The video is from Mar 29. Must be an April fool's joke. I actually needed until the "double-blind study" to get it ...

I am extremely proficient in LaTeX, but at one point I had to turn in a group project typeset in LaTeX with three others who had no knowledge of how LaTeX worked.

This was my solution exactly. Force everyone to follow Microsoft's build styling tools and use equation editor. Then the day before we turned it in, I installed the LaTeX fonts and updated the styles and our professor had no idea.

I'm somewhat ashamed to admit I stopped using LaTeX (and LyX) after that for projects... especially once I realized equation editor had a built in LaTeX mode.

Why didn't you use TeXmacs?

Today I learned that Word files are just zipped XML and can be edited directly in a text editor if you change the extension from .docx to .zip.

It’s the case with .docx modern files. Older .doc files were binary (memory dump).

This is also true of modern PowerPoint files and Excel files. Also some others: open office formats, apk, ipa, jar, and epub.

> What You See Is Pretty Close To What Other Tools Can Get

This is a template for MS Word letting you “simulate” the look of a LaTeX document. Use pandoc to convert to actual LaTeX source.

I could not know for certain, but from my experience converting document formats, such as pdf to doc or html or what have you, I suspect that the converted document will be quite different and include quite a lot of inscrutable noise compared to a document originally created in LaTeX, even if the output appears similar or the same.

I've always been in awe of users of LaTeX because they almost always have another discipline, usually academic and with years if not decades behind them, yet in order to publish they effectively need to become a typesetter, which is an entirely separate discipline in itself. Everyone else just hires the professional typesetter or page designer (probably provided by a commercial printer, marketing or design firm), but academics don't seem to have that convenience available to them. Imagine if in order to drive anywhere you had to design and build your own car for every trip.

From a friend who's a mathematics professor: "If I had to fight with LaTeX to get here, my students will damned well learn it, too."

The rest of academia is like that too. Depending on the day, I’m some combination of an embedded developer, zoo keeper, surgeon, (data) scientist, manager, writer/illustrator, accountant, and carnival barker.

For articles, LaTeX is not even that bad: most journals want you to stick close to their own article class. Posters and talks are the real timesuck.

or LaTeX is a fun and nerdy distraction from their work (speaking from experience here…)

All that's missing is a word-macro that hijacks the export-to-pdf button to run pandoc and pdflatex.

> “data was collected until results confirmed hypothesis.”

It’s a sad humor that is usually true in sciences.

TIL latex is pronounced “laytek”

Lamport says that either pronunciation is acceptable, and back when he gave talks about LaTeX, he would carefully switch back and forth between "ay" and "ah" each time he uttered "LaTeX". Or so he claims.

> Lamport says that either pronunciation is acceptable […].

This fits what Knuth said about the issue in 2006: “[…] lah-tek, lay-tek, the author never has decided how to pronounce it […].” [1]

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HuwiBPLV3A&t=41s

I've always heard (since the 80s) lah-tek. But I've never asked Lamport whose pronunciation is presumably canonical

> TeX's creator Donald Knuth promotes a pronunciation of /tɛx/ (tekh) (that is, with a voiceless velar fricative as in Modern Greek, similar to the ch in loch).

So, LAH-tekh.

Although there are a number of OK ways, lay-tech seems to be what most knowledgeable people in the community use.

Those are clearly lay people. ;)