Earlier quoted context omitted.
Outside of mathematics and physics conference/journal publishing, there's a widespread perception that it's losing ground. In CS some conferences are slowly switching to Word, or offering an option to authors (who are slowly switching to Word, especially outside of theory-heavy areas). In book publishing it's shrunk to a very small niche, even in technical areas. Part of the problem is cruftiness of tools, and part i…
> In CS some conferences are slowly switching to Word, or offering an option to authors (who are slowly switching to Word, especially outside of theory-heavy areas). Huh? In my research areas (evolutionary computation, machine learning, artificial intelligence, multiagent systems, robotics) this isn't remotely true. CS conferences of almost all stripes have always offered non-LaTeX submission routes. But LaTeX domina…
AAAI, IJCAI, and AAMAS now provide both options, and my informal observation is that more Word papers are being submitted than used to be the case, especially but not exclusively when it comes to authors from industry. CHI recently officially deprecated LaTeX as a supported option, but still provides the old (no longer maintained) stylesheets as a courtesy. Several universities (e.g. Georgia Tech) have also stopped officially supporting LaTeX stylesheets for theses and moved to Word as the only official option, though they do distribute student-edited LaTeX stylesheets as a courtesy. I assume that one's because nobody in the IT department knows how to edit the stylesheets. The unofficial GT thesis stylesheet is a hilarious example of copy/paste cruft, too, with bits taken from 20-year old U. Texas stylesheets and various other places.