Why You Should Use Latex
Categories:
LaTeX
Some pronounce it ‘LAA-Tech’, I prefer ‘Lay-Tech’, never ’lay-techs’ that’s the rubber. Latex is amazing, it has sort of a cult following among physicists. Actually a cult, in my undergrad we couldn’t hand in papers unless they were done using LaTeX (the TAs would check the properties section of a PDF to make sure).
What and Why
Skip unless you need convincing LaTeX is a good idea
LaTeX is a typesetting language that lets you specify how a generated document is supposed to look. What you are reading right now is an example of a typesetting language called HTML, you can see how the web page is actually written by right clicking and selecting ‘view-source’. Microsoft Office and Adobe are the main alternatives but are examples of GUI (graphical user interface) programs, referred to as WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) programs. None of that matters, what matters is that LaTeX gives you complete control over how your document is supposed to look. With a GUI, for instance, you specify where an image, table, etc. is supposed to go by ‘dragging-and-dropping’ it where you want it. You would then drag then use a drop-down menu to resize it or whatever. When you want to change a figure caption number you need to find every instance and change it. To move an image or resize it you INEVITABLY ruin the nicely done formatting below it. To reformat the document you need to do it all by hand again. This is, of course, utter nonsense. With LaTeX you could instead be suffering from a whole slew of different problems instead.
Benefits of LaTeX
One of the best benefits of LaTeX is quick reformatting and safe fixes. You style your document with a style class (usually a .cls, an example is Fig. 1). The document is written and formatted using macros (see more on macros at wikibooks). These are defined in the class definition and include things like the front page, page headers and footers, etc. Anything that isn’t just literal text or images is usually a macro.
In the document class definition, you set up your document, and can make reusable document templates that will always look the same. I’ve put up some examples of documents on GitHub and intend to continue to add them when I make or come across a good one.
For beginners, you don’t have to worry about this, but you should know how it works so that as you get more comfortable with it you can start taking more control of your documents. As a start, the common built-in classes such as article or book are good enough for most people to get their feet wet. You might also want to use the classes made by other people at the start.
LaTeX is straightforward, powerful, and can be a huge time saver. I have to admit that there is an admittedly steep learning curve for those unfamiliar with any sort of programming. However, its power, beauty, and time-saving capabilities should not be ignored. There’s more effort up front, but it’s hugely beneficial in the long run.
Getting Started With LaTeX
Convinced? No? Whatever. Willing to try it?
Non-programmers
I recommend downloading TexStudio which is available on pretty much every operating system out there. It comes with a text editor, spell checker, etc. For those on Windows, it comes all ready to go. For those on Linux, you need to also install tex-live which is available from all the distribution repos.
TexStudio has all the comfort features to get started. You can start immediately after some tinkering. They include templates for you to start hacking up. Give it a shot for your next paper, they will look wonderful.
Programmers
You can use your favorite editor to write the tex files then run the command line compiler. The compilers are distributed by texlive and can be downloaded from your distro’s repo, or from here.
There are a few different compilers that come with texlive, the usual one is pdflatex. There is also XeLaTex and LuaLaTex as well as their Tex variants (you can look up the difference between Tex and LaTeX on your own). These tend to be useful when you’re doing something strange with your macros and you try all three to get one to compile (no this is not good programming practice but you’re already doing documentation so who’s counting?).
Conclusion
Start hacking with LaTeX, it WILL repay your time if you write a lot of papers or even a single research paper. The way that it makes references, equations, item numbering and referencing, tables, etc. will save you 10, 20, 100X the time you spend learning it.
Checkout wikibooks for some great resources.