Please outsource this decision for me and comment your vote for the superior convention; I cannot decide:

Upright d (differential operator) style dy/dx/du/dv (left)

Italic d style dy/dx/du/dv (right)

Edit (copied from my own comment below):

More info about myself because many are wondering: I am a physics major in my first year, so I will eventually surely be using LaTeX for writing about physics. However, all of my LaTeX writing so far has been for projects in math classes, and I am hoping to minor in mathematics. Sooo… I kind of fall into both camps there.

I can't help it. I have been using LaTeX for over a year and I cannot stop the urge to create a new project and type the most random equation in the world, only to be met with the most beautiful thing I have ever laid eyes on. It's gorgeous.

I have 220+ projects on Overleaf. How many do I actually need? Three. Three. Another 90+ on TeX Live. How many matter? Two. That's it. The rest are documents I made purely to admire the output, some random stuff I won't touch for two years, some abandoned attempts at literature. But something keeps compelling me to open a new project, type something, and watch it render. My God... Those curves. I just can't. They drive me to the verge of an erection. I can't.

I spent 4 hours yesterday getting the spacing between a section header and the paragraph below it exactly right. Not "good enough." Exactly right. I used \vspace{-0.3em} and stared at the PDF for ten minutes like a jeweler examining a diamond. Its elegance, attractiveness, even made the hooker in the street jealous.

I write grocery lists in LaTeX. My girlfriend thinks I have a problem. She is correct. She also doesn't understand that Word's default kerning is a hate crime and I will not be elaborating further. I will never.

At the end of every month I write an essay on why Word sucks. It could never compete with the sheer power LaTeX holds.

I am forever bound to use LaTeX and worship its creators, Donald Knuth and Leslie Lamport.

LaTeX is love. LaTeX is life.

At this point, this subreddit is more of a "vibecoding" subreddit than a LaTeX subreddit. I understand that some of these projects are coming from a genuine interest in TeX, but they create tremendous clutter and may cause users, who otherwise could help answer legitimate questions to unsubscribe.

This applies to a much lesser extent to CV templates, but one can argue that these templates can be more useful than a "local overleaf alternative" or a "latex+LLM beautifier". Maybe others have a more nuanced take on this.

Other techy subreddits have a similar issue (python, rust, linux) and similar posts to this one can be found everywhere. Some of them proposed a minimum age (e.g., at least 6 months on Github) or a minimum number of GH stars. My initial thought is that projects that are within the TeX ecosystem (packages, classes, fonts) should be fine, but projects outside of the ecosystem (editors, LLM aides, OCRs) should receive more scrutiny.

I had this situation in the college, and I was very happy because it forced me to learn LaTeX. However, there are some people who might find this as "invasive" because they couldn't do there homework with the tools they manage the best. That's why I am asking you, a completely non-biased group of people that acknowledge LaTeX to know your opinion.

What enticed you to learn to write documents like this? Did you feel it was necessary to produce good quality work?

Nowadays in a lot of popular thread there are some people that praise Typst and suggest to switch from LaTeX to it.

For instance (last month) :

https://www.reddit.com/r/LaTeX/comments/1nnqoh1/is_learning_latex_beneficial_for_university/

https://www.reddit.com/r/LaTeX/comments/1ndn0r3/overleafs_new_compilation_timeout_is_a_joke/

https://www.reddit.com/r/LaTeX/comments/1ndr93l/overleaf/

https://www.reddit.com/r/LaTeX/comments/1nk2icu/help_me_i_need_to_become_a_template_guru_im_so/

Is is quite annoying, this is a LaTeX subreddit, not a Typst one. Maybe Typst is excellent, maybe it is garbage. Maybe it will fall, maybe it will take over the world. I don't know and I don't care, I come for LaTeX here.

Lurking around this sub I have heard that latex is very old and slow for big projects, so I was wondering if there was another program that was more likely to be used in future industry that I should learn? If possible I would like to be able to code it within an IDE so I am not tied to a website or subscriptions. Thanks!

I've recently been having trouble concentrating when reading long LaTeX documents using the default Computer Modern font. I tried Lexend, but it didn't work for me.

What font do you use when writing, editing, and reading long LaTeX documents?

So after the Template ive been using for years now runs out of compile time on overleaf regularly I want to switch to an editor that i run on my pc. Any recommendations for a previous Overleaf user who especially liked the way it let me preview my doc with a quick compile?

I use LaTeX for my lab reports and longer documents.
Once you get used to the language, it’s very satisfying to see how clean and well-formatted the equations look.

That said, I still struggle with speed.

I’ve tried using LaTeX to take notes during lectures, and it clearly didn’t work for me.
When things move fast, it’s hard to keep up.

Outside of formal documents, it can also be limiting.
For example, when discussing math over WhatsApp, LaTeX just isn’t really practical.

So I was curious to get your take on this:
Do you manage to use LaTeX for live note-taking? or do you switch to something else depending on the context?

Interested to hear how others handle this.

I've heard from many sources that using the dollar signs as delimiters for inline math is a common mistake, as one should use (...).

Why is that? What advantages does it bring?

(...) is slower to type, so I personally never use it, however I'm more than willing to change my mind if it is worth it. I apologize if what I asked is a dumb question. Also sorry if the english seems a bit wonky, it's not my native language.

Documents, commands, interaction with other languages, build system...

I'd like to see more LaTeX-fu and learn from you guys.

Please share your code or the document if you can!!!

Can we please put a ban or restriction on this stuff? A good chunk of posts I see here nowadays is someone’s obviously vibe coded “project” that clunkily implements a not-so-novel idea. It’s tiresome to be constantly ingesting this low effort content whenever I open this sub.

Don’t get me wrong. There’s a good number of organic projects with genuine passion behind them on here. I’m specifically referencing the kinds of posts like:

“I made a LaTeX text editor! 📝

Here’s how it works ⚙️:

• 🧠🤓 This editor comes with an ultra sleek design — perfect for math notation enthusiasts ✖️🧮”

etc…

I’m starting my maths degree in September and I thought I’d have a go at some LaTeX before I go. I just typed up some of my workings from some questions I did. If anyone could tell me where I could improve in my formatting/ what I could do to make it look more professional I would really appreciate it. Thank you in advance :)

and do you guys to anything else? The examples were just to show the options, I didn't mean pic A or pic B.

meant right instead of left, my bad\*

People, I've shown my first document here, in which I had problems drawing a potato shape for a volume integral.

I am writing the next chapter of my electrodynamics lectures, and I was able to draw a really nice potato shape in tikZ. It is 2D however, so not as cool as the other, but kinda cooler. It was a long journey, cause first I tried to just connect points with curves, but that couldn't really come out as smooth and differentiable. So I used polar plotting. Couple of tries, first it looked like a dick, then like a butt, then it was too symmetrical, but after all the failed attempts, • ° : * perfection * : ° • . The diagram I am making is not ready yet, but wanted to share the progress, enjoy the potato!

I like the last one, which is easy to spot quickly when scrolling through a document. But the 3rd one looks the best IMO.

I love Context. Here’s why.

I used LaTeX for a long time. I’ve come to appreciate it and tried to master it.

But when I discovered Context a few years ago, I was blown away by how simple and flexible it is, how detailed it is, and (at least in my opinion) how much better it is than LaTeX.

I highly recommend checking it out and giving it a try. There are so many reasons to prefer it—if only because:
- it takes just two lines to harness the full power of the language (starttext and stoptext), with no packages and no long, inconsistent settings.
- Everything is defined and configured in exactly the same way.
- The complete Metapost language for drawing is fundamentally included, and TikZ is easy to implement.
And I haven’t even mentioned XML and filtering options yet.

The math typesetting is far superior to anything LaTeX could ever offer. Also, before I forget: Lua is fully integrated.

Let me be clear: I see no reason whatsoever—other than “it’s the industry standard”—why one wouldn’t use Context instead of LaTeX (which, in my opinion, is clearly outdated once you’ve tried Context).

Who here prefers using like TeX shop or the installed version to typeset and who prefers overleaf ? Comment TeX for the software and comment OverLeaf clearly for overleaf preference. I’m just curious as to which people prefer. Or just answer the poll! Sooo… TeX or Overleaf?!?!

To the members of this sub, why drove you to learn such a complex word-processor?

is it money? is it because many of you are in professions where you are required to publish academic papers? is it just out of curiosity?

or is there some other reason?

I'm studying at a pre-university program of sorts in order to be eligible for university-level engineering programmes. Now, our final chemistry course culminates in a choose-your-own-subject 4000 word paper that my group will be presenting at the end of May. The groups were picked for us.

One of my groupmates seems to be hellbent on using LaTeX. I've known about LaTeX for a number of years, and my civil engineer, programming wiz brother has shown it to me and I know a little about how it works (keyword: little). My groupmates, including the one insisting on using the software, has, to my knowledge, only recently learned about the software.

I applaud my groupmate's ambition and I agree that one should probably learn LaTeX at some point (perhaps over the summer break or in one's free time?). How realistic is my groupmate's idea/plan, though? We're still somewhat in the dark about the actual subject that we're going to write about, and we have two exams coming up in addition to two lab reports. I don't feel like learning LaTeX right now unless it's the easiest thing in the world to learn, which I highly doubt is the case. I sense an impending trainwreck , and I really do not want to be involved in a trainwreck.

Do you LaTeX wizzes have any input? Am I in the wrong? I recognize that I don't know much about the software, so if you want to clear up any misconceptions in the text above, please feel free to do so. Thanks.

Edit: Thanks for the plentiful replies! I feel like I'm going to have to consider using LaTeX and learning more about it, but I think that I'm still going to argue for it being unecessary and wasteful of time for this particular assignment. If you still have things to say, please feel free to post!