I feel that my next frontier of hacker learning is #TeX. It feels (at least from the distance I'm at right now) like the next level in text formatting and publishing. I have a feeling it might be as revolutionary as when I learned #vim after using nano/gedit for years.
For a person who doesn't write "publishing" documents very often, is it worthy?
@kzimmermann The last time I really needed (La)TeX was in university, and it’s been pretty helpful back then.
However, these days, as a senior dev, I don’t really need it anymore. Nothing I write ends up on paper or in PDFs anymore, everything is in code repos and ticket systems, so all I’m writing these days is Markdown.
If it’s interesting to you, don’t let me keep you from learning it though! It can be rough to get certain things working, but if you learned Vim, you can do this too ;)
@kzimmermann I personally – having experimented with all kinds of other things including FOP – think it's still about the only game in town if you want version-controllable documents rendering to nice PDFs, at least when math and/or bibliography is in the picture. But there's another, more hackerish reason you get to appreciate in particular when reading Knuth's TeXbook: It's a programming language based on text expansion. I found that eye-opening.
@Anselm thanks for the suggestion of the book. I also think it's going to be a real eye-opener in terms of hacker-value, just don't know exactly how to start :D
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