Why TeX Still Matters in 2026

Why TeX Still Matters in 2026

When Donald Knuth released the first version of TeX in 1978, he had one goal: to typeset his own books beautifully. Forty-eight years later, his creation remains the gold standard for mathematical and scientific typesetting.[1]

The precision problem

Word processors and web browsers are optimized for reflow, not for precision. A paragraph in Google Docs looks different on every screen. TeX, by contrast, solves a global optimisation problem: it computes line breaks for the entire paragraph at once, producing results that professional typographers have described as “impossible to achieve by hand”.[2]

The difference is measurable. In a 2013 study comparing reading speed across typesetting engines, TeX-set text outperformed browser-rendered text by 12% on long-form reading tasks.[3]

The formula factor

For anyone who writes mathematics, TeX is not a choice—it is the infrastructure. Inline math like $E = mc^2$ and display equations

$$\int_0^1 x^2 \, dx = \frac{1}{3}$$

No other system offers this consistency across output formats—paper, PDF, and MathML-capable browsers alike.[4]

Static sites and the TeX renaissance

Pandoc, a universal document converter, made it practical to author in TeX and publish to the web. The tool translates LaTeX sources into HTML5 with MathML, preserving both structure and semantics.[5] Combined with a static-site generator, this gives authors the best of both worlds: TeX’s typesetting quality at edit time, and the web’s reach at publish time.

Why bother?

Sceptics ask: if Medium and Notion already exist, why write in TeX? The answer is longevity. A .tex file written in 1984 compiles today and will compile in 2034. Proprietary formats come and go; plain-text sources with explicit markup survive.[1]

Beyond longevity, there is craft. Writing in TeX forces the author to think about structure before styling—a discipline that improves both prose and presentation.

What comes next

The ecosystem continues to grow. Modern engines like xelatex support Unicode and OpenType fonts natively, tools like latexmk automate multi-pass compilation, and projects like this very site demonstrate that TeX and the web are not competitors—they are complementary technologies.[5]

• TeX — precision typesetting and mathematics

• Pandoc — universal format conversion

• Static generators — fast, secure, version-controlled publishing

• MathML — accessible math on the web

That is the stack I chose for this site. It works.