LaTeX Makes Me Angry

Version control configured for text should not split the text at newlines. It should split at full stops, commas, etc... Ideally it also should understand the hierarchy implied.

The fact that we are using a tool chain built for kernel hacking to version control Text documents is a further problem.

The workflow and presentation of Word or Google Docs in track changes mode is the gold standard here and is what people that edit text for a living actually use. (As much as I hate that fact when I am forced to move my latex documents into their workflows).

For programmers today, an option to consider is to use plain TeX directly, by writing in Markdown or whatever, and generating the `.tex` file via a preprocessor program. After all, the facilities that LaTeX was written to provide (automatic section numbering, references, etc) can just as well (or even, more sanely) be done outside the TeX engine.

There is a catch or two:

• Writing the preprocessor will still be a bit of work — I think a promising approach is to use Pandoc, but no one has yet merged a plain TeX writer into the Pandoc repo (https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/issues/4341 — I was briefly interested a couple of years ago, and may look into it again: it doesn't seem like a lot of work honestly).

• The main reason people use LaTeX is because of all the packages in its ecosystem that do various tweaks to the typesetting. (This is also the main problem with LaTeX: TeX itself is good; LaTeX itself is mostly fine; it's the menagerie of packages of varying quality and conflicting effects that cause all the problems that LaTeX users usually complain about.) And in the LaTeX ecosystem, there does not exist a culture of teaching how to do things without the package (just as "You might not need jQuery" is not written by the jQuery authors), so if some LaTeX package looks attractive to you, you're back to LaTeX package hell. I have some ideas here of making it easier to "steal" from a LaTeX package by showing the equivalent "generated" TeX, but they require a bit of work hacking on the TeX engine, and have never got around to it.

Anyway, in the meantime, writing in Markdown and using Pandoc to generate a LaTeX file remains a good approach IMO.

I'm not nor a TeXnicians nor a TeXpert but I use LaTeX for pretty any formal pdf document I produce, having used it for thesis, reports, letters, business cards, countless of times.

I found hard to read VERY complex graphic code, like PGF/TikZ especially if badly formatted, some complex custom class/packages for specific stuff etc, but not much hard most of the time and most of the time I just write plain LaTeX in a simple style:

- first I write my document in pure formatted text, with LaTeX just for something can't be easily written in text like math or so common typographic elements like an itemize/enumerate, a yasnippet away;

- then I add the rest of the template and check the visual/typesetting aspects while I'm re-read my doc looking for typos, phrases to be better reformulated etc

No need to rebuild so many times and no issue in build time, on a reasonably modern machine is quick enough for essentially all common docs, it might be a very little bit slow not enough to annoy on VERY big special docs who need various works aside anyway not for LaTeX but for mere proofreading and typographic checks.

IMVHO I think that some like the authors came from the uncivilized modern world where well typeset docs are unknown and where people just know WebUIs to click around and quickly produce something prepackaged even if suboptimal and generally bad in quality terms.

I see such behaviors many time where even skilled people do not understand that their docs are graphic heavy crap just because they do not know typography nor typographic conventions of their own country/institution. That's not an issue no LaTeX or other layer (like ConTeXt) can solve, it's a social issue, not a technical one. People should for instance learn why tables should not be like those crappy tables spitted for some spreadsheet tools on a pdf or pages drawn with such crappy margins their favorite "Office Automation" crapplication produce.

In general IMVHO people in the famous "missed CS concepts" courses like the MIT one, typography should be a topic because right now too many do not know how to write on pen and paper BUT also do not know how to write on a desktop, to a level just above the minimum literacy demanded by our society. Not joking nor insulting, that's what I see EVEN from professional publishers.

\LaTeX is a tax on the smart.

Once you have been hazed by it, you will start to defend it: LaTeX drives cognitive dissonance in its users.

Nobody will build the next thing, because LaTeX is free and there are millions of plugins and lots and lots of people with Stockholm syndrome ready to defend it.

I have built documentation systems for clients with LaTeX, but regular developers won't touch it, they know better, so the docs go stale. It's better to use restructured text/html/css, since it has a lot more features than markdown, yet it's simple enough that people who haven't been LaTeX-hazed will use it too.

I laughed too, at "CI/CD pipeline", but this is actually pretty trivial to do with a git post-commit hook. Literally one line in a shell script.