Have you ever tried to typeset a complex document with side bars, figures, multi-part figures, figures that contain math (not just images), and layouts that take a lot of tweaking to get just right?

I can imagine doing that in Pandoc Markdown, but only with extensive use of raw LaTeX code. Most of the above doesn't have a direct equivalent even in richer Markdown dialects like Pandoc.

Ah, thanks for educating me. I pity anyone who has to work within the constraints of print in 2018. To me, hypertext that adapts to the user's device and needs (e.g. rendering at a different font size and reflowing appropriately, or rendering through non-visual means like speech and braille) is the only way to go these days.

To be fair to latex, the majority of hypertext examples don't do any of those things either.

It's harder to make fine adjustments, such as those made by the microtype latex package.

Aside from what other commenters told you: LaTeX just typesets better, meaning that it will choose line-breaks, inter-character and inter-word spacing, ligatures, hyphenation, etc. much better than your regular browser.

Try justifying text on a relatively narrow column in HTML, and then try it with LaTeX. There's a world of difference in readability between them.

> Why is LaTeX unambiguously better for print? Is it just the support for math notation, or is there more to it?

LaTeX is techniques and heuristics from hundreds of years of typesetting for print, codified into a program.

HTML is at most 29 years old, and has only supported typesetting of any kind for a fraction of that. What typesetting capabilities it supports are designed by committees, and its primary purpose has always been screen display, never print.

In the simplest/best case, LaTeX will simply produce nicer-looking results for print. In more complex/worse cases, LaTeX can do things that HTML in a browser can't reasonably do at all for print, even with CSS.

> And since "print" very often means a PDF that's also available online, has there been any progress on tagged PDF support in pdflatex or a similar tool? This is important for accessibility.

I can't answer this question directly because it's been a while since I attempted such a thing, but this is largely what I was joking about with the "the project is going down in flames" bit in my previous post. If you are concerned about accessibility, targeting a proprietary format that resists parsing for text-to-speech or fragment translation and doesn't support variable-width lines for screen readers is a bad idea. Tagged PDFs are really just a hacky attempt to fix the problem: HTML was designed with accessibility in mind from the beginning (though admittedly HTML/CSS/JS as used by modern websites do a very poor job of providing accessibility). Maybe there has been progress in adding this to pdflatex, but it's still a bad idea.

Knuth said that doculents should be readable, but artvto be hanged on a wall.

Typesetting my thesis in LaTeX (physics, 2000) was an amazing choice. I could hardly modify anything (it is doable but requires a lot of work and in the meantime you learn that the default is better) so I was left with the content.

I knew that it would just work and took from me all the philosophical sufferingbof choosing such and such fontvsize for the title of adjusting margins, or placing a graph.