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If you came here expecting a list of interesting facts about prophylactics, you’ll probably want to be moseying along. This post is, in fact, my opinion on the LaTeX typesetting system. Prepare for heavy bias.

GoodTimeHadByAll by brutal
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1. WYSIWYM—What You See Is What You Mean

   Many people argue that LaTeX is intuitive. It isn’t. Sure, if you stick to a document with a couple of headings, some plain old paragraphs, and maybe some bold text, it’ll look okay. But the moment you dive into figures, tables, or pretty much anything supported by packages, WYSIWYM becomes WYSIWLWYTM—What You See Is What LaTeX Wants You To Mean.

2. LaTeX is easy to learn

   No, it looks as though it’s easy to learn. In reality, you’ll spend countless hours googling for answers to questions no one has seemingly ever asked before, copy-pasting code you can’t make sense of, wondering why a table ended up on the wrong page or why space was added which you didn’t think you’d requested, and asking yourself why you didn’t just use a proper word processor. Also, if you’re going to be writing TeX code, don’t expect to get very far without content assistance from an advanced editor or IDE.

3. Compilation errors are easy to trace

   Everyone makes mistakes, right? So you’d expect LaTeX to spit out error messages which more or less tell you what’s wrong: the package where stuff went haywire, the line on which the error occurred, maybe even a hint towards a fix? Yeah … Most of the time, it’s better not to expect any of that.

4. Computer Modern is an excellent all-purpose font

   Seriously? At most, it’s a good font for testing your stuff out, because if even the default font doesn’t like your document, you might as well give up. Unless you want people to think you wrote the document decades ago, don’t use Computer Modern. Of course, the main reason for sticking with the poor bastard is that switching fonts is a pain in the ass—XeTeX or no XeTeX. For instance, if you include the times package, that’ll change your text font to Times, but it’ll also change your typewriter font to Courier, while keeping Computer Modern as the math font. Yeah, that makes sense. Of course, all you need to do to use Times for math is add the mathptmx package—which brings me to my next point …

5. It’s easy to find a package to meet your needs

   No matter how trivial whatever you’re trying to accomplish may seem, LaTeX probably won’t be able to do it by default. But packages solve that, right? Wrong. Even if the package you want exists, it’ll most likely have an obscure name and throw an absurdly extensive and complex manual at you, because sensible defaults and intuitive commands are unheard of in the LaTeX community.

6. Packages can be mixed indefinitely

   Think twice before you add a new package to your document. Not only will it affect the behavior of the other ones you already had, it might even break compilation altogether. And, once again, don’t expect to be able to make sense of the error messages it spits out. What’s more, each package has its own ideas about margins, fonts and whatnot. Good luck getting them to match.

7. LaTeX is the de facto standard for scientific documents

   No, boring layouts are the de facto standard. You can just as easily do those using a WYSIWYG editor. And by “easily”, I mean you’d better hope someone provides you with a template, because whether you’re using LaTeX or Word, it’s going to be a bitch. The fact of the matter is, no single typesetting system or word processor’s defaults will help you survive in the science community. Of course, any approach has its benefits. For example, if you need to use a lot of math, Word’s formula editor is going to be the root of many a headache, but then, there’s always OpenOffice.org Writer with its LaTeX-like math syntax.

8. Having multiple output formats is a blessing

   It is, but not for LaTeX. If you switch to a different driver, don’t expect your document to come out the same. Included figures will break, packages will complain even if you explicitly configure them to support the driver, and you’ll discover new quirks you didn’t even know your document had. And when you’ve finally managed to work around those, you’ll notice you’ve just created new ones.

9. BibTeX is a great way to manage references

   Give me a fucking break. Never mind the fact that you have to invoke latex three times before your BibTeX-backed document makes sense, but the whole system is retarded. It was a good idea, but like TeX itself, BibTeX has gotten so cluttered that any sense of structure is gone. Anyone who’s had to use a bibliography file with multiple LaTeX documents will agree: in reality, BibTeX’s portability is nonexistent and you end up reformatting your references manually for each document.

10. LaTeX is better than Microsoft Word

    I’m not going to claim Word—or OpenOffice.org Writer, for that matter—is better, but I think it’s seriously moronic to promote LaTeX just because it’s elitist and Free. By the way, that goes for any Open Source product. Anyway, in a real-world scenario, either solution is bound to give you trouble. What I will say, however, is that LaTeX is seriously fucked up and needs to die.