Spookyblog

I am never hesitant to post information or articles about LaTeX, and when they are arguing for the use of LaTeX by academics and researchers in the humanities and social scientists, I give them centre stage. LaTeX is still under the shadow of the myth that it is an arcane macro language for mathematicians who build vacuum tube digital computers in their garages (Ok, I made up that last bit; I’ve never heard that myth). Peter Flom (National Development and Research Institutes) argues that there are extremely good reasons for academics and researchers to use LaTeX over a word processor:

This paper is written for academics and researchers who don’t use LATEX and wonder why anyone does. People who do use LATEX (probably all of the readers of the article in this journal) may wish to share the article with their colleagues.

I do wish to share the article: LaTeX for academics and researchers who (think they) don’t need it

The article takes the standard approach of showing you just what writing in LaTeX is like: simple, straight-forward (in most cases), and content-driven. The single most important benefit I can see with LaTeX is that is allows you to concentrate on content rather than presentation. Making lists and paragraphs do something that was manageable in a word processor is sometimes frustrating—writing in LaTeX is a good deal simpler with respect to getting on with writing.

One of the “(supposed) bad” things that Flom talks about is “you can’t share LaTeX files with people who use Word,” and he suggests a number of translation programs. I’d like to suggest that no translation is required when collaborating or sending for approval. If for approval, why not simply send a pdf of the document? The recipient can annotate with Acrobat and return the document to the originator. In collaboration, send the source document and have the recipient open it as a text file in their word processor. LaTeX codes are remarkably easy to pick up quickly and any code written in the word processor can be sent back to the originator as if the file was a native word processor document.

I suggest that there are extremely good reasons for anyone generating reports and articles to use LaTeX to do so. Adam Cottrell has an excellent article arguing against the use of word processors and for the use of LaTeX.