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Discussion on: Let's use LaTeX!

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Jan Wedel • Edited

It’s probably very powerful, but it won’t replace markdown. I use markdown very often in Sublime with highlighting to just structure some thoughts without ever generating a document from it. Markdown is just some formalized way to structure a text file like humans would do. Latex clearly is not something a human would write.

Now look at you basic example, it’s completely unreadable as source.

For more complex technical documentation I would still probably use Asciidoc.

Then, there are scientific papers. Actually when I did my masters thesis, I wanted to use Latex but I knew I had to use a lot of formulas, pictures and tables. The way to add those to a latex document was overly complex at that time and unreadable in source. So I read a couple of articles about how to handle large documents in Word (yes, I said it) without crashing it. Then I spent some time to create a Layout, styles and add fonts etc to resemble a document that looks like something that Latex would produce. At the end, I was much faster with the formula editor, inline Tables and graphics.

So I don’t think I would ever write Latex as primary source. Some WYSIWYG editor that generates Latex that I could change If I want to.