Learning TeX was one of the best investments I ever made. Whereas, I haven't touched TeX in 15 years, but I can still do the basics.

Strangely, it's not much like other Mac apps, or like older versions of Word. I tried using a newer version of MS Word recently, and I couldn't even figure out the basics any more. I invested quite a bit of time learning MS Word back in the day, through about the 'v.X' days, and I was pretty effective with it. In fact, I might call TeX more free, in this sense, because the interface has stayed essentially the same for 30 years (a very intentional feature), while every version of MS Word requires you to learn new things. TeX's learning curve is steeper than most, but it's not like I can pick up MS Word and be immediately productive with it, either (and I've certainly tried).īesides, if we're going to count every possible opportunity cost against the word 'free', then no software is free, or could ever be. It has a significant initial investment of time in order to learn how to use it, which for many people is more precious than a few dollars. I have used various *TeX systems for years, and produce hundreds of pages with it annually, but even so, whenever I can, I much prefer using a light markup like Markdown and then converting that (via Pandoc or other means) into *TeX markup that I can feed into a larger system. So, for anything but very basic writing, it has lots of drawbacks. *TeX is also pretty futzy to use for projects that involve graphics, and despite the 'focus on the text' philosophy that is supposedly at the heart of the system, its actual markup is very intrusive and often not human-readable. This is only true if you are talking about straight typesetting with few or no floats even then, the basic *TeX fonts and templates are pretty shitty looking (not to mention incredibly dated, by typographic standards), and to achieve a decent layout design takes some time and significant tweaking. For most people, it simply isn't worth the time investment, nor the hassle.įor anything larger than a shopping list or summary of a meeting it's much easier and will look a lot better.

Plus, compile times for complicated documents can be obnoxiously long (for example, if citing many refs from a bib file, or using an internal-linking package), and there is the time involved in learning to compile (or use an editor).

Mac word processor maths formula