Re:Lout: An alternative to LaTeX?
by stdbrouw on Wednesday March 28, 2012 @07:43AM
(#3765709)
Not necessarily. New people in academia learn LaTeX all the time, and if more students start getting upset about having to learn it while there's an alternative that, while lacking a zillion of packages, is easy to use and just works right out of the box... then I don't see how professors would be able to hold back the tide. I've seen engineers write papers in Microsoft Word, though they're a minority. And then there's those English majors who just cajole a buddy with InDesign into typesetting their thesis for them.
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Students have always been upset about learning Latex. However, after the first or second paper they realize how much trouble Latex is saving them and become fans for life. I don't see any other system offering the same advantages.
Around here I've seen a considerable drop-off in TeX fans over the past 4-5 years, with more students opting for Word. It didn't used to be a viable option, but now many conferences (outside a few very-math-heavy areas) offer both LaTeX and Word stylesheets and let you choose, and Word has improved in a few key areas, mainly citation support and auto-hyphenation. Zotero users also seem to like the Word integration. Figure placement still sucks, but figure placement isn't really TeX's strong suit either.
I personally still prefer TeX, but the gap is smaller than it was 10 years ago. The auto-hyphenation is probably the single biggest change, since the easy way to spot 2-column conference papers done in Word used to be the horrible whitespace in justified columns caused by its inability to break words. (This heuristic still words sometimes, because auto-hyphenation isn't on by default, and not all authors know about it or use it.)