You're right: LaTeX is very readable. I've never understood the complaints about the system. What's so hard about writing `\section{Introduction}` or `$R \int_0^1 f dx$`?

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.

The biggest misunderstandings about LaTeX stems from comparing it with Microsoft Word or to any other word processor. LaTeX is a typesetter. You give the text, the template and the page size and it typesets it all. You nudge it with hints, and that's all. So, LaTeX is content first and layout second in a sense.

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.

> "LaTeX gets the content and fits to the constraints at hand"

I'll believe this when scientific papers start appearing in the form of reflowable HTML.

Most journals I read offer both reflowable HTML and PDF. I don't know anybody who prefers the former.

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.

Flowed text doesn't mean that it won't be printed. It means that it could be printed the way you want it, not the way the author wanted.

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].

> I'll believe this when scientific papers start appearing in the form of reflowable HTML.

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 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.

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.

> You can typeset EPUBs with it too, if you want.

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).

I don't think that'll happen anytime soon, because scientific papers are one of the rare species of publications, which are primarily made to be printed, read and mangled with pens.

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.

fwiw, I see a lot of papers on IEEE Xplore that are presented as reflowable HTML on the page with the option for a PDF, presumably generated from the same source.

I genuinely can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic.

The hard part isn’t \section{Introduction}, but horrible hacks like \makeatletter you need to do something non-trivial.

> On publishers, I wrote a book for Springer-Nature, and they wanted LaTeX. I wouldn't have published with them, if not.

Do you know if they used LaTeX for the layout internally, or if they used some proprietary system that was fed the LaTeX source?

I think they used LaTeX internally, but I've no way to be sure. They provide latex style sheets and sample files, and so those were my starting point. Of course, they are a big organization, and latex is a simple system, so they might have a program that translates it to something else, e.g. using latex to create PDFs and something else for other formats. But at least at the galley-approval stage, it was still LaTeX.

> LaTeX is very readable. I've never understood the complaints about the system.

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}