>> Apparently, any mathematical breakthrough not written using TeX is
>> probably bogus. Go figure.
> 
> I'm with Scott - though I think LaTeX will do.

Well, yeah, by "TeX" I presume he means generically any TeX-powered 
macro system. (LaTeX, ConTeX, pdfTeX, the list goes on...)

> I don't ever expect to write a breakthrough paper but I've spent long enough
> butting my head against various word processing systems that don't really do
> maths (or other formallly structured text, like computer science or music
> notation) so well to have embraced TeX (actually LaTeX with a few bits of TeX)
> with love as a document preparation system that acts as an aid to logical
> thought rather than an incitement to keyboard/mouse vandalism.
> 
> If someone is sufficiently brighter than me to be able to write a breakthrough
> paper, I'd think they would be bright enough to come to a similar conclusion
> about TeX.

TeX produces very nice output, and it has a nice seperation between 
content and presentation.

And that's where the niceness ends. Sadly, TeX is ancient technology 
now. It doesn't handle colour properly. It doesn't handle graphics 
properly. It doesn't handle Unicode properly. And the entire 
infrastructure of it is based around low-level text substitution and 
macro expension. This makes even utterly trivial tasks like displaying 
symbols which are meaningful to TeX itself excruciatingly tricky, 
involving black magic with catcodes and the like. (You say \verb, I say 
"fragile!")

Worst of all, TeX seperates content from style, but then makes it 
jaw-droppingly intractible to change even the most miniscule aspects of 
the default styling. You know a TeX document when you see one, because 
they're all 100% identical, because it's just far too hard to change any 
of the style parameters.

Also, TeX (or is it LaTeX?) is a perculiar *insistence* on putting page 
breaks in the wrong place. It will _not_ put page breaks between 
paragraphics, only in the middle of them. (Or between the paragraph and 
the figure it's talking about.)

I see it all the time: I fill up a paragraph, and it just about fits on 
the current page. I write the next paragraph, and BAM! The existing one, 
which used to fit on one page, gets broken across two pages. WHY?! >_<

I keep promising myself someday I'll take the TeX formatting engine - 
which is excellent - and wire it up to a control language that normal 
humans can actaully do useful work with. But, alas, the program source 
code is written in some obscure dialect of Pascal, and does baroque 
things like testing whether you're using ASCII or EBCDIC. (NO, I'M NOT 
KIDDING!)

By contrast, HTML is delightfully easy to style using CSS. It's just a 
shame the end result looks so bland and ugly.

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