Java and C are both programming languages but it is still apples and oranges to compare them.

I have another question though, how much have you used Word? I have used it only a couple of times since highschool, but it's gotten pretty impressive. I bet that if you really dive into it you could get very close to the power of latex. At least, with regards to the typesetting. The drawing images/formulas/schemas thing is a whole different ballgame I'd agree.

Anyway, my point was not that Microsoft Word in any way is a good replacement for LaTex, I'm just saying that if LaTex could be as well written as Word is, it could have these fancy GUI and fast rendering features too.

There's people out there that think that the power in typesetting that LaTex has is mutual exclusive with the speed and usability that Word has. That just isn't so.

The only reason LaTex isn't fast and more easily extensible is that it was written for the machines of 40 years ago, that didn't have enough RAM to hold the parsed tree of a document.

LaTex could be ten times as fast, were it written in Ruby, the slowest language out there. Just because a modern programmer would make use of the modern hardware and modern design concepts, and just make it responsive. A GUI could be as simple external process that accessed a message passing API, rendering it to HTML and run it through Webkitview.

Overhead everywhere, still ten times faster than LaTex...

(edit: definitely worth a downvote, this comment :P)

you've written a handful of latex documents, so you're now an expert on what latex is used for and what people want out of it. would it help to point out that given latex is more difficult to use than word, I'd bet most latex users have tried and discarded word in favor of latex? Would that affect your judgements about the relative use cases?

   There's people out there that think that the power in typesetting that LaTex 
   has is mutual exclusive with the speed and usability that Word has. That 
   just isn't so.

If you built a better system, you'd find customers for it.

I had a long talk about something like this with a close friend last night. He has a favorite technology stack that is regularly trash talked on sites like this. From what he's seen its usually from people who have only a passing knowledge of it. Either they worked a job and only had to mess with it for a few months or they worked with it for a long time but never went past just the surface. Almost all the complaints he's seen about it are either extremely outdated, fixable with a little custom code or configuration changes. I think you should spend a little more time with it before you say that developers should feel "ashamed" for using it. Your post falls squarely into the category he was talking about.

I have a lot of respect for having your own toolchain that's optimized and comfortable for you.

I am sorry I come across wrong, I am not saying that developers should feel ashamed for using it. I am saying developers should feel ashamed that other people are using it.

I'm not saying using LaTex is dumb, I've stated multiple times in this thread that I use it myself. I'm just saying we could do better.

The things that I use LaTeX for are usually my own writing that I don't have to collaborate with other people for. If I have to work with other people I use Word. The things that I like about latex are that I can have it automatically generate my figures because I can script it, which I can't do with Word.

I agree that LaTeX can be difficult to write but you have to realize that word has it's shortcomings too (put an image in and send the document to somebody else, chances are the layout will get messed up). Tools like pandoc are trying to alleviate both problems so people can work in whatever environment they prefer, which seems like a good solution to me. I could write part of my document in markdown, convert to LaTeX and write my formulae and then convert to Word so my coworkers can edit it easier.

And you never stopped to investigate why, in spite of the far greater ease of entry that alternatives have?

I'll take LaTeX. It's more reliably reproducible. Once I got the basic format created (for her second book)—which took about as much time as it took to format the first book in Pages—the third book took about a tenth the time. My tooling was in place.

It's not for everyone, and you really have to either dig deep or find a macro set that does what you want (or both—I'm using a macro set on top of scrbook). There is room for something better, but that something better is not Word (or Pages).

(I'd almost say that what LeanPub does is good enough, but their LaTeX typography sucked when I tried it almost two years ago.)

I find that very unlikely.

Are you talking about InDesign? Exact placement of anything is really a pain with Latex, choosing "normal" fonts requires you to switch to a different compiler and the debugging information on all those automatic choices TeΧ and LaTeΧ does for you is abysmal. What I'm saying is that even though LaTeΧ allows you to do precision work does not mean it is a good at it.

And that is almost the whole point. Most people are idiots about how to present written material, so TeX and friends make those decisions for us. It's especially frustrating when you have to dink with floats, because now you're second-guessing TeX, and it exacts a high price.

I've used TeX for over 25 years and I'm comfortable saying that I could produce documents of a similar quality, with better support for collaboration, with Word.

I still use TeX for many projects but the Word style capability is great.

Markdown still sucks, though. :)

How? This is an honest question. I wouldn't use Word anyway, but I am just not aware of anything that could come close to Git + LaTeX in terms of collaboration support.

I've been doing projects with people who have no technical background to speak of, but immense domain knowledge. They wrote their theses in word (god help them), published in journals that required submissions in word (there are more and more of the things), and include a lot of figures in their papers or grant proposals.

Sharepoint helps a lot with collaboration, but even word's basic change tracking and commenting facilities are good for people working around a document via email, Dropbox, or even git.

Word still creates those weird situations for which it is infamous, but they are generally rare. Also, word has become much more stable, even with larger documents.

Word: explicit WYSIWYG control over typesetting.

LaTeX: semantic level control over typesetting. Additionally provides explicit low level typesetting commands.

Markdown: given how basic (trivial even) Markdown is (http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax) I'm not sure why it's even in this list.

I guess I don't really have a point. Just that if you are writing essays in the humanities or sociology then markdown can have a place in your workflow

Word nowadays has semantic typesetting controls too, I think since they started that ribbon thing that it has become useable. If you stick to using their semantic things I think you can do a pretty good job of properly typesetting in Word.

When i was finnished writing i exported the markdown to rtf, 1) selected all the h1's via "select all", set them to be a real (word) h1. vice versa with all other styles i used. 2) Then i put in all the pictures. 3) Then i exported the list from Mendeley.

That process - from markdown to perfection - took me less than 4 hours.

I have some experience with latex and especially latex + komascript, but i hated that experience because the latex sourcecode doesn't ebrace readability and you're sure to get obscure errors in the last second. besides stuff like running latex twice for a table of contents.

Writing

  \begin{itemize}
    \item really long line which gets wrangled in my vim 
  terminal, so that i don't see where the second item starts.
    \item another long line. maybe 200 characters long?
  \end{itemize}

  * really long line which gets wrangled as well, but is 
  better to read because it starts with a clear sign which 
  is recognized to be a bullet.
  * next line, which is also very long.

The older proofreaders could proofread it in the final stage in ms word with the track changes functionality.

I put a lot of thought into Design and Typography and i was sure that i could decide better how my document should look, than latex. I agree, that for some people this is not the case.

After a draft or two, transitions to LaTeX is a must. [Pandoc](http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/) for the win!

Actually the Plan was to typeset it in Indesign, but as i woke up the day of the final layout i just decided to do it in Word.

I'll just pretend it's a parody.

This is what most people do in physics and astronomy. You make the plot in some kind of plotting package and export it to a vector format. In astronomy, the journals only recently started accepting PDF figures in addition to EPS.

In my experience doing all of my figures in LaTeX is significantly more painful than using a real plotting package like matplotlib.

What about tables? Granted they aren't fun to make, but I am not aware of any methods of creating them outside of a latex document.

The point isn't if Markdown has enough features, but rather that LaTeX lets you a pay a price for those features that you shouldn't be paying, just because it's a 40-years-old software.

The best thing about markdown is pandoc.

Also, even though Markdown tends to be fairly easy to write, there are many edge cases where you can't really be sure what the result is unless you try it.

[1]: http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/