Ah, I see. Makes sense. I have seen some horrible LaTeX code at uni where someone didn’t follow your simple rule:
let LaTeX do it’s job.
The decision LaTeX makes are often very good, and the problem is often that what one thinks is better comes with even bigger downsides.
Now, once we get into tables… Ugh
Currently working in LaTeX for work.
I don’t think you really need looseness (I assume you want to avoid single lines?), you can rather increase the badness of them so that they’re avoided through other means.
Manual line breaks I only use in tables (thanks tabularray author). In text, I don’t think I have any.
Negative vspace I also don’t have, what’s your use case? I can imagine it for very specific tasks (a special page like a title page it something similar where everything is set very precisely) but for normal writing, I didn’t encounter it.
All in all, I think LaTeX shows its age, but the huge ecosystem is the main reason it’s still a good choice despite a little of shortcomings like the arcane macro system, features that are seemingly impossible to implement like accessibility (
(but it’s still leagues ahead of word)
My current document approached 50 pages with about 10 tables, 3 figures (tikz) and 10 bibliography entries and it’s perfectly handleable. Just informing having to do that with word gives me agony. I worked on the same type of document in word that was kind of an earlier draft by someone else and stuff broke left and right, and that was without the more complex formatting that I later employed.
As someone else answered, I’m also looking forward to typst. Unfortunately, PDFs generated by it are currently much larger than through LaTeX (https://github.com/typst/typst/issues/895, fix currently not in any stable version) and package import is a preview. Some features aren’t implemented yet but would be really nice, the syntax seems really sane and it’s fast, so I’m optimistic it can become a strong contender.
Hence the comment about “bias automation”
Is it though? Normally it’s ironic: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/stop-doing-math