Outside of mathematics and physics conference/journal publishing, there's a widespread perception that it's losing ground. In CS some conferences are slowly switching to Word, or offering an option to authors (who are slowly switching to Word, especially outside of theory-heavy areas). In book publishing it's shrunk to a very small niche, even in technical areas. Part of the problem is cruftiness of tools, and part is the bizzareness of the underlying languages. As far as I can tell, few people who've written significant chunks of LaTeX stylesheet code or TeX macros/packages think the language is good, and it's complex/weird enough that even the vast majority of people who've written dozens of papers in LaTeX have no idea how to make nontrivial changes to its stylesheets. Also, many of the base tools still don't have Unicode support.
Belief that something is broken and attempts to fix it are a 20-year-old refrain at this point, e.g. ConTeXt is an attempt to make TeX more usable for book publishing, LuaTeX is an attempt to reduce reliance on TeX macros in favor of a less weird scripting language, XeTeX is a project to add Unicode, etc.
> In CS some conferences are slowly switching to Word, or offering an option to authors (who are slowly switching to Word, especially outside of theory-heavy areas).
Huh? In my research areas (evolutionary computation, machine learning, artificial intelligence, multiagent systems, robotics) this isn't remotely true. CS conferences of almost all stripes have always offered non-LaTeX submission routes. But LaTeX dominance is just as strong, if not stronger, than it used to be ten years ago.
Indeed, I think that the stigma surrounding Word submission in conference papers, journal articles, books, theses, even grant proposal submissions, is so strong that one must think twice before using it in the bulk of CS fields.
It varies by sub-area, but artificial intelligence is also my area, and I don't see that dominance anymore, especially in the more interdisciplinary areas (anything that overlaps with HCI, psychology, cognitive science, etc.). I also don't see the stigma anymore among younger researchers; I detect that attitude from older people mostly, and some of the "harder core than thou" people in math-heavy sub-areas, but there's a bigger mix of preferences among people under 35 who work in less math-y areas. I use TeX myself when it's my choice, but I've collaborated on Word papers as well, if I wasn't the primary author/instigator, and it seems common/expected these days. Especially if someone from industry has been the instigator (e.g. on DARPA-contract type research), or if it's interdisciplinary with someone not from CS/math, they've preferred Word.
AAAI, IJCAI, and AAMAS now provide both options, and my informal observation is that more Word papers are being submitted than used to be the case, especially but not exclusively when it comes to authors from industry. CHI recently officially deprecated LaTeX as a supported option, but still provides the old (no longer maintained) stylesheets as a courtesy. Several universities (e.g. Georgia Tech) have also stopped officially supporting LaTeX stylesheets for theses and moved to Word as the only official option, though they do distribute student-edited LaTeX stylesheets as a courtesy. I assume that one's because nobody in the IT department knows how to edit the stylesheets. The unofficial GT thesis stylesheet is a hilarious example of copy/paste cruft, too, with bits taken from 20-year old U. Texas stylesheets and various other places.
These venues have had Word options for well over a decade or more. I recall a higher rate of Word (and HTML!) submissions in Agent97 -- the predecessor of AAMAS -- than I see in AAMAS now. At any rate I think there are few significant changes in LaTeX usage in those conferences.
You're right that the big place where Word shows up in CS is in HCI, software engineering, and interdisciplinary areas. Is it possible that, given your mention of CHI, that you're from these areas and possibly experiencing a sample bias?
In the areas of high performance computing, systems and languages, Latex is still dominant. Every conference I've submitted to has a Word template, but I've never known anyone to use it.
It depends on your particular flavor of CS. The less-theoryish flavors, like games or graphics, definitely do seem to be accepting of Word, and I've been to a couple conferences where Word was more prevalent.
Personally, I can't stand Word as an editing environment, because it doesn't offer a way of writing without worrying about formatting at the same time (seriously, if it had a markup view, I'd probably switch), and citation support is still a huge pain in the ass. However, LaTeX has many, many more pains in the ass for most people.
This kind of has been my experience as well in Statistics/EE/Machine Learning. While, IEEE/ACM have word style files, I have seen very few submissions that use word. In fact, I know reviewers who have had a significant bias (which whether it is right or not exists) against word submissions.
Yeah, TeX is a really broken tech in 2012. When I tried to look at the base languages to edit a BibTeX file, it blew my mind. I'm lucky that LaTeX has templates that I like, I have no possible means of making one myself.
It seems like the whole article misses the point. pdftex doesn't need replacing, TeX needs replacing. Pandoc (with some better extension method) + CSS style sheets + TeX algorithm layout engine would be bliss.
Unfortunately, the engineering required for that would need some really committed people, and the people committed enough to typography seem to have put all their eggs in the TeX basket, because that's all they know.
I agree that markup/stylesheets is what most strongly needs to be improved. I've only just started experimenting with it, but Biber, positioned as a BibTeX replacement, does really seem to be an improvement for the citation piece of the puzzle; its stylesheets look like something a mortal might be able to edit. It can also be used to generate HTML output, which has long been pretty crufty with BibTeX (I already have paper lists in BibTeX, so I should be able to generate things like my web page's publication list, and be able to customize the generated HTML, maybe even have some sorting/grouping options, all of which Biber can do).
If I had to predict, I would guess that something like HTML+CSS, or possibly a Markdown-ish input language with some kind of CSS-ish stylesheet, will eventually overtake TeX in significant areas, once the PDF renderers get good enough. Maybe someone will even find a way to pipe it into TeX as a renderer, as you suggest. A plus of that workflow is that it also makes it easy to produce good-looking HTML versions of articles, which is getting more important. And the "math in HTML" question is (finally) converging on a constellation of acceptable solutions. Advanced typography in HTML is slowly creeping forward as well.
Is not changing the stylesheet a bad thing really? I definitely always prefer documents from people who use latex without style to those using word without style. Wasn't that one of the main reasons for creating Tex anyway? Of course it wasn't word at the time...
At MIT Press they've moved to Word with the eXtyles plugin as their preferred manuscript/intermediary format, and InDesign for final layout. I'm not sure what precisely eXtyles does, but it appears to produce some kind of XML-based workflow that lets them retarget books to both InDesign and ebook formats, as well as process them through various scripts (e.g. for indexing).
They appear to still accept TeX manuscripts as a "not preferred" option, with their preferred approach to those being to convert them to Word+eXtyles ASAP, via some kind of processor they have. It looks like they still offer a full-TeX pipeline if authors insist, but it's deprecated and not done for most books anymore (and they won't produce ebook versions of your book if you choose this one).
If it's just equations (i.e. using no TeX features besides the $equation syntax$), that's what their conversion workflow is for. You can submit your manuscript in simple TeX and then they convert it to their preferred format with some scripts. I believe they'll also accept Markdown extended with TeX-syntax equations (not sure if that's official, but I know one author who submitted a Markdown manuscript w/ TeX equations... though he got the proof copies back as Word, post-conversion).
Ah, now I understand: When you wrote "In book publishing it's shrunk to a very small niche, even in technical areas", you mean the "technical areas" that don't use equations in their books.
My background is blinding me to the fact that books with equations is really a small niche market. That small niche is completely dominated by LaTeX.
I don't know. I can write LaTex but I must admit at times I would prefer something that could be written from a real language but still use LaTeXs typesetting, kerning, etc.
LyX is ok for what it is. It certainly gets some use, even in publishing.
But at least for me a big part of the appeal to TeX is that it isn't a (%*#% GUI. It's text. I can edit in an efficient plain text editor, "refactor" styling, etc. I've even at times generated TeX code programmatically (It's often less painful for stuff like receipts than writing a PDF generator by hand, usually looks better too.)
So, I'd like a better input language, but I _don't_ want to fundamentally change the way it works. Just don't make me use a textual-replacement macro language.
Yes, people can continue to obliviously work with the same legacy tools and the same convoluted processes for years, until something better comes along and they wonder why they put up with that shit all along.
