Dario Taraborelli

I'll bite as a LaTeX and Google Docs fetishist. Don't worry, I'm not taking this argument too seriously but if you happen to find some good arguments in there, please do tell!

> Seriously, anyone who believes that making people type this…

Just an introductory argument against it, not going into that. I'm looking for meat. Hmm... meat :)

> I know a number of academic authors who seem to spend considerable amounts of time doing that. I shan’t say that this is worse, but is it really better?

I did that too, but just because I wanted to be geeky. Was it useful? No. Would I have done this in a word processor? No. But the fact that I get to enjoy LaTeX by being geeky gives me a good feeling to return to it and write in it. Sounds like I have a fetish? I do! And not only one ;-)

> When it comes to stopping people from creating documents in purple 28pt Comic Sans, teaching them all to use LaTeX is a lot less efficient than stating that you will refuse to read anything that doesn’t match the style guide.

But LaTeX does have better alignment and justification algorithms. You won't see the difference, unless you're starting to compare it with a word processor [1].

> LaTeX does less to prevent authors from getting on with writing documents than TeX does. But if neither of the two existed, and you had to come up with something, right now, in 2016 – would it really be a markup language?

It depends, I see that people use Markdown for these reasons. And for my resume writing this…

This link got me started in TeX (I was just barely aware of its existence before). http://nitens.org/taraborelli/cvtex

Not a thesis template at all, but great ideas and it sheds some light on how to get decent typography.

On a side note, I think it would be great to have a good WYSIWYG TeX editor for office/basic user level of proficiency. Typesetting does matter, it profoundly impacts reading, which is particularly relevant when you're giving 300+ pages of your hard work for someone else to read. It would be very good for everyone to get decent default typesetting. Unfortunately, our alternatives are:

* Word/typical word processors, which are are horrible at typesetting;

* TeX, which is good, but it's hard for most people and has an aura of complexity (it's code, after all...);

* Publishing software, such as Adobe InDesign, which are indeed great at typesetting, but only if you know what you are doing. This is professional software, which is clearly not aimed at common users.

I have used LaTeX, TeX and ConTeX for years as my only programming language for writing beautiful docs and I think that nowadays there isn't a good alternative if you write technical documents that have math inside.

Today I use XeTeX together with the swiss-knife memoir class and a huge preamble that I have built over the years. XeTeX is modern and lets you write your docs in UTF8 with ease. I have stopped writing a lot of commands by hand cause there are a lot of modern editors out there (TeXShop on the Mac, TeXworks/TeXnicCenter on Windows, Kile and a bunch of others in Linux.)

When you enter the TeX world you cannot go back cause you start to see typographical errors everywhere: wrong kerning, missing ligatures, wrong align in formulas, wrong page dimensions and others. As Don Knuth says: "I can't go to a restaurant and order food because I keep looking at the fonts on the menu."

The beauty of LaTeX (XeLaTeX in this case): http://nitens.org/taraborelli/latex

The hardest part about using LaTeX is getting to the realisation that to replicate InDesign, you might need OpenType support that might not ship by default, as well as needing to run it more than once. Once you have /latexmk.pl [1] and XeTeX [2], you can then achieve amazing results [3] with the right modules and some creativity. It's just not quite as fluid to use as InDesign for graphically-minded people.

1: https://ctan.org/tex-archive/support/latexmk

2: http://nitens.org/taraborelli/TeXOpenType

3: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/1319/showcase-of-beautiful-typography-done-in-tex-friends

The claim that the Word layout engine is as good as TeX's is not correct.

Even for math-free text, TeX does a better job of hyphenating and line-breaking. The TeX algorithm specifically tries have low variability in line-to-line fill density. Word does not care, which can result in a loose line between two tight lines, causing horizontal stripes in a block of text.

For much more, including ligatures, kerning, and transparency, see:

http://nitens.org/taraborelli/latex

My point above is his point #7.

I used Bitstream-Charter [1] for my dissertation. It looks much better than Computer Modern.

My resume is typeset in Linux Libertine [2] which is used in this superlatively beautiful and elegant CV template by Dario Taraborelli [3]. Requires xelatex.

[1] http://www.tug.dk/FontCatalogue/charterbt/

[2] http://www.tug.dk/FontCatalogue/linuxlibertine/

[3] http://nitens.org/taraborelli/cvtex