Understanding the role of LaTeX

 Most introductions into LaTeX are trying to describe what the software itself is about. But this won't answer the question which role LaTeX is playing in a more general workflow. The interesting point is that most authors are not creating their text with latex itself but they are using external software like Emacs, texniccenter and vim. But, if LaTeX is so great why it is not used for writing the text?

To understand this mismatch we have to take a closer look how the programs are interacting with each other. What LaTeX needs as input text is a highly structured longer text, for example a 100 kb long markdown file, a 50 kb .tex file or a 300 kb long ascii text which contains of sections and subsections. in the next step, LaTeX is rendering this file into a pdf file similar to the ps2ascii utility.

In contrast to the MS-Word software the user never creates something in LaTeX but he creates the textfile for LaTeX. The text is written in additional software like the texnic center. And this explain what the idea behind LaTeX is. The user has to prepare the text in an outliner software and then it gets rendered into the pdf format.

Bascially spoken, creating something in LaTeX is not about the formatting itself but the more interesting point is, which sort of functionality is needed outside the latex software. The functionality is provided by so called outliner programs. That is a sort of software which makes it easy to create a longer text in structured way. Structured means that the contains of hierarchical sections, tables and references.

To understand how the process works let us imagine a world in which latex is not available. The idea is the user creates the text in the emacs org mode, then exports it into the markdown format and then renders the markdown textfile into the pdf format with an external program whcih is not latex but a different tool. The user will spend most of the text for creating the text in emacs. That means, the org mode environment is the software in which the text was created. Similar to other outliner programs like cherrytree, the user won't miss a page oriented layout, but outline means that a draft of the text is created.

There is a reason why apart from the famous ms word software, even under Windows and MacOS many external outliner programs like citavi, scrivener or omnioutliner are available. These programs are calling themself authoring tools. The idea is, that in the first phase of writing a document only the content is important and the layout gets ignored. For example, the cherrytree outline isn't able to format a simple two column layout or create the hyphens for a paragraph. That means, cherrytree is a poor choice for formatting the text on the screen and it was never created for this purpose.

Let us describe in general what outliner software is about. These programs were become famous for it's pane on the left screen which shows the document structure. The user can navigate in the document tree and shuffle the sections. Many features or even all features of a desktop publishing software are missing in an outliner program. Cherry tree doesn't even know what kerning is or how to embedded a type1 font. That means all the important features used for creating a book are not there. How can it be that the software is used in the reality if it has a low amount of features? Because cherrytree and other outliner programs are focused on the text itself. There is a distinction between creating the raw text and formatting the text into a pdf document.

From an authors perspective, a book or journal is not created with a desktop publishing software but with a normal text editor aka an outliner software. What an author is doing is not to create a pdf file but the author creates a 300 kb long plain ascii file. The interesting situation is, that even in the world of MS-Word and Indesign there is a clear distinction between creating the text itself and rendering the text into a pdf file. For example the indesign software has an often used function to import plain ascii files. That means, somebody else has to create the .txt file before and then it can be imported.