Source
r/LaTeX•
AX-user

Popularity of Latex wrt other text processors?

Answered

Hi, greetings from Germany.

The first time I heared about Tex and Latex was in the early 1990's. I never used it before, as whenever I had a look into a .tex file ... I couldn't imagine that's an ergonomic way of writing text.

Meanwhile I fell in love with Scrivener for the design phase of my first drafts, where focus is on content and rearrangements. However, at its very core it uses Word files in rtf-format. Not bad, transfer would be to other word processors like Sigil for epub, Word may be and Papyrus especially for style checking purposes. (I prefer stripping formatting information, i.e. convert to pure textual ASCII, as residual formatting information almost always will have side effects.)

However, I still see a lot of papers being published, not only from the science community, which might have been created with some Latex-program.

So yesterday I went to our local technical library, lend some books on Latex and installed Texmaker, MiKTex and TeXworks (which seemed to be necessary to get some pdf output) and started trying.

I'm enticed. Once I've got used to the special syntax, look & feel of .tex documents, I probably could really focus on content, as the layout is (more or less) handled. In terms of content flow from one processor to the other, yes there are issues, like with any other conversion.

Will I use Latex in future? Don't know yet. It certainly has advantages over binary formats when using Git for version control. However, I would have to rethink my workflow of content creation.

So I'm still wondering how popular Latex still is. It probably is in the USA ... but what's about Germany or Europe?

Thanks for sharing your insights :)

Posted Jun 23, 2021, 10:16 AM UTC

3240
ko_nuts•

LaTeX is heavily used all over the world for writing research papers, lecture notes, and course slides in many scientific and engineering fields. It is particularly useful for papers containing a lot of equations.

49
NewishGomorrah•

LaTeX is heavily used all over the world for writing research papers, lecture notes, and course slides in many scientific and engineering fields.

It's common enough where lots of equations are used all the time, true. But that's about it.

And it's dying.

1
ko_nuts•

It is certainly not dying in mathematics, control, etc.

1
[deleted]•

[deleted]

1
[deleted]•

[deleted]

-3†
baldeagleNL•

It absolutely is widely spread. In certain scientific fields nothing else is used. In other fields mostly LaTeX is used.

16
[deleted]•

[deleted]

2
baldeagleNL•

You said it’s not heavily used, you didn’t specify “in Russia”. In other countries, it definitely is. AFAIK Russia has an entirely separate scientific community with their own publications and styles. OP was asking about the US and Europe, so your “No, not heavily” is not relevant.

5
IanisVasilev•

In Sofia University (which is not Russian but historically close to the USSR school of mathematics), I've only seen one elderly professor use Word for lecture notes. I can't really speak about other fields but I assume it's the same for e.g. physics and chemistry. Those using LaTeX are presumably ones that have more experience with publishing papers.

Students (including masters' and doctoral students), on the other side, rarely use anything beyond Google Docs and/or repositories with Markdown files. I've seen a few discussions on how to typeset LaTeX-style equations in Google Docs via some plugins and nobody seemed to care that most equations were misaligned. It made me sad because TeX enthusiasts often put a lot of effort in good-looking typesetting and outside of these circles only the ability to type equations is often considered.

12
AX-userOP•

Thanks + Greetings to Bulgaria :)

3
sp00nzhx•

I prefer LaTeX, but was kind of pigeon-holed into using Word for my master's thesis, which was kind of annoying. I was almost tempted to just do everything from my R notebook since I had lots of stats anyway, but ended up just using Word and manually tweaking a lot of the tables and graphs to get it to look nice.

1
MatlabGivesMigraines•

I feel your pain. My friend had the same situation but with his PhD thesis.

1
ko_nuts•

In my fields, all the papers written by Russians have all been written using LaTeX, it is very easy to spot.

7
baldeagleNL•

A good indication of the popularity of LaTeX is the activity chart on https://ctan.org. It shows the number of uploads of updated and new packages. The amount has been growing steadily over the past years, and is now higher than ever before. In other words: people are still writing new packages for LaTeX, so it’s still being used a lot.

If you want to start trying, it’s easiest to get started with Overleaf. It’s an online service, partly free, that allows you to use everything LaTeX without installing a single thing.

I have a couple of reasons I love using LaTeX over other systems:

  • plaintext format, so no proprietary applications required, no corrupted files, and friendlier to version control
  • focus on the content
  • flexible if necessary
  • easily create different versions of the same content (e.g. assignments with and without an answer model, presentations with and without notes, et cetera)
  • automation
19
AX-userOP•

Interesting.

How do you change versions for the same content? Is there a kind of introduction available somewhere?

~~~

Wow, what a variety available on CTAN (just browsed a little). Thanks for this hint 👍

3
JauriXD•

Here is some reading about this: https://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/TeX/if

And a quick example:

\ifx\noSoloutins\undefined
    %your soloutions
\fi

Now you can use \def\noSoulutions{} in the beginning of your document to disable solutions

6
AX-userOP•

Wow: robotized text 🤖 . Love the idea. Thanks for the link.

🥰

3
baldeagleNL•

The trick I used most is to check whether you defined a command or not, and change behaviour based on that.

\def\answermodel{1}
...
\ifx\answermodel1
    % command that shows answers
\fi

You can then easily comment out the \def command and switch off all answers.

If you’re really lazy (like I am) you can have the \def command inserted when compiling the document with latexmk.

latexmk -pretex=“\def\answermodel{1}” . . .

You can save that command in an alias, so it’s easy to switch between the command with and the command without the answermodel.

I create Makefiles that handle all these commands automatically, so I can create all versions at the same time. This is too advanced to explain in a Reddit post, but there are plenty of tutorials on the internet.

2
UppityEuroTrash•

Regarding your last bullet, "automation," would you be able to provide a compelling example or two?

0
Uweauskoeln•

I, for example, automated the creation of donation receipts with LaTeX. Python extracts the payments for each member and fill the TeX files, LaTeX then creates the PDF. See more here http://www.uweziegenhagen.de/?p=3359

3
baldeagleNL•

You can generate reports with data from files or scripts. I currently don't do that, but I used to generate financial reports with graphs automatically.

You can generate multiple output files with different inputs. Letters with different addresses, forms with data pre-filled in, et cetera.

2
JauriXD•

German student here studying electronics and IT. While using Word is absolutely possible for my studies and a lot of my classmates do exactly that, they always find themselves having to a) dial back quality or b) use some wird kompromises/hacks to get stuff to really properly work dynamicly.

There ist also one other BIG glooming problem. Word can't do most of the illustrations needed for most reports or papers. You will have to rely on other software and will run into problems that are simply not solvable, like getting indizes into the names for electrical components. You can of cours solve all of this in paint or some other bodgy drawing program, but the quality and reusability is goint to go down.

LaTex on the other hand offers ALL of that. Some prof wants some really wird formating? Just add a few lines to the beginning of your tex file and you can keep the rest of you workflow no problem.

While it takes a lot of getting used to, especially if your not from the IT sector, once you have it figured out it is super powerful. And for quick and dirty you can still fall back to word.

9
AX-userOP•

Thank you 😀

3
davethecomposer•

Here is a bit of a minor point for you. LaTeX strives to produce beautifully typeset papers. One aspect of that is to use ligatures, those glyphs in fonts that combine letters together to make them more legible by reducing awkward spacing and collisions.

Most programs use/allow for ligatures today, so the fact that LaTeX uses them is not that big of a deal.

However, in some languages -- especially German! -- you don't always want to use ligatures in some contexts. Basically you don't want ligatures to cross morpheme boundaries where it can make reading/understanding a word a bit clumsy.

In LaTeX we have a package that automatically disables certain ligatures in certain contexts. It was developed primarily for use in German where the need is greatest but also has robust support for English (where the need is rare). You can read about the Selnolig package here.

As far as I can tell, this particular feature -- automatically disabling ligatures based on context -- is unique to LaTeX.

8
AX-userOP•

Vielen Dank :)

👍

3
quadroplegic•

One important clarification: LaTeX is a typesetting tool that takes text files and does its best to make them beautiful. It's more akin to HTML+CSS or a compiler like gcc or clang than anything else.

You can write LaTeX code using basically anything with a text editing field, but you probably shouldn't. I'm fond of Sublime Text, but you could also use any of those text editors that come with Miktex. You could also use Visual Studio Code, or Notepad++, or Scrivener!

It looks like Scrivener can export to LaTeX (via Pandoc or internally), with minor hand-tuning required at the end.

Overall, LaTeX is niche software, but its output is recognizable to experts, so #IYKYK

p.s. git pro-tip: LaTeX treats any number of spaces as a single space, and it doesn't distinguish between a single space and a single carriage return. Learn to start each sentence on a new line and your diffs will be so much cleaner.

5
Protean_Protein•

VS Code with markdown+latex (storing on GitHub) is just… a joy.

3
quadroplegic•

I like having an option that isn’t electron based, which is why I broadly prefer Sublime, but VS Code’s package environment puts it in a close second

2
[deleted]•

[deleted]

4
lachy_xe•

I use Scrivener and LaTeX together and it’s my favourite thing for any paper/assignment I write without major collaboration.

3
AX-userOP•

Interesting. Can you please tell me a little more how you do it?

BTW, I run Scrivener on Windows, i.e. everything.

1
quinyd•

Latex is still heavily used in academia and it’s ability to create illustrations is miles better than any other word processor.

Just trying to write a simple paper with a few graphs, formulas and maybe some code, it will always be better, faster and prettier in latex than anything else.

3
ruan_aille•

German Student here, I started using LaTeX in a scientific context, but after learning how to use it properly it became the only text processor I use.

In the beginning, it takes significantly longer to write in LaTeX than for example in Word, but by now even simple documents are faster written and more beautiful if I use LaTeX.

3
Universalwidget•

I am writing a novel in LaTeX. I use all kinds of text editors/publishing systems in my actual work (as a technical writer) but not LaTeX … I chose LaTeX for personal work because of its ability to handle typographical complexity with comparatively little effort. I have been a writer for some 35 years, and I have seen nothing that works as well as LaTeX.

I am using a lot of typography in the book (poems, marginalia, footnotes, epigrams, text in boxes, manicules, color text, equations, multicolumn text, and so on) and LaTeX handles it easily. This is stuff I never would have considered doing in word processors because they’re not capable enough.

When I use Word, FrameMaker, LibreOffice Writer (or any of the many other word processors I’ve used), it feels as if I’m fighting the software when I want to do anything beyond the ordinary. LaTeX feels more cooperative— does that make sense? I know that LaTeX can do what I want it to do; it’s a matter of figuring out how to do it. Then — poof! Make a command or environment, and it’s like magic. I’m not a programmer at all — I despise writing code and have never been able to do it effectively — but I can do what I want to do without too much trouble. Except tables … I cheat at tables.

I don’t know if anyone will ever want to publish (or even read) this book I’m writing, but I know it’s easier to create it in LaTeX.

3
AX-userOP•

Interesting 😃

I worked with a dedicated structured version of FM for a while: good for standardization, bad for individual changes 😒

Good luck with your private book.

1
Uweauskoeln•

It is very quite popular in Germany, with www.dante.de we have the world's biggest user group. Especially in all MINT areas I'd say LaTeX rules. With digital humanities, well, there is room for improvement.

2
Uweauskoeln•

Personally I write everything in LaTeX, from lecture notes for my (also LaTeX) courses, to formal letters. I have spent the last 20 years with LaTeX, never regretted it.

2
aylons•

I often do volunteer work as an editor for a small collaboration in my field of work and the percentage of papers send in latex (versus docx or odt) only increases, on all conferences. Some have more latex than others, but latex is increasing or already dominant in all of them. In most it is already over 50%.

2
Phthalleon•

Latex is very popular unfortunately. I say this because I just really don't like it. I've used markdown to make html reports and I like that much better.

For one I don't understand why people like pdf so much and two, why can't latex just leave my graphs alone, and finally why do people say that markdown makes good presentations when they're super ugly.

You will mostly see latex used in scientific publishing, lecture notes and presentations and maybe statistical analysis. Outside of that, not much. It takes a very long time to write something it's usually not worth it.

-11
emacsomancer•

It takes a very long time to write something it's usually not worth it.

Outside of trivial cases, word processors take much longer.

I've used markdown to make html reports and I like that much better.

There are markdown->tex processors (e.g. pandoc) if you prefer to author in markdown. (Likewise org->tex and so on.)

6
Phthalleon•

I know that you can convert a markdown file to a pdf using tex. It works. It's not perfect, however. Converting from markdown to tex is sometimes buggy, a document will randomly not render or you will have text missing or your graphs distorted or misplaced or missing. Solutions exist but it's not ideal.

I'm also just not a fan of pdf as much as other people. I have used html as a format to view documents and I like it more. For example, you can post a document on a website without doing anything if it's html. You also don't end up with as many scaling ussues. I wish text documents move to html as a standard and leave the word and pdf formats behind.

I also don't agree that latex is easier for most people. If you need to write formulas, you don't really have much of a choice. But not every document needs to contain any mathematical notation if they don't, something like ms word is a lot faster. And even if they do, I haven't seen industry use it. My ant works as an actuary and she has not heard of latex. I have a friend who works in publishing books (mostly fiction) , they work with other software, the UK government doesn't use latex for their pdfs, they just convert odfs to pdfs. I cannot say how many industries use latex but I'm sure it's not a lot.

1
emacsomancer•

I know that you can convert a markdown file to a pdf using tex. It works. It's not perfect, however. Converting from markdown to tex is sometimes buggy, a document will randomly not render or you will have text missing or your graphs distorted or misplaced or missing. Solutions exist but it's not ideal.

I'm also just not a fan of pdf as much as other people. I have used html as a format to view documents and I like it more.

Converting from markdown to html likewise isn't perfect either.

I can get preferring html (or epub, which, after all, is really just a zipped up website) to pdf. I generally don't because of font issues, difficulty with page numbers, and so on - but many of these are admittedly solvable.

I also don't agree that latex is easier for most people.

I didn't necessarily say "easier", and I don't actually know that lots of use cases really require LaTeX. You mention a bunch of them - like novels, and so on.

But these don't actually require word processors either.

These sorts of things could be done, and would be much better done, in a fancy GUI frontend to something like markdown.

Word processors just have complexity in all the wrong places, without a lot of power or useability benefits. Yeah, people think they know how to use them, but that's just because the companies behind them have "incentivised" schools and colleges to 'teach' them.

1
[deleted]•

[deleted]

2