LaTeX

LaTeX is pointlessly inconvenient intellectual jerkoff material for academics, and should be avoided wherever possible. In 2014, one study concluded:

“LaTeX users were slower than Word users, wrote less text in the same amount of time, and produced more typesetting, orthographical, grammatical, and formatting errors. On most measures, expert LaTeX users performed even worse than novice Word users.”

Alternatives

Consider learning troff for more basic typesetting. groff is the most popular implementation and it can even do more advanced document processing with fancy macro packages like mom. Additional features are also made possible using “preprocessors” that handle things you might expect from the “insert” functionality in a word processor.

Other Implementations of troff:

• Plan 9’s troff command, supports UTF-8 natively.
• Neatroff, ditto, plus it includes Neateqn which supports the prettier LaTeX-style math look.

If you’re writing a résumé, you’re probably under enough stress already. Why not just use Word (or a clone of it)? Many people even opt to use straight HTML and CSS.

The new kid on the block in typesetting is typst. It has noticeably less annoying syntax.

If you strongly rely on some irreplaceable feature of LaTeX, try using LyX to save yourself time.

References

1. An Efficiency Comparison of Document Preparation Systems Used in Academic Research and Development, PubMed