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Comment by exergy

Indeed. I felt he presented a very limited argument, without much of an overreach.

He doesn't say "Never use Latex!". His opinion is that those who are picking it up under the false illusion that latex gets out of there way better than MS Word are doing themselves a disservice. Seems to me to be a fairly uncontroversial opinion. The latex document, especially one that's big, is not trivial to parse and edit. Making sure the 'flow' of the text is right is infinitely easier with WYSIWYG.

He absolutely seems to be OK with people who use latex because they care deeply about the beauty of the resulting document, and himself advocates for a post-writing conversion to latex. Markdown>Pandoc>Latex even. I feel many here are not reading the article in context.

I have an aside of my own to add to the "latex gets document design out of your way" crowd. I can bet any money that the types of people who will fiddle a lot with the typeface settings on MS Word will fiddle with themes/linespacing/monospaced font-du-jour on their text editor too. It has less to do with the writing environment and more to do with personality. I would know since I'm one of those people.

parent exergy 7 years ago

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