Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”

Interesting. When I did some internships at Los Alamos (LANL) my lab neighbor was a theoretical physicist. He used Word and referred to LaTex as the Fortran of word processors.

In university I used to write literally everything in Latex. Papers, homeworks, notes, classnotes during class, personal stuff, everything and everything. All my math/CS professors gave us assignments/exams/everything in documents obviously written in Latex (some of my profs were even kind enough to give us .tex source).

I was taking this Geography class as a social science elective. We had a paper assignment, and my professor was talking about how it's important to submit HW in this specific format and that they'll give sample .docx file. At the time I didn't have any word processor on my computer so I just quickly asked the professor if it's ok to submit PDF in the same format as I use latex to do my hws. She was like "what is latex"? I'm not a native speaker so I thought I just mispronounced it and described it to her, and she was like no I don't know that you should write your paper in Word. I was stunned. I asked her how do geographers submit their research papers, and she said we just use Word.

I have a dream that one day we'll get a language for typesetting that isn't a markup language.

Rather, this language would be designed to come after writing, in the same way that flagship Desktop Publishing software (InDesign, Publisher) make the assumption that layout happens after writing. (Sure, you can write inside the layout software, but you're not supposed to. They're assuming e.g. a journalist–editor–layout–typesetter pipeline.) You'd have a "layout file" (written in the typesetting DSL) that has separate "non-typeset rich-text" files linked to it via file/URI references (just like Desktop Publishing apps do.)

The person doing layout would never modify the linked source files; if they wanted to e.g. change certain character sequences into filligrees, that'd be something stored entirely as an annotation in the layout file, not as markup in the source file.

In that world, scientists just write the "non-typeset rich text" (for which Rmarkdown / Jupyter would be a great fit); and then it's the job of science journals to produce the "layout + typesetting annotations."

And hey, then journals would actually have a reason to exist! They would be to science as physical magazines are to journalism at this point: a place to find the articles you can already read online, but typeset much better.

I always wondered the opposite: how do researchers can get any work done when they have to formalize it using LateX?

I've tried writting a book using LateX, and it's been nothing but a miserable experience. I'm been coding for 15 years, and tweaking my Linux machine for longer. I know what it means to face rought edges.

But LaTeX is another level of shenanigans.

I seem to understand that researchers use latex because of the seemingless formula integration and automation of references.

Well, why not use asciidoc (https://asciidoctor.org/docs/user-manual/#mathematical-expre...) or myst (https://myst-parser.readthedocs.io/en/latest/using/syntax.ht...) then? They are an order of magnitude easier to use, they can generate websites and pdf, use markdown but allow extensions, they support references, and accept latex formulas.

Is it a case of "everybody uses it so I have to"?