Researchers nowadays communicate via screens, not papers. LaTeX is not the right tool to write for screens. Why is it still the go-to for writing?

Question

Web format is interactive, easily to read on the phone, and the editors are as WYSIWYG like Word, but as customizable as LaTeX. Learning HTML/JS is much more useful than learning LaTeX. (Searching HTML/JS in Google yields 1080 M results, while LaTeX yields 780 M results.) You can archive, version and index a webpage like any PDF file. If one wants to have everything in one file, then webpages can do that. In fact that's what PDF does: compress multiple files into one file. If the medium is computer screens, then I only see it has advantages over using PDF.

I know that we still need to use paper as the medium here and there (we call papers as papers, not files), but isn't that only in that case that we should learn typesetting system? If the author doesn't care what medium the intended audience will read on, then why not using web format, as I think it is more popular these days? If the readers only need to read it in papers for some reasons (like it's better for their brains to read and write with pen and paper) and actually doesn't care about beautiful styling, then the print command is enough for that.

Or is it just that the new medium needs more time to widely adopted? In that case can we expect that more journals will accept web format submission in the future? Or if not, then what makes us expect that the intended audience will read the papers on paper?

Answer 1

I think your primary assumption, that LaTeX compiled to PDF is unsuitable for screens, is just wrong.

Instead of asking why authors should not use web format if they don't care what medium content is read in, ask yourself if authors really should not care what medium content is read in. In my opinion, both as an author and reader, they should!
Remember that papers do not just exist to contain results but also to present them. In this regard, for example, it makes quite a difference if the key comparison of two plots is presented side-by-side, top-bottom, single-page... or arbitrarily strewn throughout prose. There are many visual parts in a paper - even formula heavy ones - and their readability and impact depends on the layout.

In that regard, being inflexible and unresponsive is not a deficiency for papers, it is a feature. Raw web content is notorious for having looks somewhere between beautiful and unreadable depending on the device. Making proper responsive cross-platform pages is a time-consuming art in its own right. Heck, reading improperly responsive, improperly cross-platform content is time consuming!

Avoiding that effort by simply enforcing a well-defined layout for everyone is an efficient and effective solution.

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At the end of the day, people writing documents from source will be using a typesetting markup language. Regardless whether they are using "web technology", many scientists will need something like LaTeX anyway. There's KaTeX, there's MathJax, there's whatever MS Office uses and they all look like LaTeX. Even if you use HTML/JS, or Markdown, or Jupyter, you will still use something very much like LaTeX.

For many scientists, learning LaTeX isn't some huge extra effort. It's something they have to do anyway.

Answer 2

Several major commercial publishers (e.g., Springer, Elsevier) do publish both PDF and HTML versions of articles, so the end format is either.

I know that we still need to use paper as the medium here and there (we call papers as papers, not files), but isn't that only in that case that we should learn typesetting system?

The need to learn typesetting programs such as LaTeX is field specific. Furthermore, the need to learn LaTeX can be circumvented by learning markdown-based languages like R Markdown or Quarto. Both of these can be compiled to many outputs such as HTML, ePub, PDF, and MS Office formats.

If the author doesn't care what medium the intended audience will read on, then why not using web format, as I think it is more popular these days?

I would challenge this assumption. Popular among who? Web developers? Data scientists? Academics? The general public? Most non-academics I know use Word and even most academics in my field use Word to write documents.

Or is it just that the new medium needs more time to widely adopted? In that case can we expect that more journals will accept web format submission in the future? Or if not, then what makes us expected that the intended audience will read the papers on papers?

I encourage you to push your envelope and expand your horizon. Specifically, explore how other people publish who do not follow the traditional methods. Tools like Quarto allow people to write in one language and compile to many other languages. Examples include

• R for Data Science that is both an author hosted website and a Book from O'Reilly Press
• Python for Data Analysis that is both an author hosted website and a Book from O'Reilly Press
• Modern Dive that is both an author hosted website and book from CRC Press
• Many other book coauthored by Hadley Wickham that are listed on his website
• The Quarto GitHub repo for journal articles
• The rticles package for R Markdown

For your last question:

Why aren't more papers written in web format?

How do you know how papers are written? You only see the output from the journal. Most people I know and work with use MS Word. This is neither a web format nor a typesetting program. Personally, I try to use Quarto. Most mathy people I know use LaTeX.

Answer 3

There are a few reasons that a publisher might consider and that would make HTML a worse choice than print or pdf.

One is that it is difficult in html to specify pages and citations often rely on pages. Is a page a screen? Does a page take many screens?

Another is the publisher gives up a lot of control over presentation to the browser that presents, and interprets, the html. Browsers might insert ads, for example. The publisher wants full control, rather than deferring to decisions of another entity, such as the browser creator or a web service provider.

Printing pdf to paper is usually more predictable than printing html pages.

Many browsers will support useful presentation of pdf, of course, and still preserve publisher interests.

Answer 4

One of the main reasons that TeX (and its off shoots) are so popular in math heavy subjects like physics of mathematics, is that provides a robust, flexible way of reliably typesetting mathematical equations. So far this is the easiest (least inconvenient?) to use of various alternatives that have been introduced.

This is so much so that even in the web domain TeX is the go to tool for typesetting equations on the web. See an equation on Stack Exchange? It has been typeset using TeX. See a complicated equation on Wikipedia? It has been typeset in TeX. Same throughout the internet. And while integration of TeX equations in web formats using things like mathjax works, the typesetting can be a bit janky, especially when used inline. Consequently, when writing equation heavy texts, it makes sense to native write in a TeX derivative (only insane people still write in native TeX).

Answer 5

If your contention is that HTML is easier to write by hand than LaTeX, then I suggest that that is just not true. HTML was perhaps meant to, but in practice is not reasonably created by hand. It is definitely much harder to read than LaTeX sources, principally because of the lack of enclosing braces, using the <tag> ... </tag> style that is much more distracting to the eye.

One could perhaps, though to a lesser degree, level the same criticism on LaTeX. In the end, both should today be written with WYSIWYG editor, at which point the debate becomes pointless: If you're writing either in a WYSIWYG editor, what it outputs at the end no longer matters.

What is relevant, however, is that formulas are written in the fundamentally same way: MathJAX uses a syntax pretty similar to what LaTeX uses.

Answer 6

I think the answer is simply that LaTeX has a large network effect, and the benefit of interactiveness and responsiveness is small, making it still the dominant recommendation on writing complicate documents. Only when the interactiveness or responsiveness of the medium is necessary to convey the message that the authors have to use a non-LaTeX tool.

Food for thoughts:

• The Network Effects Manual: 16 Different Network Effects (and counting)
• What advantage does *TeX provide over modern tools like HTML+CSS+js?
• Why books donʼt work
• How can we develop transformative tools for thought?