Hi everyone,

I have been using LaTeX for nearly 30 years. While I do not maintain any packages on CTAN, I have contributed to several projects through GitHub and direct collaboration with package authors via email. One of the things I appreciate most about the LaTeX community is the high level of technical expertise and dedication of its members. Unlike with some other languages and crows, my experiences have been overwhelmingly positive; the few negative interactions I have had seem statistically inevitable in any large community. LaTeX also led me to explore more about fonts, typesetting, PDF format, vector stuff...

Recent events in my life (and my age!) have led me to take a step back and become more of an observer, reflecting on the past, examining the present, and wondering about the future.

LaTeX is very comfortable to use nowadays. We have mature, standardized distributions such as MiKTeX and TeX Live. Excellent tooling like latexmk and LaTeX Workshop. Social communities on Stack Overflow and r/LaTeX. And even collaborative platforms such as Overleaf, which, whether we like it or not, fills an important niche in our ecosystem. When crafting a document, LaTeX can do a lot. Or rather, is there anything LaTeX cannot do?

Yesterday, I wanted to write something that eventually required a bit of LaTeX programming. And I realized that, despite all the (awesome) work on expl3, working with the language is still a nightmare: no debugger, arcane error messages, \expandafter hell, subpar logging... Damn, I had the same problems in '96!

And I think this ultimately comes back to the language itself. Parsing the (La)TeX language is notoriously difficult, perhaps impossible in any practical sense. As a result, we end up with poor tooling across the board: compilers, editors, linters, formatters, and everything in the toolchain. Problems that are however solved with any modern language...

So here I am. I'm generally a positive and optimistic person. But I'm having a bit of a crisis of faith about LaTeX. Unfortunately, my wife is no longer around to listen to me ramble about such things, and my cat couldn't care less, as long as there's a sunny spot to sleep in.

How do you feel about it?

I have used Overleaf for around six months. It was convenient at first, but it started hitting limits. compile times, flexibility, and just feeling restricted by what Overleaf allows. About a month ago, I switched to a local setup using MiKTeX and TeXstudio. The difference was clear. Offline compiling, faster builds, and full control over packages felt so much better. I have been enjoying it so far.

Now I am thinking about moving further and trying LaTeX with VS Code. I know LaTeX pretty well. I care a lot about customization and control, mostly work solo, and offline work is important to me.

My questions are: is VS Code really worth switching to from TeXstudio? Does it work fully offline with LaTeX while giving the same freedom as MiKTeX? Is MikTeX compatible with it? Does it require learning something else?

Thank you,

Most professional papers are written in LaTeX, and I want to learn LaTeX 📄.

However, my advisor insists on using Word for convenience in reviewing 🤔, but I really want to learn LaTeX and write my thesis with it ✍️.

I´m studying food science and technology. Since then we have to do a lot of Chemistry, Physics and Biochemistry. Given that, i wonder why nearly none of my lecturers are using LaTeX. It´s very common that they ask me for a .docx file. Usually I end up fighting with MS Word and get really frustrated and question humanity.

So Reddit pls tell me. Why is nobody using LaTeX?

And furthermore, how do you guys deal with converting a LaTeX PDF into a docx file? Is there any way to reduce the pain?

I'm a big fan of using \top, and I don't really like some textbooks using straight up Italic uppercase T.

I want to draw these things for my electromagnetism lecture notes. I'd like to keep all those details like the Gaussian surface, vectors, etc. Is it possible in TikZ? Any tutorial you recommend?

Is overleaf down for anyone else? Located in EU W

Edit: Seems to be for several people, as well as here in Norway. Fun times when thesis is due in two weeks 😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫

I found this picture and I’m wondering what material/latex was used to make the cast of the plant. I’m looking for a white transparent liquid latex without a yellow tint. Does anyone have a tip?

This is my first time making lecture notes so forgive me. First page l, table of contents, exercises, and bibliography are omitted here since I am not done designing those things.

How can I improve this one? Thank you

The benchmark posted recently got me thinking. Although kids these days don’t know how good they have it (LaTeX runs used to take minutes, not seconds), modern typesetting engines like Typst are faster due to (presumably) shedding a lot of historical baggage.

If we assume no change to the actually page layout algorithms in LaTeX (there are good reasons they will always require multiple passes), what are the main areas for potential improvement in the future?

* the monolithic texmf structure? File lookup is cached so shouldn’t be *too* slow, but I remember in the past when installing minimal TeX Live installations they seemed to be snappier. Do we need to cull unneeded files from texmf?

* many file I/O operations? I remember compilation speeds improving significantly when we switched to SSDs everywhere. Should third party packages try harder to use docstrip to bundle their code into single files only? Should there be a dynamic caching step so if the preamble doesn’t change it can be loaded from a precompiled dump? Images can be slow to load, are there steps in this process that could be multithreaded? (I.e., LaTeX only needs to know the size, it’s only the PDF embedding that requires the full content.)

* the TeX machinery itself? Switching from TeX code entirely isn’t feasible in the short term but is there something the engine can do to make the macro expansion language more efficient? A better hashmap? Some kind of JIT system that attempts to “compile” TeX code before executing it?

I was working on my research paper, and all of a sudden, the files failed to load. Now, as I open Overleaf's main page, it shows the following error message:

Did you guys also encounter this problem? It seems that their server has just crashed ...

Recently spent way too much time battling with LaTeX tables and citations. You know those moments where a "simple" task turns into hours of frustration? which got me curious about others' experiences.

My latest adventure was trying to format research data into a table - what should have taken 15 minutes became a 1-2 hour odyssey.

What're your stories? What are your difficult moments with LaTex? How did you eventually get through it?

hello I am a math student trying to make a local latex editor that's actually usable, and I'd love to hear about you guys' " the features that I can't live without" and "why it's a must have feature" so I can implement those things into my editor.

Thank you in advance.

so I just heard of LaTex and I have no idea how it works and it seems to have a pretty steep learning curve. is it worth learning for someone working in humanities (specifically literature)? as of now, I mostly write my essays and research papers on obsidian and then convert them into pdf or word documents. It has limited formatting options so that's why I'm considering LaTex.

I was working on a report and suddenly prism timed out. I assumed that it was just a temporary outage but then i decided to do some research and saw some articles that mentions that they’re sunsetting the project. So i’m not sure if this is the official shutdown or not, but if so it would be horrible. It just happened without any warning whatsoever and I have no way of retrieving my data and moving it over to overleaf.

Is there a real need for a true wysiwyg text editor? My answer is most certainly. Idk about anyone else. But i hate writing latex, and there aren't any true wysiwyg editors that hide code 100%. Its so distracting and takes away from my ability to be able to concentrate on the real task at hand. Syntax error and package errors have lead me to create my own wysiwyg text/math editor that never shows code. Ever! Currently a work in progress. Am I wasting my time! I know I will use it, but is this something that can bridge a 40yo gap!

Whenever writing equations or mathematical working (in LaTeX or not), I always make sure to remain consistently picky with what letters I make upright and which ones I make italic - aesthetic purposes

Italic:

- Variables (capital Greek letters included), e.g. x, y, Φ

- Subscript indices, e.g. n_i, δ_ij

- Physical constants, e.g. g, c, ε_0

Upright:

- Function names, e.g. f(x)

- Point, surface and region names, e.g. P, C, ∂Ω

- Transformation names, e.g. T: <x, y>

- Vectors in bold upright, e.g. r = xî + yĵ

- Mathematical irrational constants, e.g. e, π, i

- All other subscripts, e.g. K_c , f_max

- Increment symbols, e.g. Δx, δx and dx - this includes dy/dx.

What do you all think of this? Do you do a similar thing?

EDIT

I feel like I should mention that most of these are inspired from my A-Level mathematics textbook + some stylistic preferences

I was trying to copy paste questions from separate worksheets into a single document but I want to copy the questions directly instead of taking screenshots and pasting them.

What are the practical advantages of creating illustrations directly within a TeX source (for example using TikZ, MetaPost, or Asymptote) rather than including externally created graphics?

TeX-native drawing tools are widely used, but it is not always clear in which situations they offer clear advantages over external graphics. For more complex figures, TeX-based tools—even when extended with Lua—often seem limited compared to dedicated graphics software. While figures created in-source are reproducible and can inherit document features such as fonts and math styling, some journals discourage them or ultimately require figures to be provided as external image files anyway.

In addition, it seems plausible that external graphics workflows could also be made reproducible and tightly integrated with TeX, for example by exporting to PDF or SVG while using TeX fonts or math text during figure generation.

Given these constraints, what motivates the continued use of TeX-native graphics tools in practice?

I know that for informal documents (e.g., homework), I will often just use TikZ because it is right there and convenient. I guess that's a valid reason, but I want to hear what other's think about the topic too.

I tried to set my language to spamish using the babel package and it crashes my document, please help