<p>Word >>>>>>>>>> LaTeX !</p>
<p>On the contrary, LaTeX>>>>>>>>>>>>>Word!</p>
<p>— LaTeX is not proprietary.
— LaTeX makes everything look as good as possible.
— LaTeX produces documents in non-proprietary forms(.pdf, .ps, …).
— There are lots of nice packages for LaTeX, including Beamer, which is the best way of creating presentations (more succinctly, Beamer >>>>>>>>>> PowerPoint).</p>
<p>Neh?</p>
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<p>Beamer >>>>>>>>>> PowerPoint
Powerpoint is easy to use with tons of features. What’s wrong with it?</p>
<p>Using a language for word processing is like fly-swatting with a nuke. Why type up a report in 5 hours when you can do it in 1? I’m here to learn & get a degree, not to act like an edittor who likes to ‘compile’ and debug word processing documents.</p>
<p>That said, what LaTeX editor do you use? :)</p>
<p>Ever tried any WYSIWYG editors? I installed Bakoma Tex but the evaluation period ran out before I got a chance to play with it.</p>
<p>A traditional word processing program is better than LaTeX for short documents such as letters and memos, as well as MLA-formatted papers. However, for academic papers, especially in the sciences, engineering, mathematics, and computer science, LaTeX is the best option. Word processors such as Microsoft Word weren’t built for academics, and it shows once you have a paper that is many pages long with a large bibliography. Plus, the point of LaTeX is to separate content from formatting. All that you worry about is the content, and the LaTeX styles provided will deal with the formatting (although you may customize them easily, if you wish).</p>
<p>Yes, LaTeX has quite a learning curve. LaTeX isn’t for everything (although some LaTeX fans use it for everything). However, once you know it very well, I think that you’ll be pleased, especially with academic papers. I love the quality of my LaTeX papers, and I have received compliments from professors whenever I turn in something in LaTeX; the quality does show.</p>
<p>amen. it’s pretty much the standard for professional documents in academia. this didn’t just happen coincidentally. Los, as for any hesitation you have for learning it because it might take too long… well, i’m sure you’re a smart college kid. if you can get a degree, you can use latex, heh. just don’t fear it.</p>
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<p>Well, yeah, the proprietariness of your word processor/typesetter might not have any direct impact on you. But, a non-proprietary word processor/typesetter can have a big impact on who can read and edit your documents — for instance, I don’t own Word, so I couldn’t, say, edit a document that you produced in Word.</p>
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<p>Really? What sort of features? I’ve always heard that the general wisdom is, a document produced intelligently in LaTeX looks better than if it were produced in something else.</p>
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<p>Not everything is word processing! Beamer, for instance, is a LaTeX package that has little to do with word processing.</p>
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<p>For normal presentations, you’re probably right. For people who want to stick math and so forth in their presentations, LaTeX wins!</p>
<p>Here’s a very simple template to use for LaTeX, for typesetting a simple essay or somesuch:</p>
<p>\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fullpage}</p>
<p>\begin{document}</p>
<p>% insert text here</p>
<p>\end{document}</p>
<p>Voila — no real headaches. Oh, and by the way, I use TeXShop (sadly, only for Macs). It’s awesome. I used to use TeXnicCenter, which is not so bad. TextPad always works in a pinch.</p>
<p>Yeah, TeXShop is pretty nice! :)</p>
<p>LaTeX is the standard because it is way better than Word for papers. If you don’t know the commands, use something like TeXmaker. If you are totally incompetent, use LyX, which is pretty much the same as Word.</p>
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<p>Stuff like automated table of contents. That’s 1 of the few specific complaints I’ve heard about Word. All other comments are along the lines of simply “Latex looks better”, which isn’t very specific. Can’t really argue with a simple, subjective statement like that :)</p>
<p>There’s also the font thing, where a Word doc may look different on on a machine that doesn’t have the same font set as the author. That’s not a problem if you stick to the fonts Word came with, and don’t use an obsolete Word. </p>
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<p>I just remember using a lot of features I never knew about when I wrote several long undergrad reports and my undergrad thesis, which was ~40 pages. I have actually met professors who use Word to create their research papers. My own advisor (who does mostly writing now and not much actual research himself) still pulls all-nighters. I bet he wouldn’t have to if he used Word. But, the guy just likes non-MS stuff, and sleep deprivation.</p>
<p>You never write formulae do you?</p>
<p>/even my brother in philosophy converted to LaTeX a long time ago…</p>
<p>LaTeX isn’t that bad.</p>
<p>Stata is bad.</p>
<p>I just got into LaTeX and I don’t even have to learn it yet. I’m only a freshman in college. I use WinEdt.</p>
<p>The report I had to do was 99.9% forumlas.
I saw in Word that the equation editor was limited to a 4x4 matrix, but I didn’t need anything bigger this time. If I did, typing it in something like MathCad would’ve been quick & easy, and paste-able into Word.</p>
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<p>Hey, now that really shows something! Philosophers try to find the longest way from A to B. Which is often a sideways 8, but hey, “to each his own”.</p>
<p>My problem with Word is the automatic formatting for a lot of stuff that Word does, i.e. putting stuff in places I don’t want it to be, putting unnecessary spaces. Of course, Latex does have similar problems and the Word problems can be fixed eventually, but I find that after you get over the learning curve of Latex, the amount of time you spend fixing stuff in Word surpasses the amount of time fixing stuff in Latex.</p>
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<p>Interesting… mostly I just use those smart tag things in Word and tell it to stop doing a certain auto-formatting. That usually solves it. Or you can save your formatting settings as a template for future re-use.</p>
<p>Typing the thing in the first place, however, is so much faster in Word. And I just couldn’t stand “compiling” the document and opening up a separate program (pdf viewer) just to see what it looks like.</p>
<p>I just ran into a paper in pdf that printed in “cross-eye”-size font. I had to print it on 11x17 paper and use the scaling feature. If it were a Word doc, I can just increase the font. Going off on a tangent but PDFs suck too.
Latex -> Pdf, ugh. Multiple systems of garbage just to do word processing.</p>
<p>why couldn’t you just scale the pdf to whichever size you want?</p>
<p>BTW, LaTeX doesn’t necessarily compile to PDF format — you can generally do DVI, PS, or PDF. All are awesome, and way better than DOC format. And, yeah, why couldn’t you just scale the PDF?</p>
<p>I forgot about one more benefit of TeX: you can view and edit the source file, which is really just a TXT file, anywhere with a text editor (say, TextPad). Not so, for Word.</p>