I am surprised TeX [1] and LaTeX (pronounced tech and lay-tech) are not mentioned in this post. When I was a physics undergrad it was required that we wrote our senior thesis in it as well as any studies we meant to publish. Interestingly, my lab worked closely with a lab from the chemistry department and apparently their standard was MS Word docs. I was given to understand that this setup was fairly universal for both disciplines.
Latex seemed arcane coming from the background of HTML but it was pretty easy to pick up and is human readable.
Aside from the markup language itself, what is cool about TeX is its versioning. Since the idea is that at some point it does meet all of its goals it is essentially approximating its own perfect form. As a result as it gets closer to that goal its version approaches the value of Pi [2]. The current version is 3.141592653.
Tex has been around for 47 years so if you are looking for stability, look no further.
Some someone who learned document editing and drafting through LaTeX in my undergrad, I gotta say I'm not sure I'd recommend it anymore to people looking for a new tool.
To me, Typst is the 'weirdly missing' option here. I really see it as the most promising successor to LaTeX, which is not something I say lightly given that I spent years scoffing at the idea of Typst ever displacing LaTeX in my life.
I watched Typst from afar for many years. I finally took it out for a spin about a month ago after version 0.14 dropped.
In less than an hour I reproduced my résumé—complete with fancy functions to typeset employment entries on a grid system. In under 24 hours I was tinkering with the Typst source code.
Typst is amazing. Syntax is clean and consistent. The compiler is so so fast. Docs are excellent. And it is very close to TeX when it comes to typesetting quality. There are a few tiny rough edges that any \usepackage{microtype} enjoyer will miss, but stuff is improving rapidly.
(Also, XKCD disclaimer: this was not an LLM—I just use em-dashes a lot because TeX made them easy to type and I got used to having them.)
Typst seems to be a cloud based solution with monthly fees? How’s that even relevant to the discussion of open source, free, local tools like latex/markdown?
Absolutely not, no. At least not any more than LaTeX is a cloud based solution with monthly fees (Overleaf)
The language, ecosystem, and compiler are FOSS. There is a cloud editor / collaboration platform that is paid, but nothing about the language requires that you use it (I use it almost exclusively through emacs)
No, Typst the typesetting software is FOSS (Apache license), as is a bunch of the surrounding ecosystem (e.g. the LSP for editor support). The people making it also ofter paid SASS stuff for features enterprises like, but there is no need to use them.
Getting people to write documentation is already an uphill battle, the reality is it needs to be made as frictionless as possible or they won’t do it. IMO this rules out (La)TeX entirely: it’s just too much work that nobody wants to deal with.
I also have a philosophical issue with writing documentation in TeX: TeX is a typesetting program, i.e. it’s a presentation format meant to look a certain way on a page, while documentation should be agnostic to appearance as much as possible. But that’s more a personal objection.
I was the only student who did the thesis in MS Word because why the fuck not. Of course I had to use a LaTeX font, and there was a bug with PDF export, but other than that, it was fine.
Long ago I've read a study somewhere that people using LaTeX take more time and effort to accomplish same tasks compared to MS Word, but they are more happy about the process. Seems to match my impression that LaTeX is "by tinkerers, for tinkerers".
Documents written in the 1980s in LaTeX still compile and look great today. Good luck doing that with an old MS Word file, especially if it has equations in it.
Latex seemed arcane coming from the background of HTML but it was pretty easy to pick up and is human readable.
Aside from the markup language itself, what is cool about TeX is its versioning. Since the idea is that at some point it does meet all of its goals it is essentially approximating its own perfect form. As a result as it gets closer to that goal its version approaches the value of Pi [2]. The current version is 3.141592653.
Tex has been around for 47 years so if you are looking for stability, look no further.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX
[2] https://www.preethamrn.com/posts/piver
P.S.: manpage format is also quite simple to learn and it is always a really good addition to any CLI tool.