# TeX

27 Hacker News commenters recommended TeX and 12 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 10 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Free typesetting system praised for unmatched typesetting quality and stability, especially for mathematics; the language is widely criticized as hard to program.

## Why people recommend it

- Typesetting quality still unbeaten (3 comments): "It's typesetting quality is still unbeaten by any of its competitors though, even 50 years after its first release." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48486787)) "TeX and LaTeX are ancient and produce better looking results than any book I've ever read" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47838170)) "its real value was in the quality of its typesetting" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48053143))
- Stable and maintained for decades (3 comments): "The LaTeX kernel and the TeX engines are more stable than nearly all other software" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48515159)) "TeX's 50-year history of volunteer maintainership" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48517310)) "if you are looking for stability, look no further" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46023346))
- Strong for maths and aligned tables (2 comments): "I still find it easier to align tables with numbers in TeX on the decimal point than in anything else." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48056280)) "TeX still dominates mathematical typesetting AFAIK" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45974915))
- De facto standard for technical writing (2 comments): "I'd always recommend and use a TeX-based document layout system" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46438015)) "LaTeX and TeX are the de facto standard for this context" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46180224))

## What people warn about

- Messy macros that fail badly (3 comments): "TeX macros and C #defines especially when nested and/or not properly bracketed to allow nesting are a mess when things go wrong." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48596977)) "TeX's macro-centric hell pounded into passable utility" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48049095)) "had to lose sanity for it to even work semi well" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47272566))
- Poor language, cursed to program (4 comments): "It's not a very good programming language, but people have implemented floating-point math" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47931085)) "it’s a cursed way to do programming and has no parallel in any other programming paradigm" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48513684)) "Hard agree about TeX the language and tooling." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47430485))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Typst](https://hackerapproved.com/p/typst.md): 205 recommend
- [LaTeX](https://hackerapproved.com/p/latex.md): 137 recommend
- [Quarto](https://hackerapproved.com/p/quarto.md): 27 recommend
- [TeXmacs](https://hackerapproved.com/p/gnu-texmacs.md): 19 recommend
- [TeX Live](https://hackerapproved.com/p/tex-live.md): 10 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "TeX", https://hackerapproved.com/p/tex/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).