\title{LaTeX}

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\section{Introduction}

I spent some time this weekend thinking about the costs and benefits of switching to LaTeX. It seemed to me that it would make a better post if I got some empirical data concerning LaTeX, and so I downloaded MacTex and attempted to convert a paper. I followed Charles Tanksley's instructions, which were helpful.

\section{Pros}

It's nerdy.

The finished product looks super awesome. And you don't have to think much about how it's going to look; you just write the content and LaTeX automatically makes it look awesome. This is supposed to save you time and stress.

It is alleged to render equations and other symbols nicely. Perhaps I chose my conversion project poorly, but the paper I chose to convert to LaTeX did not contain many weirdo symbols or any equations at all.

Apparently it is easier to manage bibliographies and references. There's a heavy up-front investment, though. Also, question: suppose you have to reformat your bibliography to conform to some journal's idiosyncratic style. Does LaTeX make this easier or harder?

You can make 1 simple formatting change that instantly applies to the whole document.

You are not subject to the whims of the MicroSoft Corporation. Their decisions about the viability of the .doc format are not going to fuck up your shit. Nor is their decision to totally stupidify the user interface for Word.

Edit: In comments, Kevin Klement mentions several other pros:

But there are a lot of other reasons to prefer LaTeX you don't discuss. The maximum portability of plain text formats. The non-proprietaryness. Heck, even the fact that plain text formats are much less likely to be corrupted than encrypted binaries ought to be mentioned.

End Edit

\section{Cons.}

You have to have Word (or something like it) anyways, because your students have word. You have to have something that will read their documents. Plain text editors won't do the job.

Frankly, I just don't see the point about how much time you'll save if you don't have to think about formatting. For one thing, I don't spend that much time thinking about formatting. Titles; paragraph breaks; blockquotes; offset definitions and principles; section headings; I spend almost no time thinking about these things. For another thing, you have to think about them in LaTeX, too, because you have to give a '\section{x}' command in order to get LaTeX to know to put a section heading in. You still have to write the code correctly.

Now, if you have to reformat something for a journal, say, you might save time by applying 1 simple formatting change that instantly applies to the whole document. But you can do that in Word, too, if you've been using your headings right (which is no harder than doing it in LaTex--anyone who could figure out LaTeX could figure out Word). And I bet I could just reformat the section headings by hand one at a time in less time than it would take me to identify the 1 simple change I have to make by doing a google search, finding the relevant information, applying the relevant procedure, testing it to make sure it worked, and then fixing any bugs that might have come up. (For example, I attempted to create subscripted text. I had to find instructions on google, and then implement the code I learned, and then identify and repair several coding errors--I have trouble remembering to hit curly brackets rather than parentheses, though I'm sure this will go away with familiarity. Then, when it still wasn't working, I had to do more googling in order to learn that the original set of instructions left out that I had to be in Math Mode in order for the subscript command to work properly, and that in particular I had to be out of math mode in order for the text after the subscript to look right. In Word, this would have taken at most 1 second, since I have a subscript button on my toolbar and I know the shortcut keystroke that results in subscripted text.)

It seems to me to be easier in Word to make 1 simple formatting change that instantly applies to exactly as much or as little of the document as you want it to.

Although I admit that equations are a problem with Word, regular logical symbols and notations are not. Although it could be easier to navigate, there's an insert symbols menu, and you can program shortcut keys for the ones you use the most.

It is easier to annotate a word document. This makes it easier for someone to comment on a draft, and also for you to connect the comment to the appropriate location in the paper.

And if your friend doesn't annotate your document, the page numbers will still be meaningful if she's looking at your Word document. But there seems to be no inherent connection between the pages in the typeset PDF file that LaTeX creates and the text in the .tex file. In fact, the document you print out does not look at all similar to the document you edit. All of its formatting and pagination characteristics are completely different. This makes it difficult to find and edit individual paragraphs and sentences. Much more difficult than simply going to page 12, paragraph 2, sentence 3, or whatever.

Word's GUI is (somewhat) intuitive and doesn't require you to memorize a bunch of codes. However, the new version of word is substantially crappier. I don't want to be the guy who defends MicroSoft Word or anything, because I have spent a huge amount of time so angry with MicroSoft Word that I wanted to kill the balls off of it. But a lot of the problems with Word that I see people saying contributed to their abandoning it in favor of LaTeX are easily solved and seemed to me to stem from not knowing how to use it.

Although, you can make 1 simple formatting change that instantly applies to the whole document, it is often not particularly easy to know how to make that change. Suppose I don't want my paragraphs to indent, and I want to demarcate paragraph breaks by adding an extra space between them. How?

Footnotes in LaTex are kind of a pain. And although I'm no Kripke, I use a lot of footnotes.

Quotation marks are kind of a pain. And because I'm no Kripke, I use a lot of quotation marks. (Zing!) (Just kidding.)

Word count. As I was writing this, I realized that Word has a pretty sophisticated word count utility. My LaTeX editor has a "statistics" utility that counts words. I hope it counts only the words in what you intend to be the text, and not all the extra formatting junk. I know that Word's does this, and Word's utility allows you to exclude footnotes easily. Does LaTeX's? Also, Word's word count allows you to select blocks of text and get stats on the selection. My LaTex editor doesn't seem to. The word count utility on MS Word seems to be pretty superior.

In conclusion, although there are some cool features here, I don't think there is enough to compel me to switch.

--Mr. Zero

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