The LaTeX fetish (2016)
This article is embarrassingly bad. It attempts to do a literary critique of written statements of the benefits of latex, and analyzes zero actual use cases or implementations.<p>Tex is such a powerful tool. It makes me sad to see someone dismiss it likely because of unpleasant first learning curve, which is also why a lot of people dismiss vim or emacs.<p>When I was a freshman in college, an upper classmen friend advised me to learn TeX, and helped me through writing several documents. That advice &amp; help was absolutely priceless.<p>Today I work in a typical tech company environment, and my team writes most of our technical documentation, sales engineering presentations, in-house tech presentations, and even recently some supporting documents for patent applications, all in LaTeX, all stored in version control in one of our repositories.<p>We can do real code review on technical documentation changes, have the power of many latex packages, beamer, etc., and even build versioned PDFs via our continuous integration tooling.<p>In some cases we also combine latex source with Mako templates and have actual software that can “push button” update all sorts of charts for new data, client-specific requests, etc.<p>It is a very powerful tool.