The problems start once you have to convert this to MS Word, which is essentially impossible with any advanced LaTeX document which will invariably contain complex formulas and also include hacks and adjustments in the preamble. I've done it several times and it basically requires a rewrite. All of the existing tools fail. In fact, in a book I've once edited and made camera-ready in LaTeX, the LaTeX contributions were harder to integrate into the book than the Word files!
Recently I had to deliver a book I've written camera-ready, doing all the typesetting myself, because a large prestigious publisher I had a contract with turned out to be unable to deal with LaTeX. In a sense the problem really is MS Word, it's still the standard and I was astonished to learn about the publishing world in my postdoc time how surprisingly many publishers only deal with MS Word files and do not even use any special typesetting software - many use Word all the way down to creating the final PDF for printing! Looks horrible but I know of several major academic publishers who do it that way.
After a bit of learning on your first document (perhaps requiring half the time of one of the first of dozens of edits you'll be making, if the document is important), what you get is (a) ease of transition between formats (article in journal becomes chapter in thesis in about 3 minutes work) and (b) beautiful output, not just in mathematics but in support for many language characters, hyphenation hints, etc.
On publishers, I wrote a book for Springer-Nature, and they wanted LaTeX. I wouldn't have published with them, if not.
On the other hand, word processors work at absolute terms, layout first. Looking to LaTeX from this perspective distorts the vision a lot, and people get confused.
When one understands the idea of "LaTeX gets the content and fits to the constraints at hand", the rest is liberating.
I'll believe this when scientific papers start appearing in the form of reflowable HTML.
A PDF (and the paper copy it generates) is more convenient for markup, and for memory. I can look at papers I read decades ago, and know where to go to find things, because of what I might call positional memory. Somehow, my brain has information such as "The key Figure is at top of third page" or "that equation I think is wrong is at the bottom of the second-last page". I'm not alone in this. I suppose it's just how brains work (e.g. people who do memory tricks "store" the information in an imagined space).
When I look at reflowed text, I just get lost. I can't make notes that "stick" with the text if I enlarge the font. And memories don't form in the same way as for PDF/paper.
I suppose this might be field-dependent. I think in some fields the key point of a paper is a single sentence, which could be identified easily in reflowing text and then copied into a separate file. I don't read papers like that, though. That's why, in my line of work, PDF/paper is superior to reflowable text.
This comes in handy when the author decided that 50% of the surface of paper should remain blank, or using a tiny font. They may find it helpful, others not. Same goes for the decision to have pages at all.
The only aspect where I see in which someone else making an unappealable decision for you is superior, is convenience. Conditional on that other person being an expert in the field [of printing].
YES!
It's 2022 and in spite of the often-praised superiority of LaTeX, we are still getting paginated PDFs on ArXiv, instead of responsive text that reflows on different screen sizes. PDFs were great to read when I was still printing papers. For reading on screen they are quite inconvenient.
Many publishers have come around in the last decade and offer HTML versions of full papers (after you get through the paywall).
It's not about LaTeX per se. You can typeset EPUBs with it too, if you want. So reflow ability is not a shortcoming of LaTeX.
Publishers send you a Word or LaTeX template, and require your manuscript as a PDF, conforming to that template. If it's LaTeX, generally there's a switch to render the text in "Review mode" with line numbers and similar additional details, and omitting author data if the judgement will be done blindly.
So, the tool itself, regardless of its brand is the proverbial wrong tree to fight with. Also, it's a reality that reading a 25 page manuscript is not very efficient on a screen, at least in my discipline. I have a dedicated "Paper printer" at home for printing such manuscripts and taking a stab at it with pens and highlighters.
In theory, yes. In practice, this only works when the document is using a restricted set of packages. I tried.
I'm fighting not so much with LaTeX, rather with ArXiv. They have the sources of LaTeX submissions, but do not provide other formats than PDF by default. Judging from my own experience in converting LaTeX to HTML, epub, etc., I assume these conversions simply create too much headache.
> reading a 25 page manuscript is not very efficient on a screen, at least in my discipline
The vast majority of papers I "read" I never read back-to-back, rather than Abstract - Discussion - Results - Introduction - Methods, bailing out at any of those points when I have the information I was looking for. I couldn't possibly keep up with the literature when reading every interesting paper completely.
Those that are really relevant to my research I will read in detail, and at that point a PDF is useful, I agree. But before that, I prefer reflown text & figures.
There was some innovation in that regard, e.g. eLife's Lens, that was specifically designed to support reading on a (large) screen. IEEE also has a good system that works on phones (well, almost; so UI elements clutter the text).
Even the templates from the publishers came with paper sizes and other crop marks coded inside them.
When publications start accepting reflow able formats and provide relevant templates, producing them is easy with LaTeX.
Do you know if they used LaTeX for the layout internally, or if they used some proprietary system that was fed the LaTeX source?
Here’s how you put an image on TeX:
\begin{figure} \caption{A picture of a tucan.} \begin{center} \includegraphics{tucan.eps} \end{center} \end{figure}
it works flawlessly, and it unarguably way cleaner than writing in plain latex
How can anyone
- tell me
- that this
- list
Is harder to read:
\begin{itemize}
\item than this
\item unintuitive
\item mess
[1] https://lee-phillips.org/panflute-gnuplot/ [This is sort of obsolete now, as you should probably write filters with Lua. But it’s still a good illustration of the possibilities.]
They convert LaTeX to the XML dialect that their in-house layout system understands.
The Lyx editor solves both these problems for me. I'd probably be using LaTeX a lot less if I hadn't found Lyx (that quote about fingernail clippings in oatmeal doesn't apply to Lisp IMO, but certainly does to LaTeX).
I don’t think the citation tooling is great, but for pagination even free tools work well with CSS Paged Media [0] [1]
For the kind of text that you'd use Markdown for, i.e. text that is mostly just text and not math heavy, LaTeX should be almost as readable as Markdown. For example,
\section{Introduction}
## Introduction \section[short title in toc]{very very long title at page}
HTML is still not nice to read, too much boilerplate tags required. Markdown source however is mostly well-readable in a plain-text editor, and offers the basic formatting that serves 95% of the needs.
But the truth is: the ideal text layout platform for scientific writing does not exist.
Markdown+HTML+CSS could be getting close, but it currently still lacks LaTeX's tooling for citations, support for pagination.
MS Word's "track changes" is extremely useful when collaboratively editing (and no, Overleaf's version doesn't come close, unfortunately). But references and citations in Word still are no match for the flexibility of bibtex, even with Papers/Zotero/Mendeley. Figure placing can be a nightmare, although LaTeX is not infallible, either. And you need a Mac or Windows to use Word, and on a Mac it feels like it's running in an emulator.
I have given up on the belief that one tool could solve all this. There are a few good attempts like overleaf and the less-known authorea (which I liked more), but these are cloud apps which complicates writing offline.
The only solution is to choose whatever tool works for the specific use case, learn to live with its shortcomings, and never forget that in the end only the finished manuscript counts.