21–30 of 154 posts
I've used LaTeX for the duration of my Bachlor studies. The results are superior to Word, but that's just about where the benefits end. It's a nightmare to use and I don't see how investing time to learn it will benefit me in the long run.
Try the more friendly WYSIWYG TeXmacs. Its output is comparable to TeX/LaTeX.
Would be interesting to imagine a parallel universe where the web is a bunch of Markdown documents linking to each other. Like Obsidian, but global and shared.
PDF fetishism and blindly disliking HTML because it's associated with the current web is such an old trope. HTML and CSS are good at making hypertext documents, they are in fact much better at that than at making applications, despite that being the most popular use case lately. No one is making you write web apps, websites are still first class citizens for web browsers.
No, no, no, that's not how Web .0 works! You have to make it worse as the number goes up. Web 2.0 added more interaction, more tracking, and more advertizing. Web 3.0 adds crypto scams. If Web 4.0 is going anywhere near LaTeX, it needs to add not just the typesetting language, but also the whole system of peer-reviewed academic publishing, and you have to publish at least 4 websites a year or perish.
I've used LaTeX for the duration of my Bachlor studies. The results are superior to Word, but that's just about where the benefits end. It's a nightmare to use and I don't see how investing time to learn it will benefit me in the long run.
I have the complete opposite experience. I used word for years and years. I started studying a bit later in life and learned latex first when I was 27. I was flabbergasted that it was not the default tool in the business world. Now I'd rather take an ice bath then write a larger document in word. I still really disagree with the poster though. Latex is not a good fit for Web pages.
I believe this is just an elaborate complaint: The author simply expresses the disgust that many feel of how the utopic promise of the internet and digital technology more general (as captured, say, in the early TED sessions) has translated into a dystopia that does not seem able to find a bottom.
Maybe the promise was fake to start with, maybe mixing a pliable and ultimately "social" technology with a broken economic/political system could never have produced healthy offspring.
In any case, we are in a sort of purgatory, waiting for some miracle to absolve people and make them feel good again about their trade.
I think PDF should be replaced with some SVG-based document format. HTMLs inability to model the concept of "pages" is something I'm missing from current web. Also, a LaTeX-style document creation language rendering into SVG would be really cool.
PDF fetishism and blindly disliking HTML because it's associated with the current web is such an old trope. HTML and CSS are good at making hypertext documents, they are in fact much better at that than at making applications, despite that being the most popular use case lately. No one is making you write web apps, websites are still first class citizens for web browsers.
(Still a bit silly though since the author does mention latex as an alternative too).