Should i use latex

LaTeX takes this task off your hands by providing highly efficient algorithms to properly format your texts. Now, what exactly is LaTeX? It is a typesetting engine. Unlike Word, which is controlled by mouse, various menus and buttons, LaTeX uses text commands to define the way your document is typeset.

These commands look a bit like a programming language, which seems to scare many people off. Here are 5 reasons, why you should seriously consider writing your thesis and most other scientific documents with LaTeX. Take a look at those dissertations covering math, physics and computer science topics. Most of them look much better. While the amount of dissertations I have seen may not be statistically relevant, I still see a pattern there.

The algorithms used by LaTeX to justify text and control hyphenation work much better than those used by Word. This is why a document written in LaTeX will have a much more professional typesetting. To add a title, author and date to our document, you must add three lines to the preamble NOT the main body of the document.

These lines are. This should be included in the body of the document at the place you want the title to be printed. As with any code you are writing, it can often be useful to include comments.

Comments are pieces of text you can include in the document which will not be printed, and will not affect the document in any way. Moreover, some packages, e. We will now look at how to add images to a L a T e X document. On Overleaf, you will first have to upload the images. L a T e X can not manage images by itself, so you will need to use a package. Packages can be used to change the default look of your L a T e X document, or to allow more functionalities. In this case, you need to include an image in our document, so you should use the graphicx package.

Here universe is the name of the file containing the image without the extension, then universe. PNG becomes universe.

The file name of the image should not contain white spaces nor multiple dots. Note: The file extension is allowed to be included, but it's a good idea to omit it.

If the file extension is omitted it will prompt LaTeX to search for all the supported formats. It is also usually recommended to use lowercase letters for the file extension when uploading image files. For more details see the section about generating high resolution and low resolution images.

Images can be captioned, labelled and referenced by means of the figure environment as shown below:. When placing images in a L a T e X document, we should always put them inside a figure environment or similar so that L a T e X will position the image in a way that fits in with the rest of your text.

Note: If you are using captions and references on your own computer, you will have to compile the document twice for the references to work. Overleaf will do this for you automatically. Lists are very simple to create in L a T e X.

You can create lists using different list environments. Environments are sections of our document that you want to present in a different way to the rest of the document. There are two main different types of lists, ordered lists and unordered lists. Each will use a different environment. Unordered lists are produced by the itemize environment. By default the individual entries are indicated with a black dot, so-called bullet. TeX has been around for over thirty years, and the underlying language hasn't changed very much in that time.

Has anyone ever tried using Word to load a file that was originally written in Word '97? What if you had decided to write your document in Lotus Word Pro back in ?

These problems almost never occur with La TeX. A document that is typeset in La TeX today is likely to look exactly the same when you re-typeset it 10, 20, or 30 years down the road. Since TeX is stored in a human-readable plain text file, you also have the knowledge that you will always be able to edit the file in the future.

LaTeX is portable concerning its implementation, your document source and its output -- all is cross-platform. There are bound to be several answers to this question, and different aspects that people highlight. I'll try to list a few.

There are a number of webpages with detail on the reasons to use LaTeX: I'll highlight a few. LaTeX is a typesetting system, not a word processor. LaTeX uses source code to generate a document: you edit one file and typeset it to a generate the output usually PDF nowadays. This is in contrast to a word processor, where you edit the text as it appears. LaTeX does things that word processors do not do but that well-designed published material does do. For example, LaTeX uses a hyphenation algorithm which generates well-spaced out justified paragraphs.

It also uses ligatures where applicable, which means that letters which 'go together' look better than if the letter design is all done separately. LaTeX is intended to focus on document structure rather than appearance. Of course, some set up is needed to get the correct appearance, but once it is done most of the source you write is focused on structure. This structured approach helps when you want to do things that are repetitive, as the formatting is always taken care of 'behind the scenes'.

There are a large number of add-ons to LaTeX called packages that are designed to help with particular tasks. Many of these have an academic focus but this is not true of every package. For example, the datatool package can be used to do mail-merging from a list of names and addresses, which is common for business documents. I will echo Leo's point, about plain-text. Programmability and highest-quality are perks, but the fact that the input is plain-text has one extremely important consequence:.

You are not at the mercy of buggy word-processing software, proprietary or otherwise. But whenever I tried to do anything modestly non-trivial, such as bullet points, it would begin to exhibit what could at best be charitably termed "eccentric" behaviour. Using Word to do anything more than a simple letter anything which involved a list, or controlling varying font sizes, or tables especially tables! And modern, well-meaning, open-source Office clones are even worse: in trying to reliably imitate Word's codependent behaviour, they have produced software with even more quirks against which I must fight.

With LaTeX, I can have documents which are as simple or as complicated as I like, with all of the mark-up and structure plainly visible to me, and with reliable results and I don't need anything more complicated than a text-editor to write the source-file to produce a high-quality PDF.

Furthermore, any text-editor will do. With LaTeX, you have the option to control "content" and "presentation" separate. And you should. This way, if you decide at a later stage to reformat your document e.

All occurrences of the corresponding styles will change automatically. It's not that you can't do the same in Word or OpenOffice. If you've ever struggled formatting a document for two or more printing medias e. If you've ever written anything over 50 pages think master thesis , and you remember your frustration making everything "just right" like table of contents, index, figure and equation numbering, references you'd be reborn with LaTeX.

The reasons for this radical switch are:. Continue reading here for a more detailed description of these ConTeXt advantages.

Starting out with ConTeXt is really easy with this getting started tutorial. Furthermore, here is the official ConTeXt documentation. I used to think that for short one-off documents, word processors are better. But since having a wiki live right inside my text editor I use orgmode , this is no longer the case.

That is one can use LaTeX as the backend and use wiki markup as the input language. In addition, as LaTeX is coded in plain text, you can use collaboration software like etherpad. But the biggest advantage is, that you can track all your changes with regular revision control software i.

One of the reasons I keep coming back to LaTeX is that it does things for me that would require the same or more amount of work in other programs.

Just take a look at how much simpler tables of contents, figure and heading numbering and headers are in LaTeX, compared to the "standard" InDesign:. Figure Numbering in InDesign and cross-references to them. There is also no automatic list of tables and list of images in InDesign though you can do that in Word or OpenOffice.

Why do we need a whole post on a site called "indesignsecrets" just for figure numbering and cross-referencing? Most of the time I've spent learning LaTeX was for something I really didn't need to do, and I can assure you just with a few hours of LaTeX crash course anyone can do most of their academic work. EDIT Speaking of being at the mercy of buggy software, I just spent a full day's work and was paid for it to format headings, quotations and table of contents of a thesis.

Word crashed several times, making me lose a lot of work every time and forcing to begin anew, saving my file at every modification. I inserted captions for some 50 images one by one, but then Word repeatedly crashed after I had tried inserting a simple "List of Figures".

LibreOffice doesn't even open the file, and crashes every time. You would suppose that inserting figures with Word or Pages would just be easier with a drag a and drop, but every time text flows with figures it makes formatting both together a nightmare.

And on top of all that, I was supposed to do copy-editing work on that thesis grammar, spelling, style etc. I wish I just had to read and mark spelling and grammar errors, specially if it was a printed or a plain text file and it would be easier to read and correct a plain text file on screen. I see two advantages to TeX over text editors and word processors: high-quality typesetting especially for math and the ability to automate formatting.

I would not recommend learning TeX unless you need one of those things. Taking notes during lectures where there are equations and formulas. It is far better for this than any traditional word processor or text editor; I can usually reproduce exactly what the speaker writes on the board, and from then on it's digitized, searchable, and essentially permanent in my records.

Formatting the output from programs and databases automatically -- for instance, preparing a working printout of a dictionary I am compiling in a database. It is also possible to do this using text editors and word processors that have macros or similar functionality, but TeX is better suited to it because of how comprehensive it is.

Preparing camera-ready copy for publication. TeX produces much more closely kerned and fine-tuned print than any word processor. People often say that TeX allows you to concentrating on writing rather than formatting. I have never found this to be true. TeX is attractive exactly because it gives you vastly greater control over formatting than normal word processors do. But that control is not cheap: TeX is time-consuming to learn as well as to use. The exception?

If you have a front-end like LyX there are others that can be used like an ordinary word-processor. That frees you from having to think about many of the technical aspects of TeX.

People, who use LaTeX, do cooperate, as you can see here in this forum, and in many other places around the web. There are thousands of volunteers all over the world who write packages, bug reports, answer questions. Not to forget the indefatigable Karl Berry and his fellows, who issue each year a new texlive. The software allows to discuss all and everythink along »minimal working examples«. I've never heard about a software making it so easy to get help when you are stuck. La TeX is a markup language , meaning that you code in a regular text file both the content and the layout of the document that is later computed by LaTeX.

Thus, I think that there are two situations when using LaTeX is worth it. I also lists two benefits of using a markup language when producing documents. Skip to content. What can I do with LaTeX? In this scenario manuscripts are everything. Content is really important and requires a tremendous amount of work. I have seen PhD. You work with abundant bibliography. Simply prepare your BibTeX file with your bibliography entries, tag them, and use the label in your latex document.

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.