If you’re a student who writes a lot of papers, or someone who often finds himself struggling to fix the document that Microsoft Word just messed up, or if you just wanna escape the botnet you’re in the write (pun intended) place, in this short article I’m going to introduce you to LaTeX, what makes it so powerful and how you can get started writing you first LaTeX document in mere seconds.
Microsoft Word Bad
Microsoft word is the most popular document processing software, it is a WYSIWYG software (what you see is what you get), which means you punch some keys on your keyboard, it shows up on your screen, you edit how the text looks using the mouse and a bunch of buttons and menus, which is fine f you’re writing a shopping list (why would you do that tho) or a simple document, but have you ever tried writing a complex document with a lot of figures, tables, sections, subsections and sub-to-the-nth-power sections? yeah that’s where you start tearing your eye lids and cursing the Microsoft overlords for messing up your document, and let’s not get into stuff like managing your references and footnotes, table of contents and other fancy stuff. You get the point, Microsoft word (or any other word processing software) is a pain in the exit hole.
What is LaTeX
From their website :
LaTeX is a high-quality typesetting system; it includes features designed for the production of technical and scientific documentation. LaTeX is the de facto standard for the communication and publication of scientific documents. LaTeX is available as free software.
Okay, but what is LaTeX in plain English you may ask, LaTeX is a typesetting language, you write you document in plain text with all your titles and figures and whatever you have going, you save it to a .tex file, you compile it and voila, you got yourself the prettiest document you’ve made so far.
Now don’t be intimidated, LaTeX isn’t a programming language, it’s super easy to learn, it will take you less than 30 minutes to get your head around it, and you can learn it as you go, want to write a table? just look up the table syntax online, want to write music sheets? look it up!
Now let’s jump to the 7 reasons you’re here for.
1. Beautiful documents
LaTeX documents are beautiful by nature, if you don’t like the default settings, you can customize; and contrary to word processors, with freedom anything like, margins, justification, fonts, colors, headers, footers, basically you can customize anything.
2. Made for science
If you’re writing an award wining scientific paper, or your algebra homework, LaTeX is really powerful when it comes to writing complex scientific and mathematical equations.
3. Consistency
Once you fine tune every little detail about your document, you’ll get the same look on every page.
4. Customizability
Like I mentioned above, you can customize almost everything in LaTeX, and there are tons of free packages that you can use to do stuff like using a 1337 h4x0r color scheme for your Assembly code.
5. Extensibility
Again, like I mentioned above, there are tons of free packages to do stuff that you couldn’t even think were possible. Working on your next Chess bestseller? there’s a package for drawing chess diagrams, music sheets, organic chemistry fancy hexagons. The point is, there’s LaTeX solution for every niche possible.
6. LaTeX is faster
It might take you some time to get your head around LaTeX, but once you do, you’ll be writing documents faster than your printer can print them, with LaTeX you focus on the actual content, and it automatically generates stuff like the table of contents, table of figures, references…etc. Want to edit a figure? do it using your favorite image editor and that’s it, since LaTeX will include the figure during compilation. Want to change the order of your sections and chapters? go ahead, LaTeX will take care of the numbering for you.
7. Free
LaTeX is free to use.
Those were my top reasons for using LaTeX, there are many other pros that you’ll discover along the way, but like anything else, LaTeX have some shortcomings, mainly the learning curve, to use LaTeX you have to invest some time first into learning it, the second major problem with LaTeX is collaboration, unlike Microsoft Word, you can’t collaborate on documents, unless the people you’re collaborating with also know LaTeX, the last short coming is the lack of the instant preview, unlike word processors, you can’t see the changes you’ve made until you recompile the document.
Getting started with LaTeX
If you’re tech savvy you can download a Latex Distribution, install it, write your document using your favorite text editor (vim hopefully), compile it and you’re done,but hey you’re tech savvy, you can figure it out.
For the none-tech-savvy bunch out there, there are online platforms that will it super easy for you to get started, overleaf is the most popular, they also have an amazing wiki that I always reference.
Further readings and links
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love LaTeX! The YouTube video that convinced me to start using LaTeX (must watch)