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I once did everything in latex, from CV to papers to an entire book, but it is definitely a PITA writing-flow-disruptor unless you’re doing uninterrupted pages of math. I now author 99% directly in web editors. Still, latex remains the most comprehensive tool I know how to use.
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Sorry for bad news, economists: “our results suggest that LaTeX reduces the user’s productivity and results in more orthographical, grammatical, and formatting errors, more typos, and less written text than Microsoft Word over the same duration of time.” journals.plos.org/plosone/articl
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I wanted to say… I stopped using latex when I stopped needing to typeset math regularly, but it’s probably more true to say I stopped doing math when I stopped using latex regularly. Latex makes math a pleasure due to sheer beauty of rendered equations.
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More than once I managed to solve a problem in latex that I couldn’t on paper. Especially with matrices and vectors and series with lots of superscripts/subscripts, something about typesetting actually accelerates insight. Forces symbol-use discipline, visual symmetry etc.
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I’m still surprised in the apparent lack of research (that has turned into usable product) in math authoring. Feels like I could have saved a lot of time drawing eqns on an iPad/iPhone. I guess software/design-y people don’t intersect with LaTeX users much. But ML people do.
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People used to hate on Microsoft word equation editor but I a,ways thought it did a good job of a visual UI. The rendering was weak though. It’s hard because specifying an equation has the precision of code syntax. Won’t render right if it doesn’t parse correctly.
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One of my PIs reported having extended and productive working conversations in spoken LaTeX with a vision-impaired student.