I am a research mathematician, and I and essentially all my colleagues are LaTeX users. To me it feels like the correct tool for the job; the only widespread criticism I've heard is that it doesn't produce documents accessible to the blind. (And I've heard that work on this is in process.)
I tend to be unsympathetic to criticism that a tool is "outdated"; if a tool is right for the job, why change it? But I want to keep an open mind -- what would you like to see in LaTeX's place?
I'm a heavy LaTeX user, but LaTeX manages to be simultaneously amazing and completely insane.
Let's get started with some negatives (the positive are well known):
- Recompilations needed. Can be mitigated by latexmk, but still.
- Choice of latex, pdflatex, xelatex, lualatex ... and documents compiled with one may or may not compile with another
- packages that are incompatible with each other in odd ways
- when you encounter an error you have to enter "X". if you're using latexmk, you have to enter "X" multiple times
- math commands are not structure-based but presentation based, despite LaTeX's (otherwise well executed) posturing of separating content from styling. If you want to change the alignment of your equations or the size of the integrals sign or just slightly tweak the appearance of the | sign in {x^2 | x € R }, be prepared for a lot of rewriting (some of this can be alleviated by defining new commands, but I don't know how many people actually do that)
- Math LaTeX input is basically unparseable in the sense that it is not really possible to take some latex math code and convert it into some actual meaningful structure (this is a corollary of the above point). Given the ubiquity of LaTeX-style math even in a range of other contexts (e.g. KaTeX), this is a bit of an issue. It's possible to do a best effort implementation that sort-of works, but it's always gonna come up short
- Error messages: "Missing $", thanks
- Outdated defaults. Unicode should just work by default.
My pick with Latex is: Error messages look to me as complicated as C++ template errors, packages sometimes don't work well together, a lot of boilerplate is usually needed, and I feel somehow the Syntax needs too many keystrokes, like why not make {} for sub and superscript optional and everything until the next space character is sub or superscripted (and not only one character). Also writing {\rm text} feels wrong. Shdnd it be \rm {text} and maybe instead one shd be able to use $ in an equation block to get to a non italic font.
While markdown is not advanced enough, I feel the making it easier for the user to use is the right modern approach, from which maybe a full system could be designed.
Also figure placement should allow more fine-tuning (not sure how, and yes this is against the original spirit)
I am a research mathematician, and I and essentially all my colleagues are LaTeX users. To me it feels like the correct tool for the job; the only widespread criticism I've heard is that it doesn't produce documents accessible to the blind. (And I've heard that work on this is in process.)
I tend to be unsympathetic to criticism that a tool is "outdated"; if a tool is right for the job, why change it? But I want to keep an open mind -- what would you like to see in LaTeX's place?