{"slug": "latex", "name": "LaTeX", "category": "other", "category_name": "Other software", "description": "Document preparation and typesetting system built on TeX, widely used for technical and scientific writing.", "recommenders": 8, "commenters": 22, "warners": 4, "score": 5.968, "rising": 0.04, "first": "2025-11-15", "latest": "2026-09-25", "why": "Valued for high-quality typesetting of math and PDFs, where it remains the de facto standard in academia, and for plain-text sources that suit version control and LLM assistance.", "why_is_quote": false, "has_verdict": true, "sentiment": {"recommend": 8, "neutral": 7, "compare": 4, "warn": 4}, "spark": [0, 0, 1, 1, 3, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0], "listed": true, "loved": ["Typesetting quality", "Academic standard"], "caveat": "Finicky and brittle", "short_quote": "Good stuff, highly recommend a LaTeX resume, whether or not you drink coffee.", "icon": true, "domain": null, "github_repo": null, "official_url": "https://www.latex-project.org/", "pricing": "open source", "aliases": ["LaTeX"], "verdict": [{"text": "Valued for high-quality typesetting of math and PDFs,", "cites": [{"id": 795256896, "item_id": 49703556, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49703556", "by": "emil-lp", "date": "2026-09-14", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "There simply is no contender to LaTeX and PDFs.", "excerpt": "As a researcher in theoretical computer science, I love PDFs more than any other format when it comes to mathematics. There simply is no contender to LaTeX and PDFs. Lucky for you, almost all research in math, cs, and physics, are put on arxiv, where you can download the source code (.tex) as well as get an HTML render.", "context": "researcher in theoretical computer science", "use_case": "mathematical papers", "switched_from": "", "story": "A beginning for mathematics"}, {"id": 756359520, "item_id": 47272470, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47272470", "by": "kkfx", "date": "2026-03-06", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Personally I use LaTeX for anything I have to write as pdf", "excerpt": "Personally I use LaTeX for anything I have to write as pdf, I understand many critics but... So far is The Tool to makes good typesetting. PostScript can do nearly the same at a harder effort for the user, Typist can't match, others are just LaTeX wrappers or can't deliver anything decent. The problem is that today we have a massive gap in development: there was a time when high-quality FLOSS development existed, fol", "context": "", "use_case": "typesetting PDFs", "switched_from": "", "story": "TeX Live 2026 is available for download now"}, {"id": 735075521, "item_id": 45942220, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45942220", "by": "tombert", "date": "2025-11-15", "stance": "compare", "quote": "LaTeX has been the industry standard for the mathematical world for decades", "excerpt": "I use Typst a lot now (which this reminds me of), and the equation support is generally very good, but the thing that gives me pause is that I'm afraid that there's going to be something missing, or worse than the LaTeX equivalent. LaTeX has been the industry standard for the mathematical world for decades and as a result it has had the most work adding new notation or making nicer formatting. For example, I needed t", "context": "", "use_case": "math typesetting", "switched_from": "", "story": "AsciiMath"}]}, {"text": " where it remains the de facto standard in academia,", "cites": [{"id": 744436337, "item_id": 46527271, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46527271", "by": "spudlyo", "date": "2026-01-07", "stance": "compare", "quote": "if only LaTeX wasn't the de-facto standard in academia and stain-related journals, they would have already switched to it.", "excerpt": "I'm surprised nobody has yet mentioned how pleasant it is to create coffee stains using Typst, and if only LaTeX wasn't the de-facto standard in academia and stain-related journals, they would have already switched to it. Of course, you can create coffee stains in HTML as well, but it's not something you can do in Markdown.", "context": "", "use_case": "typesetting", "switched_from": "", "story": "LaTeX Coffee Stains [pdf]"}, {"id": 735075521, "item_id": 45942220, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45942220", "by": "tombert", "date": "2025-11-15", "stance": "compare", "quote": "LaTeX has been the industry standard for the mathematical world for decades", "excerpt": "I use Typst a lot now (which this reminds me of), and the equation support is generally very good, but the thing that gives me pause is that I'm afraid that there's going to be something missing, or worse than the LaTeX equivalent. LaTeX has been the industry standard for the mathematical world for decades and as a result it has had the most work adding new notation or making nicer formatting. For example, I needed t", "context": "", "use_case": "math typesetting", "switched_from": "", "story": "AsciiMath"}]}, {"text": " and for plain-text sources that suit version control and LLM assistance.", "cites": [{"id": 744587024, "item_id": 46536689, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46536689", "by": "Vicinity9635", "date": "2026-01-07", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Good stuff, highly recommend a LaTeX resume, whether or not you drink coffee.", "excerpt": "Love this. My resume has been in LaTeX for over 20 years now. Underappreciated IMHO. You can version control it, no dealing with wild Word shenanigans. Totally deterministic. Just find a style, insert your bullets and you have a nice sharable PDF. Nowadays you can even have your preferred LLM do the conversion for you. LaTeX is finicky and I've had it fix warnings in mine that I couldn't be bothered to. Good stuff, h", "context": "resume in LaTeX for over 20 years", "use_case": "resume typesetting", "switched_from": "", "story": "LaTeX Coffee Stains [pdf]"}, {"id": 754566833, "item_id": 47160427, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47160427", "by": "dirk94018", "date": "2026-02-25", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "However, I use LaTeX regularly.", "excerpt": "TexMacs is great. However, I use LaTeX regularly. Used to keep a cheat sheet of commands I'd forget between documents. Today I can describe what I want in plain English, pipe it through toast, and get the LaTeX back. LaTeX, vim, sed, awk, the whole Unix toolkit is getting a new lease on life, because their interfaces are text. Text in, text out. An LLM can write you a perfect \\begin{tikzpicture} on the first try. Cli", "context": "", "use_case": "document typesetting", "switched_from": "", "story": "GNU Texmacs"}, {"id": 761038178, "item_id": 47564886, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47564886", "by": "Unbeliever69", "date": "2026-03-29", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "using the LaTeX API plus its plugin ecosystem, and the result was far beyond anything I could have realistically produced through Docs", "excerpt": "In a recent Claude Code session I tried using the Google Docs, Drive, and Sheets MCP and was honestly surprised at how limited it felt. It was hard to get anything meaningful done because it just did not expose enough capability to be useful in practice. In hindsight, that frustration was probably a good thing. I ended up skipping MCP entirely and using the LaTeX API plus its plugin ecosystem, and the result was far ", "context": "", "use_case": "document generation", "switched_from": "Google Docs MCP", "story": "Figma's MCP Update Reflects a Larger Industry Shift"}]}, {"text": " The most common complaint is that it is finicky and brittle, with heavy markup, cryptic errors and weak Unicode support,", "cites": [{"id": 748573664, "item_id": 46785854, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46785854", "by": "markbao", "date": "2026-01-27", "stance": "warn", "quote": "It\u2019s finicky and takes so much markup to do simple things.", "excerpt": "Not an academic, but I used LaTeX for years and it doesn\u2019t feel like what future of publishing should use. It\u2019s 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\u2026", "context": "not an academic, used LaTeX for years", "use_case": "typesetting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Prism"}, {"id": 768791281, "item_id": 48049455, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48049455", "by": "Hendrikto", "date": "2026-05-07", "stance": "compare", "quote": "LaTeX is great, don\u2019t get me wrong. But its heritage and historical baggage is really dragging it down.", "excerpt": "I used LaTeX for approximately 10 years, for little things to relatively complex, including my bachelor\u2019s and master\u2019s theses. It never felt natural at reliable or consistent. Every customization required weird \\makeatletter \\makeatother hacks and was very brittle. Everything seemed more complicated than necessary and hard to grok, with weird interdependencies and interactions. There are probably good reasons for all", "context": "used LaTeX ~10 years including theses", "use_case": "document typesetting", "switched_from": "", "story": "RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust"}, {"id": 776216785, "item_id": 48513549, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48513549", "by": "xvilka", "date": "2026-06-12", "stance": "warn", "quote": "cryptic error messages, complex pipeline, lack of the proper Unicode symbols support out of the box", "excerpt": "I have been using TeX/LaTeX for ages and today same issues hinder the user experience like multiple decades ago - cryptic error messages, complex pipeline, lack of the proper Unicode symbols support out of the box, and so on. Nowadays, with Typst existing, it's vital for TeX ecosystem to solve these issues, since none of them are present in Typst. Projects like Tectonic would solve this for TeX, but they lack enough ", "context": "long-time TeX/LaTeX user", "use_case": "document typesetting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Tectonic: A modernized, complete, self-contained TeX/LaTeX engine"}, {"id": 776262449, "item_id": 48516403, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48516403", "by": "CJefferson", "date": "2026-06-13", "stance": "warn", "quote": "just always having broken output as I use more unicode (maths symbols, emojis) in my documents.", "excerpt": "I'd much prefer bad looking unicode characters to just skipping them and having broken output honestly. This is currently the main reason I'm considering moving from LaTeX to typst -- just always having broken output as I use more unicode (maths symbols, emojis) in my documents.", "context": "", "use_case": "documents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Tectonic: A modernized, complete, self-contained TeX/LaTeX engine"}]}, {"text": " pushing some users toward Typst.", "cites": [{"id": 776262449, "item_id": 48516403, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48516403", "by": "CJefferson", "date": "2026-06-13", "stance": "warn", "quote": "just always having broken output as I use more unicode (maths symbols, emojis) in my documents.", "excerpt": "I'd much prefer bad looking unicode characters to just skipping them and having broken output honestly. This is currently the main reason I'm considering moving from LaTeX to typst -- just always having broken output as I use more unicode (maths symbols, emojis) in my documents.", "context": "", "use_case": "documents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Tectonic: A modernized, complete, self-contained TeX/LaTeX engine"}, {"id": 776216785, "item_id": 48513549, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48513549", "by": "xvilka", "date": "2026-06-12", "stance": "warn", "quote": "cryptic error messages, complex pipeline, lack of the proper Unicode symbols support out of the box", "excerpt": "I have been using TeX/LaTeX for ages and today same issues hinder the user experience like multiple decades ago - cryptic error messages, complex pipeline, lack of the proper Unicode symbols support out of the box, and so on. Nowadays, with Typst existing, it's vital for TeX ecosystem to solve these issues, since none of them are present in Typst. Projects like Tectonic would solve this for TeX, but they lack enough ", "context": "long-time TeX/LaTeX user", "use_case": "document typesetting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Tectonic: A modernized, complete, self-contained TeX/LaTeX engine"}, {"id": 797559426, "item_id": 49847464, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49847464", "by": "dwrodri", "date": "2026-09-25", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "As someone who used LaTeX heavily in grad school", "excerpt": "As someone who used LaTeX heavily in grad school, using Typst in VSCode to create bespoke invites to an event was quite nice! Would highly recommend giving it a spin.", "context": "", "use_case": "typesetting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Typst makes big strides"}]}], "praise": [{"label": "Typesetting quality", "summary": "Commenters see it as the strongest tool for well-typeset PDFs, especially mathematics.", "quotes": [{"id": 795256896, "item_id": 49703556, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49703556", "by": "emil-lp", "date": "2026-09-14", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "There simply is no contender to LaTeX and PDFs.", "excerpt": "As a researcher in theoretical computer science, I love PDFs more than any other format when it comes to mathematics. There simply is no contender to LaTeX and PDFs. Lucky for you, almost all research in math, cs, and physics, are put on arxiv, where you can download the source code (.tex) as well as get an HTML render.", "context": "researcher in theoretical computer science", "use_case": "mathematical papers", "switched_from": "", "story": "A beginning for mathematics"}, {"id": 756359520, "item_id": 47272470, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47272470", "by": "kkfx", "date": "2026-03-06", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Personally I use LaTeX for anything I have to write as pdf", "excerpt": "Personally I use LaTeX for anything I have to write as pdf, I understand many critics but... So far is The Tool to makes good typesetting. PostScript can do nearly the same at a harder effort for the user, Typist can't match, others are just LaTeX wrappers or can't deliver anything decent. The problem is that today we have a massive gap in development: there was a time when high-quality FLOSS development existed, fol", "context": "", "use_case": "typesetting PDFs", "switched_from": "", "story": "TeX Live 2026 is available for download now"}, {"id": 756569969, "item_id": 47285623, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47285623", "by": "gucci-on-fleek", "date": "2026-03-07", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I personally think that LaTeX is the best choice for typical users", "excerpt": "> I get that it can't handle LaTeX, that's literally my entire point. It's no wonder it goes unmentioned in TeX threads. LaTeX != TeX. If this were a LaTeX thread, then I would agree with your point that it would make less sense to bring up ConTeXt (although someone always mentions Typst in every LaTeX thread, which is essentially the same thing). But this is a thread about TeX Live, which includes ConTeXt (and a doz", "context": "Linux user", "use_case": "document typesetting", "switched_from": "", "story": "TeX Live 2026 is available for download now"}]}, {"label": "Academic standard", "summary": "Decades as the de facto standard in math and academia have given it the widest notation and package coverage.", "quotes": [{"id": 735075521, "item_id": 45942220, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45942220", "by": "tombert", "date": "2025-11-15", "stance": "compare", "quote": "LaTeX has been the industry standard for the mathematical world for decades", "excerpt": "I use Typst a lot now (which this reminds me of), and the equation support is generally very good, but the thing that gives me pause is that I'm afraid that there's going to be something missing, or worse than the LaTeX equivalent. LaTeX has been the industry standard for the mathematical world for decades and as a result it has had the most work adding new notation or making nicer formatting. For example, I needed t", "context": "", "use_case": "math typesetting", "switched_from": "", "story": "AsciiMath"}, {"id": 744436337, "item_id": 46527271, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46527271", "by": "spudlyo", "date": "2026-01-07", "stance": "compare", "quote": "if only LaTeX wasn't the de-facto standard in academia and stain-related journals, they would have already switched to it.", "excerpt": "I'm surprised nobody has yet mentioned how pleasant it is to create coffee stains using Typst, and if only LaTeX wasn't the de-facto standard in academia and stain-related journals, they would have already switched to it. Of course, you can create coffee stains in HTML as well, but it's not something you can do in Markdown.", "context": "", "use_case": "typesetting", "switched_from": "", "story": "LaTeX Coffee Stains [pdf]"}]}, {"label": "Text-based workflow", "summary": "Plain-text sources let LLMs write and fix LaTeX, and its plugin ecosystem goes beyond GUI tools.", "quotes": [{"id": 754566833, "item_id": 47160427, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47160427", "by": "dirk94018", "date": "2026-02-25", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "However, I use LaTeX regularly.", "excerpt": "TexMacs is great. However, I use LaTeX regularly. Used to keep a cheat sheet of commands I'd forget between documents. Today I can describe what I want in plain English, pipe it through toast, and get the LaTeX back. LaTeX, vim, sed, awk, the whole Unix toolkit is getting a new lease on life, because their interfaces are text. Text in, text out. An LLM can write you a perfect \\begin{tikzpicture} on the first try. Cli", "context": "", "use_case": "document typesetting", "switched_from": "", "story": "GNU Texmacs"}, {"id": 761038178, "item_id": 47564886, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47564886", "by": "Unbeliever69", "date": "2026-03-29", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "using the LaTeX API plus its plugin ecosystem, and the result was far beyond anything I could have realistically produced through Docs", "excerpt": "In a recent Claude Code session I tried using the Google Docs, Drive, and Sheets MCP and was honestly surprised at how limited it felt. It was hard to get anything meaningful done because it just did not expose enough capability to be useful in practice. In hindsight, that frustration was probably a good thing. I ended up skipping MCP entirely and using the LaTeX API plus its plugin ecosystem, and the result was far ", "context": "", "use_case": "document generation", "switched_from": "Google Docs MCP", "story": "Figma's MCP Update Reflects a Larger Industry Shift"}, {"id": 744587024, "item_id": 46536689, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46536689", "by": "Vicinity9635", "date": "2026-01-07", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Good stuff, highly recommend a LaTeX resume, whether or not you drink coffee.", "excerpt": "Love this. My resume has been in LaTeX for over 20 years now. Underappreciated IMHO. You can version control it, no dealing with wild Word shenanigans. Totally deterministic. Just find a style, insert your bullets and you have a nice sharable PDF. Nowadays you can even have your preferred LLM do the conversion for you. LaTeX is finicky and I've had it fix warnings in mine that I couldn't be bothered to. Good stuff, h", "context": "resume in LaTeX for over 20 years", "use_case": "resume typesetting", "switched_from": "", "story": "LaTeX Coffee Stains [pdf]"}]}, {"label": "Resumes and CVs", "summary": "Users keep resumes in LaTeX for version control and deterministic output.", "quotes": [{"id": 744587024, "item_id": 46536689, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46536689", "by": "Vicinity9635", "date": "2026-01-07", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Good stuff, highly recommend a LaTeX resume, whether or not you drink coffee.", "excerpt": "Love this. My resume has been in LaTeX for over 20 years now. Underappreciated IMHO. You can version control it, no dealing with wild Word shenanigans. Totally deterministic. Just find a style, insert your bullets and you have a nice sharable PDF. Nowadays you can even have your preferred LLM do the conversion for you. LaTeX is finicky and I've had it fix warnings in mine that I couldn't be bothered to. Good stuff, h", "context": "resume in LaTeX for over 20 years", "use_case": "resume typesetting", "switched_from": "", "story": "LaTeX Coffee Stains [pdf]"}, {"id": 777527072, "item_id": 48595442, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48595442", "by": "hdgvhicv", "date": "2026-06-18", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I used latex on occasion for about a decade after graduation", "excerpt": "I used latex on occasion for about a decade after graduation, but now it\u2019s only my CV I use, and I\u2019m getting rusty. Markdown is far more covienient. Never used Tex specifically.", "context": "", "use_case": "CV", "switched_from": "", "story": "Microsoft new Outlook takes 10 seconds to do what Outlook Classic does instantly"}, {"id": 796310912, "item_id": 49769432, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49769432", "by": "tombert", "date": "2026-09-19", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "they could point Claude to the LaTeX source and get it in any format they want.", "excerpt": "I don't agree with you being mass-downvoted, since you're just espousing your opinion, even if it's one I don't agree with. That said, I think we're at a fundamental disagreement here; the recruiters would screw up the formatting in a way that would make the resume say things that are flatly untrue. It's not just aesthetic. For example, I used to put the amount of experience I had in different technologies, and becau", "context": "", "use_case": "writing resume", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Microsoft Office running with Wine on Linux with no virtualization"}]}, {"label": "Non-Latin scripts", "summary": "One user still uses it for typesetting Greek, Arabic or Hebrew text.", "quotes": [{"id": 776745841, "item_id": 48546615, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48546615", "by": "applicative", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I use latex when what I am typesetting uses greek, arabic or hebrew text", "excerpt": "Latex is in no sense required by pandoc and never has been, not ten years ago, not twenty years ago. Everything you are writing is deep conceptual confusion from top to bottom. You might as well say it has required Microsoft Word since the docx readers and writers came out. Latex is a typical route to produce pdfs according to your specification, but typst is what I use; occasionally groff. I use latex when what I am", "context": "", "use_case": "non-Latin script documents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Typst 0.15.0"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "Finicky and brittle", "summary": "Long-time users find customization hacky and simple tasks needlessly hard.", "quotes": [{"id": 768791281, "item_id": 48049455, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48049455", "by": "Hendrikto", "date": "2026-05-07", "stance": "compare", "quote": "LaTeX is great, don\u2019t get me wrong. But its heritage and historical baggage is really dragging it down.", "excerpt": "I used LaTeX for approximately 10 years, for little things to relatively complex, including my bachelor\u2019s and master\u2019s theses. It never felt natural at reliable or consistent. Every customization required weird \\makeatletter \\makeatother hacks and was very brittle. Everything seemed more complicated than necessary and hard to grok, with weird interdependencies and interactions. There are probably good reasons for all", "context": "used LaTeX ~10 years including theses", "use_case": "document typesetting", "switched_from": "", "story": "RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust"}, {"id": 748573664, "item_id": 46785854, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46785854", "by": "markbao", "date": "2026-01-27", "stance": "warn", "quote": "It\u2019s finicky and takes so much markup to do simple things.", "excerpt": "Not an academic, but I used LaTeX for years and it doesn\u2019t feel like what future of publishing should use. It\u2019s 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\u2026", "context": "not an academic, used LaTeX for years", "use_case": "typesetting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Prism"}, {"id": 748571249, "item_id": 46785703, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46785703", "by": "elashri", "date": "2026-01-27", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I have been using LaTeX for years before but it was not any easy.", "excerpt": "That's is probably one good usage of LLMs. LaTeX was a relief to deal with after using LLM. I have been using LaTeX for years before but it was not any easy. Aside of making LLM write the text, it is very good grammar and typo checker. Even on overleaf and browser default spell checker, my Thesis feedback contained a few typos from my Advisor each time I sent him for review. BTW: Overleaf added LLM integration which ", "context": "wrote a thesis", "use_case": "thesis writing", "switched_from": "", "story": "Prism"}]}, {"label": "Unicode support", "summary": "Math symbols and emoji can produce broken output without proper Unicode support out of the box.", "quotes": [{"id": 776262449, "item_id": 48516403, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48516403", "by": "CJefferson", "date": "2026-06-13", "stance": "warn", "quote": "just always having broken output as I use more unicode (maths symbols, emojis) in my documents.", "excerpt": "I'd much prefer bad looking unicode characters to just skipping them and having broken output honestly. This is currently the main reason I'm considering moving from LaTeX to typst -- just always having broken output as I use more unicode (maths symbols, emojis) in my documents.", "context": "", "use_case": "documents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Tectonic: A modernized, complete, self-contained TeX/LaTeX engine"}, {"id": 776216785, "item_id": 48513549, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48513549", "by": "xvilka", "date": "2026-06-12", "stance": "warn", "quote": "cryptic error messages, complex pipeline, lack of the proper Unicode symbols support out of the box", "excerpt": "I have been using TeX/LaTeX for ages and today same issues hinder the user experience like multiple decades ago - cryptic error messages, complex pipeline, lack of the proper Unicode symbols support out of the box, and so on. Nowadays, with Typst existing, it's vital for TeX ecosystem to solve these issues, since none of them are present in Typst. Projects like Tectonic would solve this for TeX, but they lack enough ", "context": "long-time TeX/LaTeX user", "use_case": "document typesetting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Tectonic: A modernized, complete, self-contained TeX/LaTeX engine"}]}, {"label": "Cryptic errors", "summary": "Error messages and the build pipeline remain confusing after decades.", "quotes": [{"id": 776216785, "item_id": 48513549, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48513549", "by": "xvilka", "date": "2026-06-12", "stance": "warn", "quote": "cryptic error messages, complex pipeline, lack of the proper Unicode symbols support out of the box", "excerpt": "I have been using TeX/LaTeX for ages and today same issues hinder the user experience like multiple decades ago - cryptic error messages, complex pipeline, lack of the proper Unicode symbols support out of the box, and so on. Nowadays, with Typst existing, it's vital for TeX ecosystem to solve these issues, since none of them are present in Typst. Projects like Tectonic would solve this for TeX, but they lack enough ", "context": "long-time TeX/LaTeX user", "use_case": "document typesetting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Tectonic: A modernized, complete, self-contained TeX/LaTeX engine"}]}, {"label": "Boilerplate markup", "summary": "Writing requires a lot of boilerplate and markup for simple things.", "quotes": [{"id": 754565154, "item_id": 47160322, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47160322", "by": "aatayev", "date": "2026-02-25", "stance": "compare", "quote": "I find that there is a somewhat large boiler plate component when writing with LaTeX", "excerpt": "I love this tool and even wrote my PhD thesis with it. I find that there is a somewhat large boiler plate component when writing with LaTeX, but with TeXmacs, writing maths just feels easy. It\u2019s easy to set up, and easy to use. Nowadays I find myself using the Mogan fork as I find it\u2019s a little more stable. But again, awesome project and would highly recommend people to use, not just as a math writing tool, but simpl", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "GNU Texmacs"}, {"id": 748573664, "item_id": 46785854, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46785854", "by": "markbao", "date": "2026-01-27", "stance": "warn", "quote": "It\u2019s finicky and takes so much markup to do simple things.", "excerpt": "Not an academic, but I used LaTeX for years and it doesn\u2019t feel like what future of publishing should use. It\u2019s 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\u2026", "context": "not an academic, used LaTeX for years", "use_case": "typesetting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Prism"}]}, {"label": "Paged PDF focus", "summary": "A daily user dislikes its focus on paged PDF output over web-native HTML.", "quotes": [{"id": 779146384, "item_id": 48696649, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48696649", "by": "jampekka", "date": "2026-06-27", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I use LaTeX daily and hate it with a passion.", "excerpt": "I use LaTeX daily and hate it with a passion. I kinda lost all hope when ArXiv decided to do the HTML support by hacking a LaTeX to HTML conversion. We already have a very powerful layouting engine: the web browser. The only missing piece is printing/pagination, for which there was some CSS Paged Media progress, but that stalled. However, why the hell are we even doing paged media? For screen viewing it's strictly wo", "context": "daily LaTeX user", "use_case": "document typesetting", "switched_from": "", "story": "LaTeX.wasm: LaTeX Engines in Browsers"}]}], "who": [{"by": "emil-lp", "context": "researcher in theoretical computer science", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49703556", "date": "2026-09-14"}, {"by": "gucci-on-fleek", "context": "Linux user", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47285623", "date": "2026-03-07"}, {"by": "elashri", "context": "wrote a thesis", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46785703", "date": "2026-01-27"}, {"by": "Vicinity9635", "context": "resume in LaTeX for over 20 years", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46536689", "date": "2026-01-07"}], "tags": ["for academic papers", "for math typesetting", "for resumes", "for multilingual text"], "use_cases": ["document typesetting", "typesetting", "writing resume", "mathematical papers", "equations", "publishing books"], "compared": [{"slug": "typst", "name": "Typst", "co": 28, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 9}, {"slug": "pandoc", "name": "Pandoc", "co": 6, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "libreoffice", "name": "LibreOffice", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 1}, {"slug": "visual-studio-code", "name": "Visual Studio Code", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "awk", "name": "awk", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "quarkdown", "name": "Quarkdown", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48467697", "title": "Tectonic: A modernized, complete, self-contained TeX/LaTeX engine", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47271187", "title": "TeX Live 2026 is available for download now", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47152982", "title": "GNU Texmacs", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46783752", "title": "Prism", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46526933", "title": "LaTeX Coffee Stains [pdf]", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49846640", "title": "Typst makes big strides", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {"compare": 1}, "2025-12": {}, "2026-01": {"compare": 1, "recommend": 1, "neutral": 2, "warn": 1}, "2026-02": {"compare": 1, "recommend": 1}, "2026-03": {"recommend": 3}, "2026-04": {}, "2026-05": {"compare": 1}, "2026-06": {"warn": 3, "neutral": 3}, "2026-07": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-08": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-09": {"recommend": 1, "neutral": 2}, "2026-10": {}}, "quotes": [{"id": 797559426, "item_id": 49847464, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49847464", "by": "dwrodri", "date": "2026-09-25", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "As someone who used LaTeX heavily in grad school", "excerpt": "As someone who used LaTeX heavily in grad school, using Typst in VSCode to create bespoke invites to an event was quite nice! Would highly recommend giving it a spin.", "context": "", "use_case": "typesetting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Typst makes big strides"}, {"id": 796310912, "item_id": 49769432, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49769432", "by": "tombert", "date": "2026-09-19", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "they could point Claude to the LaTeX source and get it in any format they want.", "excerpt": "I don't agree with you being mass-downvoted, since you're just espousing your opinion, even if it's one I don't agree with. That said, I think we're at a fundamental disagreement here; the recruiters would screw up the formatting in a way that would make the resume say things that are flatly untrue. It's not just aesthetic. For example, I used to put the amount of experience I had in different technologies, and becau", "context": "", "use_case": "writing resume", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Microsoft Office running with Wine on Linux with no virtualization"}, {"id": 795256896, "item_id": 49703556, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49703556", "by": "emil-lp", "date": "2026-09-14", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "There simply is no contender to LaTeX and PDFs.", "excerpt": "As a researcher in theoretical computer science, I love PDFs more than any other format when it comes to mathematics. There simply is no contender to LaTeX and PDFs. Lucky for you, almost all research in math, cs, and physics, are put on arxiv, where you can download the source code (.tex) as well as get an HTML render.", "context": "researcher in theoretical computer science", "use_case": "mathematical papers", "switched_from": "", "story": "A beginning for mathematics"}, {"id": 786497651, "item_id": 49156103, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49156103", "by": "olooney", "date": "2026-08-03", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I love LaTeX", "excerpt": "I've taken a lot of notes and done a lot of \"scratchpad thinking\" over the last 20 years, something I started in college but really got into in grad school. I've tried Evernote, OneNote, Obsidian. I've tried little journal apps on my phone. I wrote my own little \"microblog\" in Django to make it easy to collect and annotate links, quotes, snippets, and images from around the internet. And what I always keep coming bac", "context": "", "use_case": "equations", "switched_from": "", "story": "Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management"}, {"id": 784985600, "item_id": 49061600, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49061600", "by": "nyrikki", "date": "2026-07-26", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "In 1997/2001 I would have just taken text inputs and used LaTeX", "excerpt": "When this post was written (1997 updated in 2001), awk wasn't very portable because you still had the awk,nawk,gawk flavors. With sed if you stuck with BRE and avoided ERE you were going to be more portable. But this email is a there because it is a bit of a feat of strength, thus why it was sent to the seders list. I wouldn't have used sed for all of this at the time, and I am wondering what they were using for publ", "context": "", "use_case": "publishing books", "switched_from": "", "story": "Using sed to make indexes for books (long)"}, {"id": 779146384, "item_id": 48696649, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48696649", "by": "jampekka", "date": "2026-06-27", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I use LaTeX daily and hate it with a passion.", "excerpt": "I use LaTeX daily and hate it with a passion. I kinda lost all hope when ArXiv decided to do the HTML support by hacking a LaTeX to HTML conversion. We already have a very powerful layouting engine: the web browser. The only missing piece is printing/pagination, for which there was some CSS Paged Media progress, but that stalled. However, why the hell are we even doing paged media? For screen viewing it's strictly wo", "context": "daily LaTeX user", "use_case": "document typesetting", "switched_from": "", "story": "LaTeX.wasm: LaTeX Engines in Browsers"}, {"id": 778012768, "item_id": 48625798, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48625798", "by": "avian", "date": "2026-06-21", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Used to type a lot of LaTeX on that laptop and used X11 for previews", "excerpt": "The Compaq laptop I was using had a 486SX and 4 MB of RAM. It had a 640x480 (if I remember correctly) screen and I'm pretty sure the framebuffer was in a separate video RAM that was not counted in that 4 MB. Used to type a lot of LaTeX on that laptop and used X11 for previews - xfree86 even had a special driver for the specific video hardware that laptop had. Not sure if I used a window manager. I think I just pointe", "context": "", "use_case": "typesetting documents", "switched_from": "", "story": "An Embedded Linux on a Single Floppy"}, {"id": 777527072, "item_id": 48595442, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48595442", "by": "hdgvhicv", "date": "2026-06-18", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I used latex on occasion for about a decade after graduation", "excerpt": "I used latex on occasion for about a decade after graduation, but now it\u2019s only my CV I use, and I\u2019m getting rusty. Markdown is far more covienient. Never used Tex specifically.", "context": "", "use_case": "CV", "switched_from": "", "story": "Microsoft new Outlook takes 10 seconds to do what Outlook Classic does instantly"}, {"id": 776745841, "item_id": 48546615, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48546615", "by": "applicative", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I use latex when what I am typesetting uses greek, arabic or hebrew text", "excerpt": "Latex is in no sense required by pandoc and never has been, not ten years ago, not twenty years ago. Everything you are writing is deep conceptual confusion from top to bottom. You might as well say it has required Microsoft Word since the docx readers and writers came out. Latex is a typical route to produce pdfs according to your specification, but typst is what I use; occasionally groff. I use latex when what I am", "context": "", "use_case": "non-Latin script documents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Typst 0.15.0"}, {"id": 776262449, "item_id": 48516403, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48516403", "by": "CJefferson", "date": "2026-06-13", "stance": "warn", "quote": "just always having broken output as I use more unicode (maths symbols, emojis) in my documents.", "excerpt": "I'd much prefer bad looking unicode characters to just skipping them and having broken output honestly. This is currently the main reason I'm considering moving from LaTeX to typst -- just always having broken output as I use more unicode (maths symbols, emojis) in my documents.", "context": "", "use_case": "documents", "switched_from": "", "story": "Tectonic: A modernized, complete, self-contained TeX/LaTeX engine"}, {"id": 776216785, "item_id": 48513549, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48513549", "by": "xvilka", "date": "2026-06-12", "stance": "warn", "quote": "cryptic error messages, complex pipeline, lack of the proper Unicode symbols support out of the box", "excerpt": "I have been using TeX/LaTeX for ages and today same issues hinder the user experience like multiple decades ago - cryptic error messages, complex pipeline, lack of the proper Unicode symbols support out of the box, and so on. Nowadays, with Typst existing, it's vital for TeX ecosystem to solve these issues, since none of them are present in Typst. Projects like Tectonic would solve this for TeX, but they lack enough ", "context": "long-time TeX/LaTeX user", "use_case": "document typesetting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Tectonic: A modernized, complete, self-contained TeX/LaTeX engine"}, {"id": 768791281, "item_id": 48049455, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48049455", "by": "Hendrikto", "date": "2026-05-07", "stance": "compare", "quote": "LaTeX is great, don\u2019t get me wrong. But its heritage and historical baggage is really dragging it down.", "excerpt": "I used LaTeX for approximately 10 years, for little things to relatively complex, including my bachelor\u2019s and master\u2019s theses. It never felt natural at reliable or consistent. Every customization required weird \\makeatletter \\makeatother hacks and was very brittle. Everything seemed more complicated than necessary and hard to grok, with weird interdependencies and interactions. There are probably good reasons for all", "context": "used LaTeX ~10 years including theses", "use_case": "document typesetting", "switched_from": "", "story": "RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust"}, {"id": 761038178, "item_id": 47564886, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47564886", "by": "Unbeliever69", "date": "2026-03-29", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "using the LaTeX API plus its plugin ecosystem, and the result was far beyond anything I could have realistically produced through Docs", "excerpt": "In a recent Claude Code session I tried using the Google Docs, Drive, and Sheets MCP and was honestly surprised at how limited it felt. It was hard to get anything meaningful done because it just did not expose enough capability to be useful in practice. In hindsight, that frustration was probably a good thing. I ended up skipping MCP entirely and using the LaTeX API plus its plugin ecosystem, and the result was far ", "context": "", "use_case": "document generation", "switched_from": "Google Docs MCP", "story": "Figma's MCP Update Reflects a Larger Industry Shift"}, {"id": 756569969, "item_id": 47285623, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47285623", "by": "gucci-on-fleek", "date": "2026-03-07", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I personally think that LaTeX is the best choice for typical users", "excerpt": "> I get that it can't handle LaTeX, that's literally my entire point. It's no wonder it goes unmentioned in TeX threads. LaTeX != TeX. If this were a LaTeX thread, then I would agree with your point that it would make less sense to bring up ConTeXt (although someone always mentions Typst in every LaTeX thread, which is essentially the same thing). But this is a thread about TeX Live, which includes ConTeXt (and a doz", "context": "Linux user", "use_case": "document typesetting", "switched_from": "", "story": "TeX Live 2026 is available for download now"}, {"id": 756359520, "item_id": 47272470, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47272470", "by": "kkfx", "date": "2026-03-06", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Personally I use LaTeX for anything I have to write as pdf", "excerpt": "Personally I use LaTeX for anything I have to write as pdf, I understand many critics but... So far is The Tool to makes good typesetting. PostScript can do nearly the same at a harder effort for the user, Typist can't match, others are just LaTeX wrappers or can't deliver anything decent. The problem is that today we have a massive gap in development: there was a time when high-quality FLOSS development existed, fol", "context": "", "use_case": "typesetting PDFs", "switched_from": "", "story": "TeX Live 2026 is available for download now"}, {"id": 754566833, "item_id": 47160427, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47160427", "by": "dirk94018", "date": "2026-02-25", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "However, I use LaTeX regularly.", "excerpt": "TexMacs is great. However, I use LaTeX regularly. Used to keep a cheat sheet of commands I'd forget between documents. Today I can describe what I want in plain English, pipe it through toast, and get the LaTeX back. LaTeX, vim, sed, awk, the whole Unix toolkit is getting a new lease on life, because their interfaces are text. Text in, text out. An LLM can write you a perfect \\begin{tikzpicture} on the first try. Cli", "context": "", "use_case": "document typesetting", "switched_from": "", "story": "GNU Texmacs"}, {"id": 754565154, "item_id": 47160322, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47160322", "by": "aatayev", "date": "2026-02-25", "stance": "compare", "quote": "I find that there is a somewhat large boiler plate component when writing with LaTeX", "excerpt": "I love this tool and even wrote my PhD thesis with it. I find that there is a somewhat large boiler plate component when writing with LaTeX, but with TeXmacs, writing maths just feels easy. It\u2019s easy to set up, and easy to use. Nowadays I find myself using the Mogan fork as I find it\u2019s a little more stable. But again, awesome project and would highly recommend people to use, not just as a math writing tool, but simpl", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "GNU Texmacs"}, {"id": 748573664, "item_id": 46785854, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46785854", "by": "markbao", "date": "2026-01-27", "stance": "warn", "quote": "It\u2019s finicky and takes so much markup to do simple things.", "excerpt": "Not an academic, but I used LaTeX for years and it doesn\u2019t feel like what future of publishing should use. It\u2019s 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\u2026", "context": "not an academic, used LaTeX for years", "use_case": "typesetting", "switched_from": "", "story": "Prism"}, {"id": 748571249, "item_id": 46785703, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46785703", "by": "elashri", "date": "2026-01-27", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I have been using LaTeX for years before but it was not any easy.", "excerpt": "That's is probably one good usage of LLMs. LaTeX was a relief to deal with after using LLM. I have been using LaTeX for years before but it was not any easy. Aside of making LLM write the text, it is very good grammar and typo checker. Even on overleaf and browser default spell checker, my Thesis feedback contained a few typos from my Advisor each time I sent him for review. BTW: Overleaf added LLM integration which ", "context": "wrote a thesis", "use_case": "thesis writing", "switched_from": "", "story": "Prism"}, {"id": 745186465, "item_id": 46574154, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46574154", "by": "adityaathalye", "date": "2026-01-11", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I use LaTeX when orgmode is insufficient.", "excerpt": "Sure... I use LaTeX when orgmode is insufficient. And I can use LaTeX from within orgmode too. Utility is Contextual. \u201cWhen you are hungry, eat; when you are thirsty, drink; when you are tired, sleep.\u201d - Wise UNIX Master Foo ---- http://catb.org/esr/writings/unix-koans/shell-tools.html Master Foo and the Shell Tools A Unix novice came to Master Foo and said: \u201cI am confused. Is it not the Unix way that every program s", "context": "", "use_case": "typesetting when Org falls short", "switched_from": "", "story": "Org Mode Syntax Is One of the Most Reasonable Markup Languages to Use for Text"}, {"id": 744587024, "item_id": 46536689, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46536689", "by": "Vicinity9635", "date": "2026-01-07", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Good stuff, highly recommend a LaTeX resume, whether or not you drink coffee.", "excerpt": "Love this. My resume has been in LaTeX for over 20 years now. Underappreciated IMHO. You can version control it, no dealing with wild Word shenanigans. Totally deterministic. Just find a style, insert your bullets and you have a nice sharable PDF. Nowadays you can even have your preferred LLM do the conversion for you. LaTeX is finicky and I've had it fix warnings in mine that I couldn't be bothered to. Good stuff, h", "context": "resume in LaTeX for over 20 years", "use_case": "resume typesetting", "switched_from": "", "story": "LaTeX Coffee Stains [pdf]"}, {"id": 744436337, "item_id": 46527271, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46527271", "by": "spudlyo", "date": "2026-01-07", "stance": "compare", "quote": "if only LaTeX wasn't the de-facto standard in academia and stain-related journals, they would have already switched to it.", "excerpt": "I'm surprised nobody has yet mentioned how pleasant it is to create coffee stains using Typst, and if only LaTeX wasn't the de-facto standard in academia and stain-related journals, they would have already switched to it. Of course, you can create coffee stains in HTML as well, but it's not something you can do in Markdown.", "context": "", "use_case": "typesetting", "switched_from": "", "story": "LaTeX Coffee Stains [pdf]"}, {"id": 735075521, "item_id": 45942220, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45942220", "by": "tombert", "date": "2025-11-15", "stance": "compare", "quote": "LaTeX has been the industry standard for the mathematical world for decades", "excerpt": "I use Typst a lot now (which this reminds me of), and the equation support is generally very good, but the thing that gives me pause is that I'm afraid that there's going to be something missing, or worse than the LaTeX equivalent. LaTeX has been the industry standard for the mathematical world for decades and as a result it has had the most work adding new notation or making nicer formatting. For example, I needed t", "context": "", "use_case": "math typesetting", "switched_from": "", "story": "AsciiMath"}]}