Documents written 20 years ago in LaTeX are almost guaranteed to compile today. Compare this with a document produced using a word processor from 20 years ago, it is likely the software no longer exists and if it does, it has undergone so many changes that it may not display the document correctly.
For those with little experience beyond point and click interfaces on a computer, LaTeX has a significant learning curve to efficiently create documents. This may take differing amounts of time to surmount based on previous exposure to programming or command line operations. Time is often a luxury in a professional or academic setting, so it is one of the aims of this website to help ease new LaTeX users into the system by providing ready-made templates that can be quickly filled in by a novice.
For proofreading purposes, PDFs can be annotated with notes, highlights and lines to cross out text. Another option is to print the document and make annotations by hand. If a collaborator requests a document as a Word file, this represents further problems since both a PDF and LaTeX code are not easily translated to plain text and formatting will not be retained. Overleaf is a web platform that is tailored to collaboration on LaTeX documents so this may be a good solution if this is an issue for you.
In a word processor, when a change is made, it is immediately obvious what has been changed. In LaTeX, every change can only be seen after the document is compiled. This means LaTeX does not provide the immediate feedback that a word processor does, which adds another layer between the user and the document. This is both a blessing and a curse in that you are able to write without worrying about the look of the document and compile at a time when you are ready to see the document and add formatting, but when you do compile, you may see cryptic errors that can be difficult to diagnose or formatting that you need to manually adjust.
What is LaTeX? What I do requires me to produce many complicated tables with spanning elements, different alignment settings for different columns etc. These always cause me headache in Microsoft Word. Latex gives you more control as to how things should behave at a very micro level. It is also more transparent i. Sometimes in MS Word, things don't look right just because of some changes you have made but not aware of. In addition, many software packages support Latex so you can paste their outputs directly into your document.
This must have been covered by other people. But equation editing in Latex is very powerful. It does have a bit of a learning curve but, once you learn some basic syntax, it is much faster to write an equation in Latex compared to MS Word Equation Editor. Latex in general is quite intuitive if you have some basic programming skills. There are also many resources online such that you can get most of your questions answered by just putting them into a search engine.
In my opinion, Latex is the best system to typesetting that I have ever seen. Because the quality of its output is great. I strongly recommend you to use Latex and throw away systems like Word and Open office. If you have time to learn it, then Yes , you should shift from LibreOffice or Word etc.
It's all done in script, like html. All you see is Type until you render the results unless you have your LaTeX Front End automatically render it on the fly. If you answer 2 then you should send plain text manuscript off to a professional to have them do it for you, and done right.
If you are comfortable scripting html for instance or don't mind adjusting to it, then learn LaTeX. Just know that it's potentially more complex than html because of it's software system of package distribution, documentation and there is other related software in the TeX family.
LaTeX is just the most famous part of an entire Typesetting system, and it's really the only element most users need to know anything about. It's very easy for an Indie Publishing Company to efficiently create a standard "look and feel" for their family of books, customizing their LaTeX Preamble settings for the documents look and feel like their finger print.
Then, every time you need to create a new memo, it's as easy as opening notepad or any text editor, then clicking process and send via email. Suppose you work in I. With LaTeX, that task is a piece of cake, much easier than a word processor.
It works as a set of macro package programs that you use depending on the type and class of Look and Feel you expect from your type. So, due to it's packaging complexity, there will be a learning curve. But, you can start out writing a Professional Looking letter that says "Hello World" about as easily as writing an html page that displays the same stuff.
On the other hand, HTML typesets flowable, dimension-less text that falls into whatever the display size might be, 4" ebook reader or 24" computer monitor, for instance. That's the key output difference between html code and LaTeX code. So by default, the final Typeset product is a Technical or Academic Publication. Literary projects, like Novels, usually have simple typesetting requirements.
So, you will to have to add a few options to adjust the defaults for things like Chapter Headings. Word Processors only have a choice between flexible or monospace type. In Monospace every letter has the same width. Flexible type different letters have different widths, for instance an "i" is more narrow than a "w".
That's about it for a word processor. So depending on the line, it might reserve a different amount of space for a "w" on one line, verses another line that needs more letters to fit.
Plus, LaTeX has automatic hypenation by default, and the ability to add custom words and their hypenation points within the Hypenation Package. And, if that weren't all, LaTeX features a "glue" between paragraphs, that is a slightly different potential spacing between paragraphs so that "orphans" are not left on a page by them self.
Finding all the documentation for setting various options, especially with one set of very powerful packages within the "Koma Script Classes" will seem to be an obfuscation of know-how, but once you learn the few options you need for your document, then you have a keen new advantage in efficiency, after all, you won't have to spend anymore time tweeking fonts and sizes and spacing and the table of contents and the Page Headers and Footers and Page Numbering.
You've done the hard work once, and you can easily repeat the endeavor time and again, just as fast as you can type. And you can count on the result being a professional grade of typesetting that you don't have to pay a professional to do for you. Just consider LaTeX that professional, and always at your service. This is certainly a bit late to add a post to this question, but there is one advantage of using plain text sources that I didn't see in previous posts: it is very easy to make a search on dozens of file looking for a single word using external, console tools such as grep.
It is even very convenient to make serial changes with sed and awk. When writing my thesis, it was very quick to find among a huge amount of file the proper source and citation. It took much longer to find the same in my paper notes. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top.
Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Why should I use LaTeX? Ask Question. Asked 11 years, 3 months ago. Active 7 months ago.
Viewed k times. I have heard a lot about LaTeX , but never used it myself. Improve this question. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Now, you shouldn't use LaTeX if You don't have time to learn it.
Improve this answer. If you have a LaTeX document from 20 years ago it will still compile and output identical probably results; cf. I didn't mean that you cannot use it to store documents reliably of course you can! It's not that you can choose between saving as. LaTeX is more than that. I use Latex to make a web page. Even with the point and clicks systems, I find Latex easier.
What you care about is the design of the document". Very important point that too often gets neglected in the pray of LaTeX. I found LaTeX very frustrating in the beginning because of this issue; today I am still sometimes puzzled how complicated even small design wishes can be to implement. Nevertheless, I would never go back, as I am also still fascinated, how easy really complex tasks can be carried out.
Show 6 more comments. That is one of the reasons I came to LaTeX! Well, that may holds for simple documents and plain TeX, but if you go the LaTeX route and start using the newest and super-coolest packages, don't forget to archive them as well!
I have had a lot of troubles to get documents compilable again not to speak of getting exactly the same output that where less than five years old, but used packages like biblatex the libertine font or microtype features. Even with LaTeX, longevity is not granted for free! Still, it's much better than closed binary formats with which you'll have absolutely no chance. It's extremely stable, no matter how complex the documents are. It's free and Open Source, we can study and improve everything as we do on this site.
The compiler will do the rest. I know, there are plugins and solutions for MS Word and other text processors. But remember, for thirty years this problem has been solved in an easy way. And from my experience, these plugins result cumbersome.
You are using formulas. Every decent solution around to manage math formulas is based on LaTeX. Why not to use it directly? You need outprints with figures using the best quality possible. Formats such as SVG cannot be available for your text processor. Not many solutions around can offer something like this.
You want a free solution. You want it to be forward compatible. LaTeX has been around for more than thirty years. We can typeset really old documents and see how they were intended to be. One entry point several output formats. You want to forget about the document layout. No more paragraphs separated with double spacing instead of single space. This is the moment to start with LaTeX. You want your documents to stand out among others. And you will. LaTeX outcomes have a distinguishing quality and it is loved among practitioners.
You are considering to write a book, article, manuscript This is a common situation nowadays with the adoption of platforms such as Amazon Self Publishing. You have to think about what your experiments mean, think about a proper way to describe them, and all in a manner that is easily understandable. Whether you change the appearance of your headings, the style of your legends or the way you refer to your equations, changes will affect your whole document, thus the appearance will be consistent.
While it may take some time to get into LaTeX, you are rewarded with the security that there are no unintentional leftovers of your last-minute reformatting session. This will spare you time and nerves. In the end, we need those to troubleshoot our experiments — not our documents.
These are some of the advantages that I think make LaTeX an outstanding resource. Of course, there are many more. Have you worked with LaTeX yet? Tell us about your experiences with LaTeX as a tool for biological science!
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