I was watching Luke Smith on YouTube touting R-Markdown as a better alternative to LaTeX, and I was struck by his declaration,
Now, the thing about LaTeX, and it's always the elephant in the room when you're talking about LaTeX, is that a lot of the basics, it, well, let's put it this way, LaTeX is great for making research papers and term papers and doin' advanced projects 'n' stuff like that, but LaTeX syntax is very cumbersome. So if I just wanna make a shopping list in LaTeX or something, I mean, I wouldn't make a shop, I make shopping lists on this [holding up a pad of paper], but, if I wanted to make a really simple document to give to my students or uh, you know, to give, you know, just a memorandum or something like that, uh, LaTeX is a pain because you can't just open it up and start writing, you have to
\documentclass{article} \begin{document} \end{document}, all this kind of stuff, uh, to do thangs like bold, italics, you have to literally go in and write/textbf{bla bla bla}, and you know the backslash, it's like the most annoying key on the computer to actually, like, hit.
I thought I'd check to see if he was right, so I ran emacs
shoppinglist.tex and typed
C-c C-e <return> <return> <return> C-c C-e <return>
c a r n e C-c C-j h u e v o s C-c C-j p o l l o C-c
C-b <return> <return> C-c C-b <return> C-c C-b <return>
<return>
which produced this shopping list, rendered and on the screen in an xdvi window:
\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
\begin{itemize}
\item carne
\item huevos
\item pollo
\end{itemize}
\end{document}
It took about 30 seconds, but 10 of those were starting up a new Emacs so that I could time the process more easily.
The initial ^C^E prompted me for the environment name (default
document) and documentclass (default article) and options (default
none). The second ^C^E prompted me for another environment name; as
it happened the default was itemize because the last thing I'd done
in LaTeX was also to make a list, so I just hit <return> again. The
^C^J is the sequence to separate list items. Then the ^C^B sequences
run latex and xdvi to see the rendered document.
Unsurprisingly he's also wrong about "things like bold, italics";
although you can \textbf if you want, it's probably easier to say
PUAs are {\bf losers}.
Which renders as, "PUAs are losers." It's two characters longer than the Markdown version, admittedly, and I do like Markdown a lot, but I think LaTeX is getting a bad rap here. You can totally write your shopping lists in LaTeX --- it's not quite as easy as writing them in Markdown but the difference is very small. Maybe 10 seconds of overhead.
Where LaTeX becomes difficult is when you're trying to do more complex things in it. Markdown saves you time there because you know you can't do complex things at all in Markdown, so you don't try.
The major advantage of R-Markdown from my point of view is that you can embed your R code in it.