LaTeX: 1 Year Later

I've been using LaTeX for a little over a year now. I've written a few papers with it, I've used it for classroom materials, and my job application materials were mostly written in LaTeX last year. Now that I'm a somewhat experienced user, I thought that it might be helpful to collect my thoughts about it. Is it worth the effort to switch?

First, some things I continue to dislike about it:

• Window proliferation. For every document you're working on, my TeX program (TeXShop for Mac) produces as many as three windows: one for the text document, one for the typeset PDF "output" document, and a "console" window in which the program shows its work as it produces the PDF from the text file. That's fine if you're just working on a paper, or whatever. But if you've got a paper going, and a lecture for your intro class, and a handout to go with that lecture, and a lecture for ethics, and a handout for that lecture, you've got a lot of windows open. I try to be vigilant about closing consoles, but there's another problem in the vicinity...
  
  
• Document proliferation. The process of creating nice-looking PDFs involves the creation of a bunch of auxiliary files. And if you forget to use the console to trash them before you close it, it's a (minor) pain in the ass to get rid of them all. And if your document contains a bibliography, you need those auxiliary files.
  
  
• Certain things take longer, because you have to learn how to do them. Make an abstract; make a numbered list that starts at 5; making a space show up in the PDF after '\textonehalf'; stuff like that. These are all things that I figured out how to do without a huge amount of trouble, but they wouldn't have been any trouble at all in Word.
  
  
• All in all, these are pretty minor annoyances, though.
  

What do I like about it? Why have I stuck with it?

• It's not Microsoft Word. Whenever I am asked to open an MS Word document, I whine a little inside. "Do I have to?" I cannot stand MS Word. I particularly hate it now that everything is a "Docx" file and I'm still using Word from '04 or whatever. Word's conversion process makes opening and saving documents take forever. And causes the program to crash. It sucks.
  
  
• It is free. Subsequent software updates have been free. New versions of the software are also free.
  
  
• It makes PDFs, not Word documents. Everybody has at least one free PDF reader. No BS conversion to make my old-ass version of Word read your newfangled "docx" document. Nearly every computer in the world has the software for reading PDFs already installed.
  
  
• The documents do look awfully nice. They do not look like they were made with free software. This isn't such a big deal with paper drafts, but I like to hand out nice, professional-looking handouts in my classes and (especially) at conferences. And I like my application materials to look polished and professional.
  
  
• Bibliographies. I love--love--not worrying about bibliographies. I love not having to remember to add each reference to the bibliography whenever I add one. (Although you do have to keep your bibliography file up-to-date. But that's helpful, too.) I love not having to remember to take the reference out of the bibliography if I delete the reference in the main text. (Although that happens less frequently.) And I really, really love not having to mess with the bibliographic format. Mind wants it one way but Phil Review wants it another? No problem whatsoever. (Not that I've had this exact problem.)
  
  
  
  • A minor problem here is that you have to keep track of your bibliographic entries in a separate program (I use BibTex BibDesk, which comes with the TexShop bundle). But I find that helpful, too. Before LaTeX I was using a spreadsheet to keep track of the bibliographic information and physical locations of my many, many photocopied journal articles. BibTex does the same thing, but better.
    
  
  
• Symbols really are easier. You might have to google it, but the symbols you want are there and easy to implement. The symbols menu situation in MS Word is really tragic. There are a large number of different "symbols" menu/tables, some of which are very long, and none of which has all the symbols you want. So if you want a "times" symbol, you're looking in one table; if you want a universal quantifier, you're looking in another; and if you want, say, a curly greater-than-or-equal-to, you might just end up copying it out of some webpage.
  
  
• Last year I didn't like way LaTeX handles quotation marks, footnotes, word counts, and the general user interface. I am mostly over these problems now. The TexShop word count application sort of sucks because it counts the words in your preamble and stuff. But if you know how many words there are in your preamble, you can work around this. And it doesn't count the stuff you've "percent signed," so that's nice.
  
  
• Speaking of which, the percent sign thing comes in really handy when you're "conference-izing" a paper. (Quick note of explanation: when you put a '%' in front of some text in LaTeX, the program ignores whatever comes after it until you hit "return." This comes in handy when you want to write a little note to yourself, or block a command in the preamble, or whatever.) In this way, you can cut out large quantities of text from the main PDF document without deleting it altogether. And the word count function ignores it even though it's technically still there. And so you can just as easily put it back.
  

So, what we've got here is a free, highly functional word-processing program that makes nice-looking pdf documents and makes your bibliographies in whatever style you want for you, by itself, without you having to do anything other than keep track of the stuff you've been reading.

--Mr. Zero