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I read about typst a few weeks ago. I no longer make math- or formatting-heavy documents anymore, but if I had had this while I was in university, I would’ve loved to use it.
LaTeX is nice, but there’s some things that are an absolute pain to get right or make them look like you want to.
I did all my Quantum Field Theory homework in Latex, the professor required it. My classmates would write everything out by hand and then transcribe it, meanwhile my officemate and I could think/write/math in Latex, so we only had to write our homework once. The prof lifted the requirement halfway through the semester after everyone else complained, but I never looked back.
The only thing that prevented a 100% Latex-only semester was the goddam section where we had to draw Wick diagrams. There just wasn’t a reliable way to draw them on my computer, as the Feynman diagram tools stuggled with the nuances of Wick diagrams. I still included the hand-drawn versions as figures in Latex, but it felt like cheating.
I did figure out how to write the Wick’s theorem bracket notation in Latex though (not that I’ll ever need to again), so that made up for it a bit. I wager that I spent more time researching obscure Latex packages than actually solving the problems that semester.
I love Latex so much, I even made a template for generating profesional looking DND item cards for my table that I submitted to overleaf: https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/d-and-d-item-card-template/ndfdspmmxnrn
I’m sorry but you can totally control the margin size in LaTeX if you learn the right incantation
backslash UsEpAcKaGe letterpaper H-maaaaaaargin point seventy-niiiiiine inch brackets GEOOOOOMETRY
then you spread the entrails slightly and stab towards the sky. Really don’t see what the big fuss is all about.
My former colleague and I both decided on the same template for our dissertation, but hers looked wonky with the default margins. Sacrificing that lamb to have slightly tighter margins was worth it, even if the eldritch ramblings keep me awake at night.
A long while ago, I used to use kdissert (now semantik) to make all my white papers, from mind map to document, generating latex out, fine tune, and just gorgeous.
Then I was forced to put them in word and hand it off to our graphics design people to put it into InDesign.
I think I’m going to try semantik for more than mind maps again.
Question sheets in Word - “Hello, and welcome to indent roulette”
Question sheets in LaTeX - “\item{} goes brr”
Not to dunk on word, if I need slightly more flexibility than a native .txt reader, it will do in a pinch. That being said:
Word: Oh, you want a table? Good luck getting your excel sheet to cary everything over properly, and god forbid you change a formula. You want to write it natively in word? Lol no.
Latex: tabularx goes brrrr
Word: Equations? Have fun properly tracking equation numbers and manually formatting your text to center justified every time.
Latex: $ $, \( \), and \begin{equation} go brrrr.
Word: Figures? Hope you anchored everything properly, it would be a shame if your entire document layout got shifted…
Latex: What the fuck is an anchor? top, here, bottom, those are your options. Add an exclamation mark if you’re feeling spicy.
For actuarial sciences is LaTeX or dead, because the specific notation we need only exists on LaTeX.
The only thing I hate is how sometimes a document compiles perfectly fine on one machine only to utterly fail on another. On the two machines were I had this happen I have Texlive installed so that I wouldn’t have to look up missing packages. Maybe this is a version mismatch error? I have no clue.
Also I had an old document I wanted to compile which used a ‘\begin{justifying}’ tag. I can’t get that tag to work anymore and had to replace it with just ‘\justifying’
