I hate LaTeX, because it’s basically just a huge pile of opaque macros nobody cared to document well. Every time a find some docs they are in the form of a PDF document Google ignores.
OTOH, zipped XML sucks for version control and ad-hoc styles are pure evil. We need some decent middle ground. Pandocs ability to render ODT with custom styles is close. Asciidoctor is cool, too.
My big problem with Markdown is lack of semantic markup. I guess this just makes it more complex though, considering Markdown was intended for simple tasks.
I’ve never used LaTeX for anything but fairly simple equations, but I used it to write my master’s thesis and a fair few documents and loved it. There is a steep learning curve and because there are so many different macro packages it’s so easy to get caught in the “configuring the tools rather than using them” cycle (much as with your editor if you use vim/Emacs, your shell, mail client, etc) but it does produce beautiful documents and being able to use the same workflow as for software development (Makefile, same editor, VCS for document versioning, etc) is hugely productivity-boosting. Of course, if you don’t want to go that route there are tools like LyX that make the experience more word processor-like.
Professionally I have to use Microsoft Word and although it’s gotten better with every release, some parts of it are just horrendous. Yes, it’s easy to create great looking documents with lots of tables and embedded images, etc but when it goes awry (eg, numbering or indenting going wonky), there’s no reproducible way to fix it - you just fiddle and reset styles until things are ok again. Nowadays with XML-based files it’s probably easier to fix things if needed, but that’s not something to be tackled lightly.
Let’s put it this way - I’ve corrupted many Word documents and had lots of issues with documents just going all weird on me (and yes, I do know how to use Word). None of that ever happened with LaTeX. Plain text with markup Just Works.
So, what about asciidoc / markdown?
I hate LaTeX, because it’s basically just a huge pile of opaque macros nobody cared to document well. Every time a find some docs they are in the form of a PDF document Google ignores.
OTOH, zipped XML sucks for version control and ad-hoc styles are pure evil. We need some decent middle ground. Pandocs ability to render ODT with custom styles is close. Asciidoctor is cool, too.
EDIT: Maybe I should just shut up and learn the LaTeX.
LibreOffice supports Flat XML (.fodt) which works a little better under version control.
My big problem with Markdown is lack of semantic markup. I guess this just makes it more complex though, considering Markdown was intended for simple tasks.
I’ve never used LaTeX for anything but fairly simple equations, but I used it to write my master’s thesis and a fair few documents and loved it. There is a steep learning curve and because there are so many different macro packages it’s so easy to get caught in the “configuring the tools rather than using them” cycle (much as with your editor if you use vim/Emacs, your shell, mail client, etc) but it does produce beautiful documents and being able to use the same workflow as for software development (Makefile, same editor, VCS for document versioning, etc) is hugely productivity-boosting. Of course, if you don’t want to go that route there are tools like LyX that make the experience more word processor-like.
Professionally I have to use Microsoft Word and although it’s gotten better with every release, some parts of it are just horrendous. Yes, it’s easy to create great looking documents with lots of tables and embedded images, etc but when it goes awry (eg, numbering or indenting going wonky), there’s no reproducible way to fix it - you just fiddle and reset styles until things are ok again. Nowadays with XML-based files it’s probably easier to fix things if needed, but that’s not something to be tackled lightly.
Let’s put it this way - I’ve corrupted many Word documents and had lots of issues with documents just going all weird on me (and yes, I do know how to use Word). None of that ever happened with LaTeX. Plain text with markup Just Works.