Basic LaTeX is probably not that hard to learn. But LaTeX is a really deep rabbit hole and you need a lot more knowledge of it if you write math papers.
You don’t have to go very far down the rabbit hole to write papers. If you can draw a commutative diagram, and insert a PDF graphic, there isn’t really anything much more complex than that.
Well, I’ve been to grad school, done significant amounts of mathematical writing, read my share of papers, so I know what I’m talking about, too. The depth of the rabbit hole isn’t that deep for any one person; it’s more like a gopher hole, but everyone has their own little gopher hole.
- Often, I had to look deeply into forum posts to get LaTeX to format a formula in the way that I imagined (often the solution involved deep LaTeX wizardry)
- Creating a document that involves text in multiple alphabets (e.g. Latin alphabet, Greek alphabet, cyrillic alphabet). Actually trivial with Microsoft Word. ;-)
Not to even mention problems where I have no idea how to start such as how to do reproducable build processes for LaTeX documents (i.e. each run of the build process produces a binarily identical PDF document).
