20

Are there any statistics about the use of LaTeX in the world?

In which countries? In which journals/fields of research? Number of articles using LaTeX? etc.?

Johannes_B
  • 24,235
  • 10
  • 93
  • 248
Tal Galili
  • 1,389

3 Answers3

14

Brischoux and Legagneux (2009) surveyed the submission rate in LaTeX of ten randomly selected journals from each of 13 different scientic disciplines of the ISI Web of Knowledge database.

They found that apart from Mathematics (97%), Statistics (89%), and Physics (74%) and to some extent Computer Science (45%) most fields in the natural sciences (including Psychology) did not use LaTeX at all for papers submitted to journals.

Alan Munn
  • 218,180
imnothere
  • 14,215
  • 1
    Link is broken. – Alan Munn Jul 28 '23 at 18:39
  • 1
    @AlanMunn Here is a link to the article. It's not official so not sure if I should edit it in. The official version is behind a paywall – mbert Jul 28 '23 at 20:02
  • 2
    @mbert Thanks. I've added a bit more detail from the paper and one of the authors' Research Gate link to the paper (which requires a request, but is better than nothing, and somewhat more permanent.) You can leave your very helpful comment so that people can follow the unofficial link. – Alan Munn Jul 29 '23 at 14:15
6

Total LaTeX usage

Although it's an imperfect proxy of LaTeX usage, we can estimate the relative growth of LaTeX along with the growth of the number of Overleaf users:

So, Overleaf grows by roughly 2 million users per year, which has a certain sense to it—after all, every year, newly matriculated undergrads and grad students are introduced to LaTeX for the first time, and therefore create new accounts at a more or less constant rate.

Which countries?

There are several populations we can use to estimate the overall geographic diversity of LaTeX users.

TeX user groups

There are 28 TeX user groups spread across the world. Some of these groups are transnational, but the largest by far is the Chinese TeX Society (CTeX) with roughly 20000 members, followed by DANTE (Germany) with 2000 members, and TUG (US and international) with 1200 members.

Overleaf users

Overleaf users account for at least 189 different countries. For comparison, there are 193 nations represented in the United Nations.

TeX StackExchange users

According to this query of users' location data in their TeX StackExchange profile, of users with reputation of two or greater and a known location, the nations with the greatest representation are the United States (19%), Germany (13%), the UK (9%), and India (7%). I originally got these numbers from this Meta post.

Some parts of the query seem a little questionable, like how all users from "North America" are assumed to be from the United States, but this generally agrees with Similarweb, which gives 23% of all TeX StackExchange visits as from the United States, followed by 8% from Germany and 6.6% from India. There's probably some selection bias towards Anglophone countries because this is an English-speaking site.

Overall, it's pretty safe to say that LaTeX is used globally, although I'd still imagine usage is more skewed towards Anglophone communities, given that macro names, error messages, documentation, the TeXbook, etc. are all in English.

gz839918
  • 1,938
  • 1
    Most major programming languages in use today are expressed in (US) English: I won't say that e.g. C or Python are only used by Anglophones because of the language thy are written in – Joseph Wright Sep 09 '23 at 16:42
2

this question comes up from time to time since years. There exists no statistic about the use of TeX and friends.