The LaTeX cargo cult

Personally, I'm perfectly happy if I can open a document in a text editor and get the content that way. That obviously works perfectly fine with LaTeX, it doesn't work at all with doc.

Latex and HTML work in fundamentally different ways: latex typesets for a fixed paper size, and specifies its coordinates in physical dimensions. HTML is free flowing; if the user resizes the window the layout should adapt, they layout has to work on mobile devices, etc. The HTML way asks for a completely different way of designing layout, and Latex is simply not the right tool for that job.

Incidentally I believe that the Latex way of typesetting for a specific paper size is superior, because it allows the typesetter to manually arrange everything until it looks just right, whereas with HTML there are x number of browsers, with y number of screen sizes, and you have much less control over the final look.

1. It's style driven. I'm not sure how well you can do this is Word now. But in Latex it's pretty easy to reformat your document to match a journal or thesis style.

2. It's scriptable. I don't mean that it's Turing complete. But you can drive it with a Makefile. This is great for scientific publications I've found. You can script it such that Make will re-build you tools, re-run analysis, generate new figures, and then regenerate the article. This save a lot of time when you're iterating over a publication.

3. Well integrated reference management. Bibtex itself is a mess, but if you don't need to alter the reference format, it works well.

4. Equations!

I think it's probably overkill for what he's doing. Sounds like Markdown + a reference manager would be fine for him. But for a lot of scientific publications it has handy features. I too would like to find something else, but I've not seen anything.

I guess you could write everything in HTML! But it's obviously not well suited to this application.

LaTeX is pretty good for typesetting lots of text, like novels, if you want to output something that looks professional without much effort. It's also good for typesetting lots of mathematical formulas, as the GUI alternatives are pretty tedious to use and the result doesn't look as good.

It's also interesting as a template language, to produce documents from applications, but here's where it starts to become obsolete: there are a lot of alternatives to do this that don't force the person creating the templates to be technically-inclined and having to learn LaTeX.

Also, LaTeX becomes downright irritating when trying to make complex documents. The rules say you let LaTeX choose the looks of your document, while you focus on content, but it's impossible not to spend hours fighting it because it's not breaking pages or placing figures where we want it to (and iterating over this endlessly as the document is modified). You just cannot force yourself to let LaTeX do everything by itself.

So, it's useful for novels (which might as well be written in plain text and let the publisher do the typesetting) or documents with a lot of maths (which are nowadays most likely also complex documents that cannot go without human intervention to look good.)

I like LaTeX for the technical aspect of it, but in the end it's just a tool do accomplish some goal and, sorry, but Word doesn't consume that much resources anymore on a modern machine...