualdrapo]

> I wouldn't say underrated. Literally every single research article in maths and cs, every PhD dissertation and master thesis in these fields too, are written in LaTeX.

Usage level is not correlated to "rate". Sometimes people use stuff because they have to, not only because they like it. See the Microsoft Word case.

I'd agree that LaTeX has fell a bit in popularity this days against Typst - but not much in its usage. It is still the de facto standard of scientific and technical document typesetting.

[mr_mitm]

> I can change my article into a presentation just by changing the document class to "beamer".

Don't you need to insert tons of `frame` environments to get anything worth looking at?

[thangalin]

> LaTeX is also pretty convenient and powerful ... pandoc's markdown

Have you considered writing pandoc-style Markdown that's converted to TeX for typesetting? If not, have a peek at my text editor:

* https://keenwrite.com/screenshots.html

* https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB-WIt1cZYLm1MMx2FBG9... (see tutorials 4 and 9)

KeenWrite basically transforms Markdown -> X(HT)ML -> TeX -> PDF, although it uses ConTeXt instead of LaTeX for typesetting because ConTeXt makes separating content from presentation a lot easier.