Be Aware of the Makefile Effect

Another factor is frequency of use. I use LaTeX to do big write-ups on the order of once per year or less. LaTeX at the level I use it is not a hard tool, but I generally start a new document by copy-pasting a previous document because there is a lot of detail about how to use it that I'm never going to remember given that I only use it for a few weeks once a year.

I usually try to avoid the "makefile effect" by learning the technolgoy I use reasonably frequently (like e.g. Makefiles, Shell Scripts, ...).

However, despite the fact that I used to use LaTeX very much, I always copy-pasted from a template. It is even worse with beamer presentations and TikZ pictures where I would copy-paste from a previous presentation or picture rather than a template.

For TikZ I am pretty sure that the tool is inherently complex and I just haven't spent enough time to learn it properly.

For LaTeX I have certainly spent enough time on learning it so I wonder whether it might be something different.

In my opinion it could very well be a matter of “(in)sane defaults”. Good tools should come with good defaults. However, LaTeX is not a good tool wrt. this metric, because basically all my documents start something like

~~~ \documentclass[paper=a4, DIV9, 12pt, abstracton, headings=normal, captions=tableheading]{scrartcl} \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} \usepackage[english,german,ngerman]{babel} \usepackage[english,german]{fancyref} % ... \usepackage{microtype} \usepackage{hyperref} ~~~

Most of this is to get some basic non-ASCII support that is needed for my native tongue or enable some sane defaults (A4 paper, microtype...) which in a modern tool like e.g. pandoc/markdown may not be needed...

Hence the purpose of copy-pasing the stuff around is often to get good defaults which a better tool might give you right out of the box (then without copy/paste).