If you look at the three comparisons carefully, what’s actually being contrasted is not LaTeX and word processors, but the effective use of LaTeX and the naive misuse of word processors
This is key, the value of LaTeX is less about the markup itself and more the emphasis on structure vs. appearance.
I winder why other, newer semantic markup languages didn’t replace it? Docbook? HTML + MathML? Markdown + HTML + MathML? The last one provides lightweight markup for basic text structure allowing relatively easy inclusion of more complex elements.
LaTeX is a rather dense language. I understand that tooling already exists and proven by time but it certainly doesn’t help writing. It’s not an excuse to ignore every technology advancment in the last three decades.
Markdown is getting more common. It initially lacked many features needed for academic writing, like citation handling, but Pandoc’s extended form of markdown is pretty serviceable. It actually can solve problems for both LaTeX-haters and Word-haters. If you’re in a field that expects LaTeX (only provides LaTeX templates, etc.), you can write in markdown and then just use the journal/conference’s template at the end to make the PDF. And if you’re in a field where manuscripts are expected as word processor documents, you can write in markdown and then just convert to .docx at the end, letting you use a text-editor writing style.
I personally still mainly use LaTeX, though, because I’ve grown to like some of the other packages around it, which are LaTeX-specific. For example you can generate plots directly in LaTeX from CSV files, which both fits in the “reproducible documents” trend and smooths over issues you often get when embedding externally generated plots in a document (especially around fonts). Once you’re using those kinds of features you’re pretty much committted to the LaTeX ecosystem. For the fairly large percentage of papers that are using nothing but the very basic document-structure and layout features of LaTeX though, pandoc Markdown should work fine.
For example you can generate plots directly in LaTeX from CSV files, which both fits in the “reproducible documents” trend
org-mode with babel is also exceptionally good at this. You can directly pass data from org tables to embedded code and embed the results of the code, such as textual output and graphs into a document.
You can also embed LaTeX directly and render LaTeX fragments, equations, etc. in-line while editing.
(Though I moved away from Spacemacs in the meanwhile.)
Another cool feature is that you can mark any document header as a TODO item, to keep track of what sections need to be rewritten/revised/etc. I also tag sections to generate different (beamer) slides for students and myself.
Yeah, there are a few approaches for handling that part of it. I’ve also just used old-fashioned Makefiles that generate figures (with e.g. an R script) and then regenerate the document.
The thing I really like about typesetting graphs inside LaTeX isn’t really captured by org-mode as far as I can tell, though: fonts are handled in one place, and according to the parent document’s specification. The usual situation when you generate a figure with e.g. gnuplot (which org-plot seems to call out to) and then embed it in a Word or LaTeX document, is that the embedded figure has its own font configuration that doesn’t follow the parent document’s stylesheet, unless you manually configure it to be in sync. And the EPS or PDF embeds (or doesn’t embed) a different set of fonts that have to be merged with the parent document’s font embedding to produce portable PDFs. All quite possible to do, but I’ve wasted a lot of hours on this kind of thing (when IEEE Xplore rejects my PDF due to embedded font problems, some font inside a figure is the culprit 95% of the time).
I also honestly just don’t really like org-mode files. Instead of \noise everywhere you’ve got #+NOISE everywhere; and in practice you often have both kinds due to needing to embed LaTeX markup in the org-mode markup. Doesn’t seem like a huge win except for a few things like bulleted lists (where it’s clearly cleaner). It’s especially noisy as a document format if you don’t use emacs to edit the files.
The usual situation when you generate a figure with e.g. gnuplot (which org-plot seems to call out to) and then embed it in a Word or LaTeX document, is that the embedded figure has its own font configuration that doesn’t follow the parent document’s stylesheet, unless you manually configure it to be in sync.
Indeed! But you can use LaTeX directly in org-mode, e.g. I have embedded pgfplots in org-mode slides. I use a small ‘by-backend’ function that embeds the tikz code directly for LaTeX-based output or generates a PDF/PNG for other outputs (e.g. HTML). E.g. in one slide deck a LaTeX block is preceded by:
it embeds the TikZ directly for LaTeX beamer and LaTeX output and creates an external image and converts it to PNG for other exports.
The nice thing is that I still get to use the simpler org-mode markup and the possibility to run source code a la Jupyter directly in documents.
I also honestly just don’t really like org-mode files. Instead of \noise everywhere you’ve got #+NOISE
This is definitely true. For me the balance is definitely on the ‘much easier to type and much more flexible than LaTeX’-side, but I can fully understand that you’d prefer plain LaTeX.
This is key, the value of LaTeX is less about the markup itself and more the emphasis on structure vs. appearance.
I winder why other, newer semantic markup languages didn’t replace it? Docbook? HTML + MathML? Markdown + HTML + MathML? The last one provides lightweight markup for basic text structure allowing relatively easy inclusion of more complex elements.
LaTeX is a rather dense language. I understand that tooling already exists and proven by time but it certainly doesn’t help writing. It’s not an excuse to ignore every technology advancment in the last three decades.
Markdown is getting more common. It initially lacked many features needed for academic writing, like citation handling, but Pandoc’s extended form of markdown is pretty serviceable. It actually can solve problems for both LaTeX-haters and Word-haters. If you’re in a field that expects LaTeX (only provides LaTeX templates, etc.), you can write in markdown and then just use the journal/conference’s template at the end to make the PDF. And if you’re in a field where manuscripts are expected as word processor documents, you can write in markdown and then just convert to .docx at the end, letting you use a text-editor writing style.
I personally still mainly use LaTeX, though, because I’ve grown to like some of the other packages around it, which are LaTeX-specific. For example you can generate plots directly in LaTeX from CSV files, which both fits in the “reproducible documents” trend and smooths over issues you often get when embedding externally generated plots in a document (especially around fonts). Once you’re using those kinds of features you’re pretty much committted to the LaTeX ecosystem. For the fairly large percentage of papers that are using nothing but the very basic document-structure and layout features of LaTeX though, pandoc Markdown should work fine.
org-mode with babel is also exceptionally good at this. You can directly pass data from org tables to embedded code and embed the results of the code, such as textual output and graphs into a document.
You can also embed LaTeX directly and render LaTeX fragments, equations, etc. in-line while editing.
Screenshot: https://www.dropbox.com/s/hf5x3p9bne3tqbg/Screen%20Shot%202017-03-08%20at%2008.20.36.png?dl=0
(Though I moved away from Spacemacs in the meanwhile.)
Another cool feature is that you can mark any document header as a TODO item, to keep track of what sections need to be rewritten/revised/etc. I also tag sections to generate different (beamer) slides for students and myself.
Yeah, there are a few approaches for handling that part of it. I’ve also just used old-fashioned Makefiles that generate figures (with e.g. an R script) and then regenerate the document.
The thing I really like about typesetting graphs inside LaTeX isn’t really captured by org-mode as far as I can tell, though: fonts are handled in one place, and according to the parent document’s specification. The usual situation when you generate a figure with e.g. gnuplot (which org-plot seems to call out to) and then embed it in a Word or LaTeX document, is that the embedded figure has its own font configuration that doesn’t follow the parent document’s stylesheet, unless you manually configure it to be in sync. And the EPS or PDF embeds (or doesn’t embed) a different set of fonts that have to be merged with the parent document’s font embedding to produce portable PDFs. All quite possible to do, but I’ve wasted a lot of hours on this kind of thing (when IEEE Xplore rejects my PDF due to embedded font problems, some font inside a figure is the culprit 95% of the time).
I also honestly just don’t really like org-mode files. Instead of
\noiseeverywhere you’ve got#+NOISEeverywhere; and in practice you often have both kinds due to needing to embed LaTeX markup in the org-mode markup. Doesn’t seem like a huge win except for a few things like bulleted lists (where it’s clearly cleaner). It’s especially noisy as a document format if you don’t use emacs to edit the files.Indeed! But you can use LaTeX directly in org-mode, e.g. I have embedded pgfplots in org-mode slides. I use a small ‘by-backend’ function that embeds the tikz code directly for LaTeX-based output or generates a PDF/PNG for other outputs (e.g. HTML). E.g. in one slide deck a LaTeX block is preceded by:
it embeds the TikZ directly for LaTeX beamer and LaTeX output and creates an external image and converts it to PNG for other exports.
The nice thing is that I still get to use the simpler org-mode markup and the possibility to run source code a la Jupyter directly in documents.
I also honestly just don’t really like org-mode files. Instead of \noise everywhere you’ve got #+NOISE
This is definitely true. For me the balance is definitely on the ‘much easier to type and much more flexible than LaTeX’-side, but I can fully understand that you’d prefer plain LaTeX.