I had always been dissatisfied with documents that Libreoffice or Word produce. Something about them… just never felt right. Yes, it was really convenient to just be able to open and click around and see what the document was gonna look like but in the end it always looked a little low-res. PDFs were heavy, and Libreoffice has crashed on me multiple times while I was editing larger documents.
All of this however never really bothered me enough that I was actively gonna look for change. Some programs like Pages on macOS worked better in some regards, but in the end I was still using Word adjacent editors. I did everything like this, schoolwork during the pandemic, small reports after that, applications for jobs, everything in a subpar environment.
Then, I started wondering: all of these academic papers look so nice. How did they do it? I stumbled upon LaTeX. Now for someone that knows what they’re doing the LaTeX website is pretty informative but for a still relatively tech illiterate teen it was very intimidating. I tried some of the examples on the website but didn’t know where to go from there. Things like Overleaf were too much as well.
So, I thought I’ll just continue with what I did before.
A couple years pass and being older and wiser I decided to jump in the cold water again and just learn TeX. Not LaTeX, because I thought it’ll be easier if I know the base to learn LaTeX on top than the other way around. Bottom up learning or something like that.
I grabbed myself a copy of ‘The TeXbook’ by Donald Knuth and just started powering through the exercises, absorbing the technical info along the way. And I was making progress. Soon, I started making my own small macros and reformatting documents that I wanted to read but only had photocopied PDFs in TeX to make them nicer. Apart from difficulties with managing the ominous black boxes that appear at the side of a line when they’re “overfull” and getting tired of hitting the backslash it was fun.
And, none of the issues I had with Libreoffice exist with TeX. Yes, getting UTF8 characters is a bit difficult (different font and different tex compiler, or csplain), yes, sizing PDFs can be a bit of a hassle (AFAIK only comfortably possible in XeTeX and luaTeX) but the results overweighed the slight hardship encountered on the way.
Especially after ditching my powershell+notepad+firefox editing work"flow" and instead first using TeXShop, then emacs, it became even more comfortable.
Nowadays, I don’t use TeX itself much because I switched to typst. TeX became pretty tedious for quick notetaking - something that can be solved with a better editing environment. But also typst’s math mode is cleaner and less visually distracting while editing that (La)TeX.
But TeX is still probably one of the most impressive and useful pieces of software ever created.