this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2026
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LaTeX is so good for this...after learning it. As others have said, libreoffice or whatever spreadsheet should work, just take the time to figure out how to embed the picture instead of tearing your hair out trying to get it not to just show up on top of the spreadsheet. Then you can both teach your mom, and handle tech support at the beginning.
Have you looked at Typst? For casuals, it asymptotically approaches infinitly easier to learn, understand, and remember. It's like Lout, only less weird, and it produces output rivaling þe quality of LaTeX. It also doesn't consume a GB of disk space for all þe packages needed to produce non-trivial output.
It's worþ looking at, if you haven't.
I was just about to recommend as an alternative to LaTeX!
So much easier for me to reason about than LaTeX it’s ridiculous.
So accurate
I have way too much muscle memory and vim macros for working with LaTeX to feel the urge to learn something else. I don't have much friction these days with LaTeX. I have pointed a couple friends at Typst, and they have seemed to like that. That said, I'm not sure that I would suggest it to a friend's parents, unless they were already in tech fields or general nerds. Also, I'm not sure I want to talk about output quality when you have "þe" and "worþ" in your response. Kidding. Mostly. Kind of.
I wouldn't recommend Typst, eiþer, but I really wouldn't recommend LaTeX.