I am thinking of posting a preprint of a paper of mine before I get a response to my submission. This is allowed by several publishers.
I considered three possibilities: arXiv.org, academia.edu and researchgate.net.
I have a problem with arXiv because it requires posting the source LaTex files which will be made publicly available. I resent this because I am foolish enough to fear that someone may want to plagiarise my work and this would make it easier. In the Why submitting TeX help page they explain why LaTex files are better for archiving but not why it is useful to make them publicly available.
A first question is: is it safe to make the LaTex code public?
Second, do professional mathematicians usually post preprints on these sites?
This leads to another concern. I see that often the results of googling a paper point to the preprints while the published paper is "hidden" in the scholarly article links. Would this be counterproductive in the long run as most people would just download the free version (with possible mistakes) instead of the peer reviewed one?