There are aspects of it which are extremely annoying to use, however - for example including and resizing an image could be a 10-20 minute googling session. Setting margins, headers, and footers not only requires including and invoking some package in exactly the right way, but actually choosing which package to use for the job as well. These are just a few examples, the list goes on and on.

LaTeX produces great looking documents, but I find it a giant pain to use.

When formatting a large document, those costs are amortized. In addition, many changes are set-it-and-forget-it. Once you set the right dimensions for an image, table, header text size, or margins, table of contents layout, bibliography style, etc., you wont have to mess with them again.

In a word processor, an image size can be changed by inadvertently clicking on something, the style of a text selection can be changed by moving the mouse scroll wheel on the font drop-down menu, page numbering may not refresh when working on a large document, inserting a figure may screw up table or image numbering, etc. You have to be constantly checking your multi page document to make sure everything is still ok.

As a teacher, my heuristic is simple: if I'm authoring a document that is less than 3 pages, I use Word. Otherwise, I use LaTeX.

For example, I write exams and syllabi in LaTeX. Quizzes, assignments and handouts in Word. It has worked well for me for a decade.

In MS Word, an inadvertent click won't change an image size. You have to click and drag. And inserting a figure certainly doesn't screw up table numbering.

> You have to click and drag.

Or type a letter, or open the document on a different computer, or set margins, paragraph size, printer, whatever.

But yes, just clicking an image won't change it.

Just because this is the way that most word processors currently work, does not mean it needs to be this way. You could imagine a word processor where the default mode was to edit content only, and editing structure/layout was hidden behind a second button or something.

LyX is, for me, the perfect word processor. It doesn't have those flaws. The only reason I use Word instead is because it makes collaboration and sharing with colleagues extremely simple.

I'm actually curious what you're doing that causes this. Basically all my figures are \begin{figure}[ht] and everything works out fine. Yeah sizing can sometimes be odd but I save it for the end (I use \includegraphics[width=0.x\textwidth] and adjust x. I get it in 2 or 3 attempts). I only invoke graphicx. I use \FloatBarrier frequently but that's trivial. I use jpg, jpeg, png, and pdf images almost exclusively (wish gif worked and wished mp4 would save into the pdf). I do also invoke tikz and pgfplots when I'm making vectorized plots and graphs (I know this is "advanced"), but I'm not writing tikz pictures in most documents. I do all my homework, papers, presentations, etc (PhD student) in LaTex. Been using it for almost a decade now and I've only faced placement problems when I was just starting and didn't know about [ht] (or [h!]).

I'm not sure what you find difficult about margins. You define them in document class. It is literally top, bottom, left, right, or height, width. Or you use the template that a publication is giving you. Are you doing something more complicated? If so, I can't imagine this is common.

Headers and footers? I never use headers. But I use footnotes (\footnote{this is all you need}).

Honestly I'm curious what issues you face. I'd gladly lend a hand (LaTeX is far from trivial) and I'd like to learn from others. But I'm honestly confused at the complaints. There's plenty of things to complain about LaTeX, but these aren't the challenges I face.

Yes, this is the same way that I use LaTeX, and have been using it for almost as long as you. However, when you first started out, how long did it take you to figure out this stuff? My original comment was in response to the “accessibility” of LaTeX, and honestly I don’t think it’s that accessible.

As for margins, I’ve had issues where changing the margins makes the page numbering “fall off” the page, and as for headers and footers, asserting that you “don’t need” them is not a valid option for many people producing documents.

Also to be clear, I’m not saying LaTeX is impossible or even hard to use, I’m complaining that certain tasks in it should be so much easier than they are.

And also tables are a major pain in Latex. Also that it does not separate physical and logical formatting of text. Asciidoc is what I prefer now, as it is semantically equivalent to XML DocBook, which I find is a better designed system than Latex.

DocBook is not a typesetting system, but I agree it's almost ideal to compose a highly structured document.

Word and PDF also support semantics readable by assistive technologies. With a LaTeX file, the user has to go through the raw code, often character by character.

Don't most people consume the document by reading say the pdf that is ultimately output at the end?

Yes, but I was responding to a post that wasn't about "most people." For people who use a screen reader because they have a visual impairment, a PDF is better than a raw LaTeX file if the PDF has been produced in a way that includes document semantics. My understanding is PDFs produced by LaTeX converters do not include such semantics, the code is only meant for printers, so also having the raw LaTeX file available is better than not having it.

>Editing LaTeX documents is actually far more accessible, since they're all plain text.

The conclusion doesn't follow from the premise.

Who said "editing plain text" is more accessible (in the accessibility for people with impairments sense) than a dedicated editor that can help them with assistive technologies?

>with the emphasis being on "see" -- you must be able to see to be aware of the markup

Not anymore than you must be able to see to edit a text document. The markup can be read back to the user (and is , e.g. "bold emphasized words end bold".

One trick I found that makes things WAY easier is by breaking sections of a paper into different tex files. You can share them on github and each collaborator works on their part. You don't end up with collisions and it works beautifully. I honestly believe LaTeX is easier to collaborate with than Word or even Google Docs.

Disclaimer: I'm mostly a nix user and so doing anything Word generally ends up as a pain for me, but I understand it isn't for most others.

Agreed. Having all the usual versioning tools at your fingertips handily beats Google Docs and Office 365 for collaborative paper writing.

One thing that I find useful is to have semantic line breaks in the source. That is, instead of using automatic or static word wrap, introduce line breaks at the end of sentences or clauses. This makes it somewhat more convenient to look at diffs.

I break on sentence end in HTML as well

Last time i edited some latex document, i ended up in dependancy hell with diffrent packages excluding one another or distorting the results of elements used by other packages. Has that become better?

For example if you use

  \usepackage[spanish]{babel}

to change the hyphenation tables, it also change a lot of things. For example it makes < and > active characters, so they can be used as a special kind of quotes. This breaks other packages like xypic that expect that < and > are normal characters to recognize the arrows.

Yes, now most people use online services that run on a standard platform with the dependencies already sorted out.

I've been using LaTeX for almost a decade and never faced this problem. Always done ```sudo <insert package manager and options> texlive-full``` and been good. Only dependency issues I've faced are forgetting to copy a cls file (which are downloaded).

I have run into that problem, but only when merging Latex documents with different packages. If you find something that's really difficult and requires a lot of packages, ask why other users haven't made it easy already - maybe it's not a good design.