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LaTeX (pronounced [latech] – author’s note) is like a conductor leading an orchestra. You do not play every instrument yourself, you give the right signals, and everything comes together in harmony on the page. That means that LaTeX users usually do not format text by directly changing its visual appearance on the page, as they often would in tools like Microsoft Word. Instead, they write the text together with markup commands that describe the structure or function of each part, and LaTeX then turns that into formatted output. It is particularly useful for complex documents in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, the so-called STEM disciplines, formatting neatly formulas and calculations. But its relevance spans further beyond these fields.

Frank Mittelbach, one of the key figures in global digital typography and the long-time coordinator of the LaTeX typesetting system’s development, came to Brno to receive an honorary doctorate from Masaryk University. He also used this opportunity to meet with academics and students of the Faculty of Informatics of Masaryk University and to discuss LaTeX in this interview.

LaTeX has been used by researchers and students around the world for decades. What do you think has given it such lasting relevance and earned it the trust of the academic community?

LaTeX has endured due to its unmatched ability to produce precise, high-quality documents while letting authors focus on content and structure rather than formatting details.

Its trust comes from rock-solid stability—old documents still compile perfectly after decades—plus its extensibility through thousands of packages and seamless integration with tools like version control and collaborative platforms.

In academia, where reproducibility and longevity matter most, no other system matches this reliability or the typographical quality produced by LaTeX. And as academic publishing evolves toward open science and reproducible research, LaTeX is well-positioned to remain central.

When you look at LaTeX today, what feels most different from the time when you first became involved in its development?

Everything has changed — except LaTeX, in a sense. LaTeX has been a kind of fixed point over four decades in which the surrounding world changed dramatically. That is not to say that LaTeX itself has stayed still; it has evolved a great deal in response to its environment and its users. And it grew a lot: from a tool mainly for English speaking mathematicians and computer scientists to one serving people worldwide in various disciplines with over 5000 add-ons. Throughout that transformation it preserved its core values while adapting to new needs.

Can you walk us through this evolution in more detail?

When I started to get involved with computers and with TeX/LaTeX there was no Internet, no Windows PC, etc. Then the Internet gradually appeared, but initially computers from different countries couldn’t correctly understand files written in other countries and LaTeX had to invent methods to bridge this gap and enable more international communication.

Then computers got faster and faster and with it more complex tasks could be addressed. When I started with TeX we celebrated that it could typeset a page in less than 30 seconds and a printout on a needle printer took even longer. These days people get impatient if a document with a dozen pages takes more than a few seconds in total.

Throughout all these years new devices appeared, starting with Mainframes, Unix machines, Vaxes, etc., in the universities as well as in industry. Then PCs, Macs and then handhelds like smartphones and tablets. And basically on all of them TeX, and with it LaTeX, got implemented and used in one way or another.

In parallel to these new devices appearing and becoming supported, LaTeX evolved from university installations on mainframes and midsized computers (centralized installations managed by admins but used by users individually) to local installation on PCs etc (managed by individual users) and fairly recently also to a service approach on the Internet (managed again by admins), e.g., with companies like Overleaf. Across all these different platforms LaTeX supports collaboration seamlessly.

On the top of this continuous development of LaTeX, a major part of your recent work has focused on accessibility, i.e. for users of assistive technologies. Why is that? 

Information should be made available to everyone in the best possible way, not only to specific groups. Of course, advances in technology typically benefit some people more than others, at least initially.

For decades, STEM publishing focused on accurate visual presentation on paper or on screen, while other forms of access were often neglected, partly because existing solutions did not work well for complex scientific material and there was not enough commercial and other pressure to develop better solutions.

Excluding people from academic discourse is unacceptable, so improving accessibility is both a moral imperative and practical gain—it expands access and reuse for everyone, not just those with disabilities.

What has been the biggest challenge in making mathematics truly accessible in digital documents?

The hardest challenge was not really technical in the narrow sense. The main problem was that accessibility standards for PDF, which should have enabled real accessibility for mathematical documents, were not properly implemented for a long time in commercial or open source solutions, largely because there were so few such documents in practice. As a result, initially all workflows to process our improved digital documents fell flat on their face.

A substantial amount of the work was therefore about pushing industry to address the issue. That part remains important, although the situation has improved.

How do you see scholarly publishing changing at a time when openness, data sharing, and online accessibility are becoming increasingly important?

Scholarly publishing is moving toward a model in which the article is only one part of the research output. Data, code, supplementary material, and accessible formats are becoming more important, and that is a healthy development. Open workflows can improve transparency and reuse, but only if they are also sustainable and technically reliable. I think LaTeX will remain important because it supports structured, reproducible and high-quality content very well, and those qualities fit naturally with open science.

Have you encountered any surprising or unexpected use of LaTeX over the years, something that particularly stayed with you?

One of the most surprising things has always been how widely LaTeX has spread beyond the academic core. People use it for letters, presentations, exam papers, CVs, technical and non-technical manuals, novels, games, music scores, and even highly specialized niche workflows I would never have predicted. That breadth is remarkable because it shows that LaTeX is not just a mathematics tool, but a general system for high-quality structured documents. 

Just recently I came across a German company that produces all their product documentation for dozens of product lines in more than 150 languages, from data stored in databases and with LaTeX as the central tool of their automated workflows. The quality of the results were impressive and according to their CTO, the accuracy, quality, and speed to market they achieved would not have been possible without LaTeX as the central component.

Photo: Frank Mittelbach received an honorary doctorate from Masaryk University (19 March 2026)

When you look back at the cooperation between the international LaTeX community and Masaryk University, what do you see as its most important contributions?

In general, Masaryk University has been a true home for digital typography and the LaTeX community.

In particular, the development of pdfTeX and the evaluation and integration of the HZ algorithm into TeX by Hàn Thế Thành, as part of his master and PhD work supervised by Prof. Jiří Zlatuška, were hugely important. This work boosted adoption of TeX at the time, and without it TeX and, by extension, LaTeX would probably have become much less relevant over time and may well be marginalized by now.

What advice would you give to students and early-career researchers who want to use LaTeX effectively and see it as a helpful tool rather than just a requirement for writing theses and papers?

I would encourage students to learn the basics early, but learn them properly, e.g. to take a course such as https://learnlatex.org or read a good curated beginners book, and then grow into more advanced features only when they need them.

LaTeX is easiest to appreciate when you use it to focus on structure, consistency, and content rather than formatting. If you write regularly in LaTeX, use templates, version control, and a few well-chosen packages, it quickly becomes a tool that saves time and reduces errors. The key is not to aim for perfection from the start, but to build a workflow that helps you write better and more reliably.

Photo: visiting the Faculty of Informatics MU (18 March 2026)

What would you like students and academics at Masaryk University to take away from meeting you?

I would like them to take away three things:

• First, good tools matter because they shape how we think, write, and share knowledge.
• Second, that accessibility and quality are not optional extras, but part of responsible scholarly communication.
• Finally, pursuing your ideas and visions is worthwhile even if it takes a long time to see that they bear fruits. Producing intermediate results and refine them based on feedback and new insights is part of this process. Don’t wait for things to be perfect (they will never be) and you may not understand in which direction the perfection lies if you do not have your ideas challenged by others and refine them accordingly.

Thank you for the interview and I hope we will have the opportunity to welcome you at FI MU again soon.

Author: Marta Vrlová, Office for External Relations and Partnerships at FI MU

Photos:  Markus Kohz (AI extended), Jitka Janů and FI MU