big-listtex-general
Most people use TeX and its many varieties to create printed documents, such as reports, books, flyer's, etc. Occasionally, I have found software that uses TeX markup for other purposes, for e.g., the flashcard software, Anki can use TeX to render on-screen flash cards.
I'm a minister of religion and I use LaTeX for both sermons and theological papers. I keep all my work in version control and the plain text format just makes so much more sense than a word processor.
I'd love an excuse to put some mathematical notation into a sermon one day, but I'm yet to find one.
One area of TeX which needs to be improved is math spacing (starting from 2007, Word does better than TeX in this area). The TeXbook (in chapter 18) recommends quite a few manual adjustments most which could (and thus should) be automated (and the list is not complete). Here are a few examples, with the correct spacing below (the cos²+sin² is a bit subtle as it’s a thin space instead of a medium space, but it is an important change since it also changes the shrinking and stretching values):
The problem is that the 8 spacing classes (\mathord, \mathop, \mathbin, \mathrel, \mathopen, \mathclose, \mathpunct and \mathinner) are not enough to cover all the cases. You would need at least the following supplementary classes: \mathnull (no spacing at all, for / and the backslash used as quotient), \mathfact (for factorials), \mathsqrt (for square roots) \mathdiff (for differentials in integrals) and \mathdpunct (for double punctuation like : and ; in French typography, in which you want a thin space both after and before).
Best Answer
One, very incredible solution to an ICFP contest was created by Steve Hicks.
He did an amazing job by coding a Mars rover guidance bot.
See: http://sdh33b.blogspot.com/2008/07/icfp-contest-2008.html
He has shared his code and written about it in the above link.
This clearly shows that
TeXis not just for typesetting (although it clearly is best at that!).