Tex vs. Latex: Is it worth the change? [closed]

Question

I have been producing documents (both mathematical and non-mathematical) with Latex for about two years, and I feel rather confortable with it. Now I would like to learn Tex, but I wonder if there are any real reasons to do it rather than just for the fun of it... Is there really anyone using Tex when that person could well be using Latex?

Answer 1

"Learn TeX only if you would like to become a typesetter",

this is a memorable sentence our school project leader answered this question to my colleague years ago... :-)

LaTeX will do the job 99% people need. There is a perfect book about TeX - TexBook naruby, unfortunatelly in Czech only (I doubt it was translated). But just look at it just to get shocked and assure that you really don't want to learn TeX :-)

Answer 2

Advantage of plain tex over latex

reference: http://www.tug.org/pipermail/texhax/2009-October/013645.html

LaTeX moreover, gives very limited access to the features of the TeX engine. This is just due to the effiency idea of LaTeX. When most urgent things have been done and you can afford spending some time learning about what is behind LaTeX and what TeX really offers.

This may help you in understanding difficulties with LaTeX, why you need some extra packages for certain fine tuning, you may then mix Plain TeX code into your LaTeX code for fine tuning, you can write your own LaTeX packages getting more control of TeX ...