Another fun trivia:

The "La" in latex is Leslie Lamport. https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/

The special naming convention is mostly used as a form of elitist gatekeeping; it's a tribal shibboleth. You should be able to figure out whether someone is talking about latex (polymer) or latex (markup) from context, so having a special naming convention is rather pretentious and superfluous. If calling it lay-tek was important, they should've called it laytek. Historically, as I understand it, distinctions between the written and spoken forms of words were used as a form of gatekeeping between elites and commoners. Same goes for arXiv.

The great thing about language is that you can just change things if enough people play along. Call it gif or jif, arxiv or archive, latex or laytek.

> it's pronounced "lay-tek"

Or “lah-tek”, the Wikipedia article doesn’t seem to address which, if either is preferred. And I think Leslie Lamport said that he didn’t want to impose any particular pronunciation.

This is incorrect. In his book on LaTeX, Leslie Lamport specifically says that he does not care how you pronounce it. (See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX#Pronouncing_and_writing_...)

Knuth, on the other hand, has a whole rationale on why it’s pronounced “tech”. (“Your keyboard should become slightly moist”, iirc).

Typst is more minimal and faster in compiling documents, I prefer using it. But it's not in all cases a LaTex replacement. The ecosystem is also larger. I have LaTex documents I struggle to convert.

Typst sure has a lot of good marketeers. LaTeX never needed that.

  > Markdown doesn't have enough features

Typst doesn't (yet) have one of the features that make LaTex stand out: microtypography. See https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/4693

“Pricing”, “Sign Up”

Ah yes, this definitely is the “Modern” approach.

There does seem to be an open source, non-SAAS part, but information about it looks pretty deliberately buried.

I wouldn't say underrated. Literally every single research article in maths and cs, every PhD dissertation and master thesis in these fields too, are written in LaTeX.

Most students, and many researchers use Overleaf nowadays, though.

> I can change my article into a presentation just by changing the document class to "beamer".

Don't you need to insert tons of `frame` environments to get anything worth looking at?

Please nobody actually do this. Good presentation slides have almost zero overlap with the corresponding article since they serve completely different purposes. In my field, seeing beamer slides is a huge red flag for an imminent terrible presentation. Slides are an extremely visual medium, and WYSIWYM is a huge hindrance for designing appealing slides.

> LaTeX is also pretty convenient and powerful ... pandoc's markdown

Have you considered writing pandoc-style Markdown that's converted to TeX for typesetting? If not, have a peek at my text editor:

* https://keenwrite.com/screenshots.html

* https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB-WIt1cZYLm1MMx2FBG9... (see tutorials 4 and 9)

KeenWrite basically transforms Markdown -> X(HT)ML -> TeX -> PDF, although it uses ConTeXt instead of LaTeX for typesetting because ConTeXt makes separating content from presentation a lot easier.

There are many reasons this comparison is not made. I will just touch on one. The target medium is different. For html, you have monitors of different sizes as well as windows that can be resized. For latex, you choose your target at the start: A4 paper? Screen presentation? A0 poster?

With a fixed medium in mind, you can be extremely particular on where on this canvas you want a piece of text/graphic or whatever.

Without a fixed medium, you have to have logic to address the different mediums and compromises have to be made.

Because HTML is not an option. For academic papers you usually have to submit pdfs conforming to either a latex or word template.

Its the same reason that Markdown became popular. I want my document to primarily contain content. Not a sea of handwritten tags.

I don't want to manually type (or read past) HTML tags littered around the place. I don't want to manually put <p> tags on my text, or worry about how indentation will affect my rendered output. (For example, <p>foo</p> and <p> foo </p> render differently).

If I'm writing a blog post, I also don't want my post's text to get mixed up with site specific stuff, like meta tags and layout elements.

Are there any good "literate HTML" type tools which first and foremost let me type text, but still let me break into HTML? That I could get behind.

My own experiment involved writing my CV in YAML, and using a Pandoc template to generate .tex and .pdf. I think I may have overcooked the thing a little, but it was good fun.

I never got into emacs. Is Org worth it?

https://github.com/boerseth/cv

My go-to template collection is from Overleaf: https://www.overleaf.com/gallery/tagged/cv

My cv is an adaptation of one of the templates there: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1woxVNcJ4AmT7dD2WEnYr9BHEEY7...

EDIT: ahahahahaha I just came across this cv: https://www.overleaf.com/latex/templates/resume-slash-cv-tem...