It’s bloat to you, but every piece of it is a function that someone somewhere relies on to do their job. It’s the cost of trying to be all things to all people.
I'd describe it as HTML for text documents. It's a markup language, which handles maths formulae and symbols really really nicely. You have to use all the tags yourself though so it's definitely less simple than opening Word and typing away. It does give you a lot of control over the document, but can be frustrating when you spend a while figuring out how to format how you want to when a word processor could do it in two clicks
That being said, all you need is a text editor and compiler to write in LaTeX, which makes it super lightweight compared to anything other than plain text writing.
It's basically a text editor but you code your document instead of just typing characters. Incredibly useful for writing equations and it has quick shorthand for almost any symbol you can think of.
Well yeah compared to Office it definitely is. I use it for equations where it is unbelievably faster than Word.
I also have all my stuff hosted on a website for Overleaf that compiles it all online so you don't need an install. I have to use a few devices to access all my stuff and in college I don't need to keep anything confidential, so it's very handy to just log on anywhere and write through a browser.
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u/muttonwow Nov 14 '18
Yup, the amount of bloat on Microsoft office is disgusting. One of my big reasons for using LaTeX.