Why I am pushing you to learn and use LaTeX? % ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Main reason You need to learn to type technical documents. There is no supply of jobs in the world where you can get away with hand-written, low quality, reports (or papers or whatever). If you are the "genius of the century", maybe people will tolerate you and spend the time required to decipher your squiggles. Most likely, though, you will be ignored, and have a hard time finding a technical job. Some documents do not require equations, or pictures (like this one), and then any text editor will do. But beyond this, simple text editors are not enough. % % ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Second reason When you give someone a barely readable document, the underlying message is: "I am too important to bother spending the time to make this readable to you". Do you really want to send this message out? % % ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ideal world considerations There are many ways out there to type technical documents; humanity has been doing this since the press was invented. However, here we are concerned about doing it in the computer era. For this you want something that is reliable; easy to use; produces nice output; can handle equations, formulas, and pictures; does not get silly "updates" every six months (making whatever you wrote a few years ago unreadable); it is cheap; etc. I will argue below that LaTeX does all of this (except for the "easy to use", on which: see the next topic). % % ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Practical considerations Forget about "easy to use". Technical documents are messy, they include formulas and pictures. Some software allow you to write formulas by picking symbols from a menu, and using the mouse to put them in place [or similar strategies]. This is "easy" to learn, but painfully slow anytime you have a nontrivial equation. Or a long calculation. Best way for equations is to forget about "baby easy" and go for something technical that allows you to "program" the equation. This is what TeX does. TeX was introduced by D. Knuth in 1968-1989 as a way to replace the way books were typeset at the time [very labor intensive, and involving hot metal]. TeX can do book level quality output, and gives the user massive (and precise, dot precise) control of what goes on the page. But TeX is not very user friendly; it is actually a full blown computer language whose intent is to typeset. You would have not much problem learning it, since you are technically minded and already know (or should know) other computer languages. But, to the less technically minded person, this is a huge obstacle. Hence LaTeX was born. LaTeX is a program on top of TeX, with lots of "macros" (pre-cooked instructions to do common things), to make life easier. LaTeX is still "technical", and there is a learning barrier to overcome, but even non-technical trained people can climb it ... and for you it should be a picnic. % % ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- LaTeX; pros and cons. The con: a) It is technical, and not "intuitive", but for someone with a technical background, not hard to learn. At least the basics. As far as I can see, it is the only con. The pros: b) It is FREE. There are versions available for Mac, Windows, and Linux. The Mac (MacTeX) and Windows (CTAN) versions are trivial to install. I have been using MacTeX for years; it is rock solid software. c) There is also a web-based version, called Overleaf. d) It is non-commercial software; not subject to pointless updates. See next topic. e) It is widely used in science and academics. For example: e1) Piazza has a mini-version of LaTeX within it, to write formulas. Not every LaTeX command is understood, but enough to write simple formulas. e2) Same with MatLab. In order to put formulas in titles and labels, MatLab accepts some LaTeX commands. f) Further down the line: many journals require LaTex when you send a paper. It is pretty much impossible to publish in technical science if you do not know LateX. Other areas [business, management, law ...] accept MicroSoft, but not much in technical areas. There is an economic reason for this: the step from LaTex/TeX to print is much smaller (specially if you have equations). g) There is even a GUI interface into LaTeX/TeX, called LyX. LyX works on the basis of WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean). It lowers the barrier to using LaTeX considerably. Unfortunately: g1) The LateX/TeX "under-the-hood" that LyX produces is not very human-readable, and rather crappy. g2) As far as I know, journals do not accept it. You will have to clean up the mess under the hood before you submit. And to clean it up you will need to know LaTeX anyway. Thus useful under some conditions, but not a replacement to LaTeX. h) This one is a subtle/technical advantage, but real. Often, when writing a technical document, you may choose a particular symbol to denote something [e.g.: a variable, like the voltage drop across a resistor]. As you proceed, it may become clear that you made a bad choice, and want to change this ... but the symbol may already be in a 100 places. Well, easy to search the source document and do the change [find and replace]. Even better, you can decide to give a "name" to the symbol, and decide later what the symbol will look like. i) Another technical advantage: very often you have to refer to figures, or equations, or references [e.g.: "as shown in equation (15) ..." or "see paper [11] in the bibliography"]. What happens if you add a new equation (or figure, or ...) and the numbers change? do you have to go and search the whole text to update the references? Nope, not with LaTeX; you give each formula a unique name [whatever you like], and LaTeX keeps track of it. j) Perhaps other software has advantages like (h) or (i) [not the ones I have heard of], but in LaTeX you can create new ones if you need them. Remember: at the core, it is a programming language for typesetting. % % ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- LaTeX; more on it. LaTeX is not commercial software, and thus not subject to the infinite cycle of pointless "updates" that would make anything written with it unreadable in 10 years. And it is written in ASCII (human readable), which means you can easily fix it if there is some change. Changes happen, but typically occur for a good reason: for example, the early 1990's LaTeX could not handle pictures easily, so there was a 10 year period where the way pictures were handled evolved rapidly. But there have not been any code-breaking changes since LaTeX2e was introduced in 1994; a document written in the late 1990 will still process fine today --- you may have to fix a line or two at the worse; usually because you are using a "package" to do something special [e.g.: figures] and the input syntax has changed a bit. And even a document written in the prior version, LaTeX209, will still run after minor tweaks. This is one reason why journals have moved to LaTeX. They do not want to have to update their whole set-up every 6 months; and have to keep track of infinitely many versions of the software so their archives do not become obsolete. Remember: people still read papers published centuries ago. Publishers have to think long term, same as Librarians. Another reason is that the step from LateX document to printed document is small. In the future maybe we will move to web-only journals, and maybe something better than LaTeX will appear ... but you need to get from here to there. % % ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- EOF