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A comment on Tectonic: a modernized, self-contained TeX/LaTeX engine. Parent comment

Re:Tectonic: a modernized, self-contained TeX/LaTeX engine by chriswarbo on Wednesday May 31, 2017 @08:50AM (#14452056)
TeX is certainly still a big deal, and is not at all fringe. That's my experience from academic Physics and Computer Science. I've heard that different disciplines vary in this regard (e.g. humanities may use more word processing, possibly because they don't need TeX to typeset math).

Anecdotally: when giving a presentation last week, the event organiser was surprised that my slides were HTML (from pandoc; I'm an ex-Web dev), as she'd never seen such a thing. Everyone else used beamer (TeX slideshow package).

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Re:Tectonic: a modernized, self-contained TeX/LaTeX engine by SomeHacker44 on Wednesday May 31, 2017 @02:09PM (#14454663)
One of the most enjoyable moments this past (academic) year was noticing my son's 7th grade homework sheets looked awfully familiar from a typesetting and font perspective. Sure enough, after inquiring, I confirmed that the teacher was using LaTeX to prepare all her schoolwork.

Simply awesome.

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Re:Tectonic: a modernized, self-contained TeX/LaTeX engine by criddell on Wednesday May 31, 2017 @09:48AM (#14452441)
That may be true, but the world of academic Physics and Computer Science people is still a relatively small one.

Anecdotally: in the 20+ years I've been out of school I've sat through hundreds of presentations. I don't think any of them were created with TeX (unless TeX is the underlying technology of PowerPoint, Keynote, Prezi, Impress, etc...).

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Re:Tectonic: a modernized, self-contained TeX/LaTeX engine by pkgwilliams on Wednesday May 31, 2017 @11:50AM (#14453432)
TeX used to have numerous unique features: fairly good fonts; automatic hyphenation, which makes it feasible to lay out text with full justification; support for non-English Latin characters, etc. The rest of the world has caught up with these.

IMO the ways in which it is still special are: (1) good math typography; (2) integration with automated bibliography systems; (3) easily generatable by other tools. (Lots of things that eventually turn into HTML hit #3, but not lots of things that eventually turn into really good-looking PDFs do.)

These points certainly aren't important in all cases ... but for what it's worth, arxiv.org hosts more than a million scientific papers, the vast majority of which are written in TeX.

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