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@SortOfTested I've never seen *Tex being used anywhere in the industry - only in academia. Markdown is only suited for extremely simple documents, and even that sucks.
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@Fast-Nop
About half the people I worked with at google and amazon had an affinity for LaTeX.
If I need more than markdown will do, I generally host a notebook. -
@SortOfTested Astonishing. The last time I ever saw and used *TeX for real was in the 1990s during my studies.
I've never used it afterwards because the main drawback is that you forget most of it as soon as you don't use it daily, and then the productivity drops to zero.
Let's also be real, most documentation doesn't need the layout quality to be ready for book print, so even the main reason for *TeX isn't there. -
@Fast-Nop If you have several templates or previous documents written in Latex you can easily copy those snippets... You do not have to study Latex again. The problem would be to define a specific template. In this case, you should master Latex, otherwise it is a hell...
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I once wrote a book in LO - 100 pages, somewhat complex layout.
The 2003 style interface is part of the problem, but mostly, it was the sub par performance on anything larger than two pages, or anything with images.
Or anything with diagrams.
Or tables.
So the perfect tool to write Nonfiction with, especially computer books.
I'm writing my current project with LaTeX and organize it with MS One Note and ToDo (because the rest of my business is also MS stuff)
Perfect combination for me. I'm not sure I could do better with Word than with writer, but the other tools from MS sure are superior. I just started the project in LaTeX and I dislike switching tools in the middle of a job.
I'm actually a big supporter of free software, but that whole split up in OOs development team set them back a decade in a race that they were at some point almost up to speed. -
@raulqf Even with a template, *TeX still sucks because its discoverability is bad. That's one of the pillars of usability and a major advantage of GUIs.
Especially devs tend to dismiss that and attribute the resulting user resentment to stupidity, which is a big point why you don't let devs design UIs.
What also sucks is the edit-compile-view-debug cycle.
I think these are the main reasons why it hasn't really caught on. -
@Fast-Nop Idon't agree but I understand your point of view. Have you seen Overleaf? It has a great potential. A saas that allows multiple peers to work concurrently in the same latex document with several tips and examples.
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@raulqf Just took a look at that, and apart from offering new problems through merge conflicts if multiple users are editing the same document, and the complex installation (you wouldn't use their hosted version for anything serious), I don't really see how it would solve the problems with *TeX.
What I'd wish for would be the TeX engine incorporated in browsers because the layout quality in renderers is just ridiculous compared to what TeX could achieve already decades ago.
Chromium in particular still fails to even auto-hyphenate because it's too difficult or something. Too difficult to use what TeX had, and also too difficult to copy what FF is doing.
I hate LibreOffice. I truly despise it. I have one page with an article containing an image with a caption and on the next page is another article with some tables. I have to save it in the piece of shit Microsoft docx format, because everyone in the world uses Windows and MS Word. But everything's fine so far. Now let's try to save, close and re-open. Ok, cool, cool, cool. And what do we see? The captioned image has glitched into the next page and fucked everything up. I've tried re-saving four or five times already and it keeps glitching back into the next page in various and new ways. Fucking piece of garbage software. I hate this so much. End me and my suffering, please! I hope I never have to write documents ever again! Of course that's naive - the rest of my life will probably require a million more garbage documents. I don't want to dualboot into Windows with MS Word. I fucking hate Windows too. It's slow, it's weird, it doesn't have a normal shell (ok, there's WSL, but that doesn't count, that's just a wrapped Linux). P.S. AAAaaaaa!11A1!!
rant