I was a math major in undergrad, we care about typesetting so much because you really do not want to be stuck handwriting everything, but it's not easy to be faster typing than you are with handwriting when you're writing out rows and rows of equations. (Actually physics was generally a lot harder for me to keep up with while typing than math was.)

And when your life is revolving around classes or your thesis, the #1 most important thing to you in the world is how easily you can transfer your ideas to paper/digital format. It makes a lot of sense that people care a lot about the quality of their typesetting engine and exchange macro tips with each other (I got a lot of helpful advice from friends, and my default latex header was about 50% my own stuff and 50% copied from friends in my same major)

It's because LaTeX gives us a sense of legitimacy. (it's also why people go overboard with math notation in LaTeX documents, even when prose is more appropriate).

It produces documents that look like those produced by professors, and luminaries in the field. If you write equations in Word Equation Editor, your work just doesn't look very serious.

It's the same joy I felt when I laser-printed my first newsletter designed in Aldus PageMaker. I was only in my teens but I felt like a "professional".

Time spent on typesetting produces immediately visible results (however minor). Actual research doesn’t. It’s the classic feedback loop problem, so like you said, procrastinating students devote lots of time to largely pointless but seemingly productive activities like typesetting.

I was there once. In hindsight all the tweaks were a complete waste of time. All I needed was amsart, plus beamer for slides.

This is not limited to CS or Latex in any way. Plenty of students spend a lot of time fiddling with word, powerpoint, note taking systems, citation management (which is surprisingly horrible in MS word), Adobe software etc..

Obvious reasons:

- Your thesis is a major output of years of work. Of course you want it to look good.

- You might think it superficial, but if the presentation looks bad, many people (subconsciously) interpret this as a lack of care and attention. Just like an email with typos feels unprofessional even if the content is otherwise fine.

- Spending time on tooling feels productive even if it is not past a certain point.

- People that are into typesetting now have an excuse to spend time on it.

That said, in my experience people spent a few hours to learn "enough" latex several years ago and almost never write any macros. Simple reason: you work with other people and different journal templates, so the less custom code the better.

A small, but important aspect of typesetting/WYSIWYM is the ability to break down a large document (like a thesis) into discrete sub-components. You could work on each section of your document in an individual .tex file and include it later in your top-level .tex file. This setup works well with VCS like git.

Another ergonomic benefit is scripting. For example, if I'm running a series of scripts to generate figures/plots, LaTeX will pick up on the new files (if the filename is unmodified) and update those figures after recompiling. This is preferable to scrolling through a large document in MS Word and attempting to update each figure individually.

As the size and figure count of your document increases, the ergonomics in MS Word degrade. The initial setup effort in LaTeX becomes minimal as this cost is "amortized" over the document.

Another reason to use LaTeX for papers back in the day was that Microsoft Word would routinely corrupt large documents in terrifying ways. Sometimes the root of the corruption existed in the document somehow long before any of it was visible, so even recovering from an old backup would just lead to the problem repeating. I recall the only way to properly "recover" an old backup was to copy it all via plain text (e.g. Notepad), and then back into a brand new Word document.

This is all to say, if you're working on a theis or even a moderately large assignment, working in Word was not good for the nerves.

Looking back, I probably should have just worked in plain text and then worried about formatting only at the very end, but ummm, yes, I guess another hapless victim did indeed fall into LaTeX's trap. :)

From watching people write their thesis in both latex and word, I'd say if anything it is the other way around. The people who write their thesis in word (or another wysiwyg editor) spend more time on their layout than the people writing in latex. Worse, they spend the time while writing, while latex allows for separation of tasks, which allows people to get into the flow much more easily.

Sure, theoretically you can only concentrate on writing with word and ignore layout. In practice in takes a lot of discipline so instead you see people moving figures around putting spaces or returns to move a heading where they want to etc.. In particular as a way to procrastinate from actual writing.

LaTeX typesetting is a solved problem. Memoir or Classic Thesis, paired with microtype, provide outstanding results and you need to spend zero time on tweaking stuff.

Typst is interesting, but it doesn't yet support all microtypography features provided by microtype. IMHO, those make a big difference.

I wrote my joint med-CS honours (1 year research thing we have in Aus) thesis in Word. My med supervisor was happy with it. CS supervised insisted I reformat it in LaTeX as he couldn't stand the typesetting.

Honestly I don't disagree with him, it looked far better in 'TeX. But that's probably a learnt preference.

In essence, it's culture.

Not all of us fell into that trap! My dissertation was written almost entirely using a default document class and a handful of packages, and only towards the end did I apply the university document style to come into compliance. I had more than enough to do on the subject of the PhD and didn’t have the patience to burn time on typesetting or fiddling with macros.

I’ve found in the decades since then that my most productive co-authors have been the ones who don’t think about typesetting and just use the basics. The ones who obsess over things like tikz or fancy macros for things like source layout and such: they get annoying fast.

>> Why do CS doctoral candidates have such a fascination with typesetting?

Probably because Donald Knuth created TeX and Leslie Lamport created LaTeX.

Two of the greatest minds in Computer Science created the tools and used them to write papers and articles that are beautiful.

Elegant ideas presented beautifully make reading and writing papers a nicer experience.

I don't know about now but in 2000s anything even remotely math-related was PURE PAIN in Word-likes.

In my master's there were like 30 pages of formulas, all interdependent. Typing/retyping these would take forever.

Also, something as simple as having per-chapter files or working with an acceptable editor also helps.

I give 0 fs about typesetting. But typical mainstream software just cannot freaking process a 500 page document with tables, figures, references, equations etc. If Word/Pages/Openoffice/GoogleDocs could do it, no sane person would sink 100’s of hours in debugging latex out of memory errors.

But once you are in the latex world you start noticing how much prettier things can be. And then you end up sinking another thousand hours to perfectly aligning the summations in your multi-line equations.

For me personally, I have yet to figure out how to get a word processor to have text be justified on both sides without inserting big gaps between words. I could use left justified but then the text ends up looking like a saw blade, which is still ugly.

Latex' handling of floating figures and tables is also much better.

And of course math notation is much nicer to work with in LaTeX (IMO).

> Why do CS doctoral candidates have such a fascination with typesetting?

Same reason wantrepreneurs have a fascination with adding dark mode to their CSS. It feels productive while you avoid the real work.

Here it's typical that a thesis will be printed as a book, and it's that book that will be evaluated. For PhDs, there's a doctoral defence in front of a committee, peers and other interested parties and they're all given the book.

Usually the process for ordering books is that you send them a PDF with embedded fonts inside it, and it's made at the university's printing house. They will handle distribution etc. So you really, really want it to look right at the first go.

There's been some progress the past few years now where you get to preview the book somewhat, but one surefire way to get it right is to use something like LaTeX. It used to be one of few WYSIWYG solutions out there. And it used to be really hard to do certain required things in e.g. Word. For instance skipping some page numbering and doing others in roman numerals etc.

Why does the premier word processing software (Microsoft Word) care so little about typesetting?

I am biased however, as my thesis was written in LaTeX with all the plots regenerated at compile time from the raw data.

I guess monks were procrastinating likewise when they illuminated their manuscripts.

First, you have to (or at least - you had to). I mean, it was the only way to sanely include a lot of formulae and managing bibliography.

Then you discover that is id beautiful. Honestly, even using base style sets you above the typesetting of books. With some extra tweaks, it is beautiful.

Did I spend a lot of time on LaTeX during my PhD. Sure! But (even counting in all masochism involved into dealing with LaTeX) I both cherish this time, and the results.

Because it's not particularly fun to edit a typo and have your layout completely messed up 10 pages later, which you have no chance of noticing unless a full review.

And publishing is the primary way academics communicate en large - it's kinda important to be able write your specific notation without resorting to drawing on paper.

The typesetting is finished whenever you want it to be. I spend most of my time thinking about the content.

People who are fascinated with LaTeX are gearhead types. Just the same as photographers who care more about their cameras or chefs who care more about their knives.

When I was in college I found out that I have better reading experience reading LaTeX typsetted books. That's why I prefer to read Springer published reference books rather than class recommended books.

Well during 5 years of undergrad reports and papers, then 5 years of PhD thesis papers, you do tend to hoard some useful snippets, it is more of a byproduct than a fixation... at least for me.

It's like developers obsessing over their tools, so i get it.

I have often thought that LaTEX' distinctive font and formatting is either a virtue signal or an in-group signal.

> Why do CS doctoral candidates have such a fascination with typesetting?

Why does anyone care about typesetting? Probably because they spend a lot of time working with text and have therefore developed a level of taste.

Just because the bottom 80% of consumers have zero taste and will accept any slop you give them doesn't mean there isn't value in doing something only appreciated by the top 20%. In any field, not just typesetting. Most people have ~no refined endogenous preferences for food, art, music, etc.

I find it odd too. The fascination with typesetting limits the paper’s usability on narrower devices which seems a very strange position for engineers.