Here's why I don't think it's worth any longer spending time learning LaTeX: When Donald Knuth came up with TeX, he had in mind the printed page. LaTeX gave writers the opportunity to control the way their printed documents looked like. It made writers their own typographers. But the future of documents is content and collaboration, not typographic style. Printing will become irrelevant, and the documents of the future will have to be interactive, executable and device agnostic. As we move forward Authorea provides the best of both worlds (full disclosure, I'm one of the people behind the project). Authorea, which is a format agnostic collaborative platform, allows to write documents in richtext (word), markdown, LaTeX (or a combination of the three). It renders your docs to HTML, but you can export anytime to LaTeX (and PDF). Which means if you want, you can still convert your document to LaTeX without learning LaTeX syntax. It is version controlled (built on GIT) and allows to include data rich plots and Jupyter notebooks. We built it with the "paper of the future" in mind https://www.authorea.com
You mean to say that all we've been doing so far is just pretty printing our mundane thoughts since the invention of the written word and true value will only be unlocked by throwing away typographic knowledge accumulated over centuries and writing documents for the machines instead? Maybe you're right. Perhaps typography and the print media is finally truly obsolete. But you're not the first to make such a claim and you won't be the last. In the meantime, there's still a valid case for learning LaTeX well enough to be able to produce a correctly typeset document. Perhaps you should consider this viewpoint instead of dismissing TeX as an unwanted bastard child in your website's workflow?
I think the new value-add is based on a combination of:
1) the internet and
2) being further down Moore's Law
The increase in both computational power and connectivity has had impact all over the place, but has also transformed science. Even the most analog disciplines now have computational modeling branches, are building datasets, and need best practices for presenting and publishing computational artifacts. From Digital Humanities, to Computational Biophysics.
Printed pages struggle to convey the depth of these results, as do (originally) flat data formats like PDF, which are oriented towards pixels, rather than datatypes.
But I have to disagree strongly about sniping LaTeX as (completely) outdated, because of the need to supplement the printed page with a "content browser". Yes, we most certainly need a computational toolkit for presenting scientific results and aiding peer-review. But no, typesetting is not going away. The human taste for aesthetically pleasing documents is here to stay, and beautifully laid out narratives are instrumental for getting your message across to your audience. Delighting the eye allows the reader to focus on content, rather than struggle with an ugly form.
So my take on my work at Authorea (yep, beware inside bias!) is to transfer our typesetting best practices to the web as the baseline, but then focus and innovate on the "depth" of web-first science articles. To improve academic writing, we need to expose and interact with data, do the well-known social collaboration gig, and embed guarantees for transparency and reproducibility. Machine-assisted quality control and authoring are the two large impact sweet-spots to hit in the coming decade on this front. Time will show if we're in the know or not, but LaTeX is certainly a point of departure that has to be supported, and learning it is a healthy thing to do in 2017. We have a lot of important work ahead of us!
>The human taste for aesthetically pleasing documents is here to stay, and beautifully laid out narratives are instrumental for getting your message across to your audience. Delighting the eye allows the reader to focus on content, rather than struggle with an ugly form.
Is this really true? I don't think it is any more. Just look at graphical user interfaces these days: they're horrifically ugly, as exemplified by Windows 10, and also the flat-UI trend that everyone has adopted.
