LaTeX

FIRST-HAND READS

What people reported, in their own words. Every line links to where it was said.

• “use latex and not spend half the time troubleshooting latex, esp without internet access”

  NEGATIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-06-28

• “Every time I try to do anything with LaTeX it pulls gigabytes of stuff but it's somehow still not batteries-included”

  NEGATIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-06-26

• “I would like to use TikZ just because it's kind of the idiomatic way of doing diagrams in LaTeX, so a WYSIWYG might be useful”

  LUKEWARM · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-06-23

• “latex does not resemble markdown while authoring. Text ends up intermingled with ugly \sectionheader tags everywhere.”

  NEGATIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-06-21

• “I used to have a Latex resume and switched to LibreOffice several years ago”

  NEGATIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-06-19

• “agonizing directing Claude Code (Opus 4.7 at that time) to create a (non-mathematical) preso using LaTex”

  NEGATIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-06-16

• “were annoying (Used LaTeX, wkhtmltopdf, weasyprint in production and evaluated several more)”

  NEGATIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-06-15

• “I use latex when what I am typesetting uses greek, arabic or hebrew text, but only because I haven't yet bothered to learn the typst approach to them.”

  LUKEWARM · features · Hacker News · 2026-06-15

• “sometimes people share some weird types of syntax which looks like Latex but not rendered correctly”

  NEGATIVE · reliability · Hacker News · 2026-06-13

• “Using LaTeX makes sense because that's what all journals and conferences expect”

  POSITIVE · Hacker News · 2026-06-13

• “Everything "just works", that's the best way to describe it. Thank you for fully fixing LaTeX for me.”

  POSITIVE · performance · Hacker News · 2026-06-13

• “A tool like this is sorely needed for LaTeX, and Tectonic is especially intuitive to embed into other applications”

  MIXED · features · Hacker News · 2026-06-13

• “Maybe I will truly have to invest more time and create a good looking LaTeX CV.”

  MIXED · features · Hacker News · 2026-05-31

• “I've felt like I could do everything in Typst that I needed from LaTeX”

  MIXED · features · Hacker News · 2026-05-28

• “In the past, I used code to convert to LaTeX. (It was horrible)”

  NEGATIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-05-28

• “being able to tweak my own LaTeX shell for the content is quite nice as well”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-05-27

• “LaTeX had a few more of the controls I was looking for in print”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-05-27

• “LaTeX has all the little knobs to tweak and find what's right for your uses”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-05-27

• “I couldn't tell you how to recompile it (if I were to try, I'd probably get an LLM to literally translate it to LaTeX)”

  NEGATIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-05-13

• “embedded rendered latex equations makes it really easy to take notes and write things up in a plaintext format without needing to export every 30 seconds to view equations”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-04-29

• “I have detailed memories because everything is in LaTeX with version control going back to 2014. Most of my peers can't find their old code.”

  POSITIVE · Hacker News · 2026-04-28

• “generate a full PDF proposal using Latex between 14 and 32 pages long depending on how many photos were taken. There are sections with terms and conditions as well as a bit of sales guff etc. as well as quite a nice cover page with their contact details and mine etc.”

  POSITIVE · features · Hacker News · 2026-04-15

• “With LaTex I can be reassured that the formatting will be 95% fine and the 5% remaining will come down to taste”

  POSITIVE · ease of use · Hacker News · 2026-01-28

• “I loved LaTeX and friends because it let me convert my notes to digital paper and websites without having to change how I thought”

  MIXED · ease of use · Hacker News · 2025-11-16

• “I really do enjoy the quality of graphics, diagrammatic, and scientific output from LaTeX”

  MIXED · performance · Hacker News · 2025-09-27