Comment by markbao
3 hours ago
Not an academic, but I used LaTeX for years and it doesn’t feel like what future of publishing should use. It’s finicky and takes so much markup to do simple things. A lab manager once told me about a study that people who used MS Word to typeset were more productive, and I can see that…
100% completely agreed. It's not the future, it's the past.
Typst feels more like the future: https://typst.app/
The problem is that so many journals require certain LaTeX templates so Typst often isn't an option at all. It's about network effects, and journals don't want to change their entire toolchain.
Latex is good for equations. And Latex tools produce very nice PDFs, but I wouldn't want to write in Latex generally either.
The main feature that's important is collaborative editing (like online Word or Google Docs). The second one would be a good reference manager.
Agreed. Tex/Latex is very old tech. Error recovery and messages is very bad. Developing new macros in Tex is about as fun as you expect developing in a 70s-era language to be (ie probably similar to cobol and old fortran).
I haven't tried it yet but Typst seems like a promising replacement: https://typst.app/