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I remember starting LaTeX when I was in the last year of my undergraduate studies .I was fascinated by a book in Industrial Organisation, partly because it was a good book per se, but also because I liked the way it looked like. In the very first pages it stated that it was prepared in TeX. This made me curious, and triggered my mind to want to know more about it.

After doing my little research, I found Mittelbach et al. sublime companion for LaTeX in the library. It took me a while to figure out how to start producing some work, even the simplest cases. I firstly read about the WYSIWYG editors and I used LyX for a couple of months. However I was not satisfied with it and I wanted to actually use a 'real' editor. Therefore I switched to TeXmaker that I use until today along with TeXStudio (which I like better).

My point is that this 'journey' is not simple, as it requires a lot of effort, time and research (luckily this forum helps a lot in this aspect). Given the, admittedly, struggle of producing beautiful papers, and the possible enhancements, where do you see TeX going? Will it become mainstream or is this just a dream?

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    What makes you think it is not mainstream? – Stephan Lehmke Mar 3 '14 at 3:25
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    I was introduced to it in my sophomore year of undergrad. And I haven't looked back since. :D – Paul Gessler Mar 3 '14 at 3:44
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    It is not 'mainstream in academia'. It is mainstream in an extremely small part of academia. Outside that, nobody has heard of it. Certainly nobody uses it. And everything has to be submitted in Word. Do you really think that if you walk into the department of history or politics or medicine that you will find people using latex? Mostly it is maths departments which use it. Beyond that, it is the wastelands of MS Office. Note that I'm not saying nobody uses it. But it is unusual. And I bet even the maths department has to fill out university forms in Word. – cfr Mar 3 '14 at 4:16
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    @cfr I agree about the wasteland of MSOffice. Sometimes I feel I cannot read MS Office documents. – Pantelis Kazakis Mar 3 '14 at 4:19
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    @Pantellis - It is an interesting and worthwhile qn, but it is hard to see what would count as a fully satisfactory, objective answer, so I think it cannot work for this site as is. You might break it up into a series of smaller qns that do invite more objective answers, e.g., What trends are there in Tex usage: numbers and kinds of users? You'll get the kind of higher-level commentary you want along with the narrower answers. – Charles Stewart Mar 3 '14 at 5:56
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I'd like that, but (La)TeX is a specialized tool, for discriminating users. I will always stay mainstream in an elite.

Just my totally uninformed opinion.

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