Have you ever asked yourself “how did research get done before LateX?”
(<i>The link goes to a thread on beautiful scientific communication (especially figures&#x2F;diagrams), so it would have been nice to discuss that rather than discuss LaTeX. But as the conversation here seems to be mostly about the latter…</i>)<p>What a lot of people don&#x27;t realize about LaTeX is that much of its awkwardness comes from it being a product of two very strong personalities (both Turing Award winners for unrelated work!) pulling it in two opposing directions:<p>• Donald Knuth, who designed TeX as a tool for <i>typesetting</i> primarily, allowing a meticulous author complete control over the appearance of his pages, and attempting to capture in a program (or at least making possible) the highest standards of typography developed over the centuries since the invention of printing.(†)<p>• Leslie Lamport, who wrote LaTeX as a macro package running in TeX, trying to hide complexity from the author and making things as convenient as possible, out of a (probably correct) belief that authors should <i>not</i> care about the appearance and instead only focus on the content! (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lamport.azurewebsites.net&#x2F;pubs&#x2F;document-production.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lamport.azurewebsites.net&#x2F;pubs&#x2F;document-production.p...</a>)<p>The result is that with LaTeX, things look “easy” superficially, but everything is implemented in TeX macros (never intended as a full-fledged programming language), so things break in mysterious ways. Not to mention the additional layers of complexity from zillions of users writing their own &quot;packages&quot; for everything. The error messages don&#x27;t make sense to users because they often come from the bowels of TeX, and I suspect that many users even just ignore(!) warnings about overfull&#x2F;underfull boxes.<p>Conversely, if you look at one of Knuth&#x27;s own documents written in plain TeX, everything is startlingly simple: for example there is no automatic equation numbering or cross-references; for Equation 5 you just write &quot;5&quot; in the equation and refer to it as &quot;(5)&quot; later, none of that stuff with &quot;\eqref{eq:foo}&quot; or whatever. If macros are used, they tend to be custom for the document, rather than elaborate general-purpose ones. Consider giving plain TeX a try (a great book is <i>A Beginner&#x27;s Book of TeX</i> by Seroul and Levy); everything makes sense, you feel in power, all the error messages are clear (often the same error messages! but now they apply to something you actually wrote&#x2F;intended), and if nothing else, you&#x27;ll end up with an appreciation of what LaTeX is&#x2F;does.<p>This comment is turning into a repetition of my same tiresome comments on other sites (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cstheory.stackexchange.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;40282" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cstheory.stackexchange.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;40282</a>, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tex.stackexchange.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;398372" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tex.stackexchange.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;398372</a>, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tex.stackexchange.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;386592" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tex.stackexchange.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;386592</a>, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tex.stackexchange.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;384881" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tex.stackexchange.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;384881</a>, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tex.stackexchange.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;518802" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tex.stackexchange.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;518802</a> etc.) so I&#x27;ll stop here I guess :-)<p>----<p>(†): good paragraphs, avoiding widows and orphans and hyphenation on consecutive lines and loose&#x2F;tight lines adjacent to each other, all of that. By far the longest chapter in <i>The TeXbook</i>, the manual on how to use TeX, is called “Fine Points of Mathematics Typing” and teaches the careful reader about aspects of typography that TeX does <i>not</i> handle automatically — and this is not even counting such advice in other chapters such as ties for avoiding line breaks in “psychologically bad” places. See for example <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rtznet.nl&#x2F;zink&#x2F;comparison.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rtznet.nl&#x2F;zink&#x2F;comparison.pdf</a> (linked from <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rtznet.nl&#x2F;zink&#x2F;latex.php?lang=en" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rtznet.nl&#x2F;zink&#x2F;latex.php?lang=en</a>) comparing plain-text paragraphs in Word and InDesign and TeX. If you look at the “bad” typesetting that Knuth rejected as painful (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tex.stackexchange.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;367133" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tex.stackexchange.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;367133</a>), I think you get the idea :-)