The thing is, the vast majority of written communications are just fine in Word. And Word is a lot easier to integrate into other workflows than is LaTeX (and this is from someone who's finishing a book on using LaTeX right now). There are plenty of times that I wish for the kind of control that I have in LaTeX when using other platforms, but for just plain writing, I have to confess that Word is far more ergonomic and I haven't opened a LaTeX document to write fiction in for more than twenty years.
How do you feel about Markdown? It sometimes has issues, but generally speaking I feel like Markdown converted to LaTeX looks pretty good, and I think that Markdown is usually fairly pleasant to work with.
Markdown is designed to be simple and minimalist. It works well for the specific set of things it is designed to do, but once you need anything else - images, headers/footers, color, page numbers, and so on - it collapses entirely.
> Markdown is designed to be simple and minimalist.
Fair enough.
> It works well for the specific set of things it is designed to do, but once you need anything else - images,
It's never been particularly hard for me to add images in markdown when rendering with Pandoc. It's fairly easy to add images and adjust their size and whatnot, not 100% what you're referring to.
> headers/footers,
Yeah, I'll give you that one, you gotta muck with the preamble YAML in pandoc to get headers, and that's some irritating LaTeX.
> Color
Also fair, not sure it's possible to have color in Markdown->PDF with Pandoc.
> page numbers,
Page numbers are output by default in Pandoc with Markdown. You can also add an optional Table of Contents if needed. Not sure where that rumor started.
Often you want page numbers so that you can refer to them later in the text (“See Figure 1 on page n.”) I think at one point I knew how to do that in markdown but IIRC it was only an option in pandoc, and 2) it only worked by printing to pdf via LaTeX, and 3) I may have needed to implement it in LaTeX anyway.
“Pandoc lets you achieve X by embedding latex in your markdown file” is a lot different than “markdown supports X”
Page references are an interesting case because they’re very print-dependent. A I've been working on finl, I've thought about the fact that page references don't work well for documents which might be presented electronically.¹ A reference like “on page 32” doesn’t translate to say HTML or ePub. At one point, while I was reading the Rust book, I was excited to see how a page reference was translated into the online version. I quickly went there and they rewrote that sentence to eliminate the page ref.
The other challenge with page references is that they’re at least in theory, a potential source for a loop condition in rendering. We can have a reference to “on page xcix” which will cause the referred to element to move to page c, but then when the output is changed to “on page c” the element moves back to page xcix.²
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1. PDF in a way doesn't count as electronic presentation in that it’s inherently an electronic representation of a print product, things like PDF reflowing notwithstanding.
2. I suspect, but can’t prove, that in LaTeX, this could even happen if a page reference becomes longer, thanks to how LaTeX’s line breaking algorithm works on a paragraph at a whole. When I get to that part of finl, I guess I’ll know for sure whether this is possible, and if so, will work out how to avoid it.
It’s nice for small-context stuff, but it depends on the editor context as well. Hitting cmd-I to turn italics on and off is no more difficult than typing * at the beginning and the end. And then there’s the fact that the verbatim equivalent doesn't provide a way to be able to easily have ` as an in-line verbatim. Word is nice because it’s designed for writing which most text editors are not.
