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Education

Is Latex Still Worth Learning? 180

Posted by Cliff from the Is-TeX-still-king-for-math-typesetting dept.
Bocaj asks: "I have start back to college and have to write a few technical papers. Right now it's mostly physics, but I'm a CS major and there will be many more papers to come. I've tried all of the office suites with little luck in getting them to format complex formulas correctly. I'm trying to learn Latex, but I am wondering if I should. Is Latex still the defacto standard for this kind of stuff? What about SGML or XML? What is everyone else using?"
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Is Latex Still Worth Learning? More

Is Latex Still Worth Learning?

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  • yes. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Satai ( 111172 ) * on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @03:19PM (#6445338)
    Physics still uses LaTeX quite a bit; for astronomy, it's the standard. Once you get used to it, you will find that it's much easier to use, and especially for formatting data -- you can reformat a LaTeX data table with sed&awk in seconds.

    If you look around, many of the journals accept the LaTeX source -- I know that ApJ does, and I believe APS does. But you'll also notice that submissions to the NSF can be done in DVI format, as well. Many people still use it, and many still require it.

    But, hey, if you don't like it, use something else and then convert it to LaTeX later. But I guarantee that if you start using it, you'll love it. I can't stand WYSIWIG word processors anymore, mainly because I can't be guaranteed of reproducible results.

    • Re: APS? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by ggwood ( 70369 )
      Yes, the American Physical Society accepts LaTeX files submitted electronically. It is pretty big news that they are now about to accept Microsoft Word format [aps.org] as well. (Note that they just began accepting Word format this June - although PRL (the rapid communication journal) has been accepting since all of July 2002!)

      The learning curve to latex is steep but not really long. Whatever you are thinking about doing in LaTeX has probably already been done, so try to get a template if you can and just begin p
  • Anyone know if MathCad is still around?

    I remember using it to write a few technical papers/proofs. The student edition was very affordable and it would format the equations and to the calculations which was nice.

    Just an idea....

  • Using Latex (Score:5, Funny)

    by dlosey ( 688472 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @03:20PM (#6445343)
    Haven't you seen The Matrix? Of course latex is still popular!

    Oohh! .. You meant LaTeX?

  • I'm sorry... (Score:5, Funny)

    by phraktyl ( 92649 ) * <wyattNO@SPAMdraggoo.com> on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @03:22PM (#6445363) Homepage Journal

    Ask Slashdot is reserved for questions regarding legal and dental advice. Please refrain from asking further technical questions that could be construed as News for Nerds, or Stuff that Matters. Thank you.

    Seriously, I've been using LaTeX for papers for a long time, and have yet to find a format that is as easy to use (all you need is a text editor, files are in ASCII, etc.) and that produces professionally typeset output. However, I believe the real question is: does it fit your needs? If so, then it is worth learning.

  • Sheep gut (Score:4, Funny)

    by elliotj ( 519297 ) <slashdot&elliotjohnson,com> on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @03:22PM (#6445370) Homepage
    Some people will tell you that sheep gut will do the trick, but doctors advise that only latex based products can keep out desease as well as provide effective contraceptive protection. Whichever you chose, remember to use it with a water-based lubricant.

  • We use it at work; I use it at home. (Score:5, Informative)

    by cjhuitt ( 466651 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @03:23PM (#6445388)
    At work, we use latex all the time for its ability to typeset the mathematical formulas, as well as its ability to keep track of the references for us. An added bonus is the ability to set up your own formatting commands, and have it make an index for you.

    I also personally use it at home, for the ability to define commands and environments, and the ease of rearranging content. (I keep everything in relatively small files, and include those to build up the document I want. Very convenient to rearrange by just changing where the include command is.)

    One thing I have to say makes it a lot more worth it at home (I use OS X there) is the application TeXShop, which makes typesetting and viewing the output much easier. I'd recommend using this (or an equivelant program on other platforms) to make the paper creation process go much easier.
    • Not just useful for indexes, but with bibtex, it is fantastic for bibliographies. You won't be putting in extra entries, or leaving some out.

      I guess there is a steep learning curve, for people not computer savvy. And you can use other easier programs to do almost as good. I do not regret learning it at all, and I only really used it for my Honours thesis.
  • Learn LaTeX for papers and noweb for literate programming (it is basically LaTeX with two added tags).

  • For my field, yes (Score:5, Informative)

    by jvmatthe ( 116058 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @03:25PM (#6445404) Homepage
    As a mathematician, most journals I have dealt with recommend LaTeX. For example, two papers are in the pipeline for appearance in SIAM journals [siam.org], and both were submitted in LaTeX form. To quote from the author instructions [siam.org]:
    Authors of accepted papers are encouraged to submit their TEX files to SIAM for typesetting.
    They accept papers in other forms, but TeX is encouraged.

    It is because of expectations like this that I require graduate and undergraduate students write up assignments in LaTeX for my scientific computing course.

  • Yes, definitely. (Score:2, Informative)

    by sntx ( 145241 )
    LaTeX actually has quite a low learning curve, for the usual applications. I've gotten by for ten years with nothing but the first Lamport book and the occasional google search.

    You will definitely find yourself typing much less boilerplate than with an SGML descendant. I don't know of other plain-text formats, which to my mind is crucial.

    Also, the huge number of tools for working with LaTeX, DVI, and PostScript files means there's virtually always a solution to your current problem.

    TeX and LaTeX do have

    • Re:Yes, definitely. (Score:3, Informative)

      by divbyzero ( 23176 )

      > I don't know of other plain-text formats, which to my mind is crucial.

      What about the roff family? Text-based, non-SGML. You might know that nroff is used for man pages, but there is a related system called troff which is a full-featured print typesetter.

  • Front-ends for Latex (Score:5, Informative)

    by fingal ( 49160 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @03:29PM (#6445451) Homepage

    If you want the power of Latex but don't want to have the hassle of learning to write raw Latex, then you could always go for a GUI wrapper around it. Lyx [lyx.org] is probably the best for Latex (and I would hate to go and use anything else for generating large cross-referenced documents), but if you are also interested in generating TeX then TeXmacs [texmacs.org] may well fill the bill.

  • Yes! (Score:2, Informative)

    by MacJedi ( 173 )
    Once you get the hang of it LaTeX lets you make complex formulas far more easily than Word's equation editor. And you can use LyX [lyx.org] to put a nice WYSIWYG on top of LaTeX which some people prefer-- it certainly makes making tables a lot easier. Anyway, if you want your papers to look professional, LaTeX is a great way to go.

    /joeyo

  • I use it daily. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ChiefArcher ( 1753 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @03:31PM (#6445488) Homepage Journal
    LaTeX is still the only way (note i'm not saying "good") to create PDF documents under UNIX that look the same EVERY time..

    I try to use it on all projects in which I need to create badges and PDF forms.... Definately worth the learn.... Although the learning curve is worse than linux.

    ChiefArcher

  • If you're asking.. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by GiMP ( 10923 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @03:36PM (#6445546)
    Then you have no clue about the purpose of LaTeX, XML, and SGML. That is ok, I can enlighten you :)

    LaTeX is a set of macros for TeX. TeX compiles to DVI, TeX input file should produce the same DVI file regardless of which implementation of TeX is used to produce it. When you write something in TeX you know how it will look in the resulting DVI file. DVI is most closely related to PostScript and PDF; however, it is not a programming language like PostScript and only contains positioning and formatting information. DVI stands for "DeVice Independant".

    SGML and children (XML and HTML) are structured markup langauges. These are simply designed to store information in a human readable fashion. HTML is a slightly different format which contains formatting but no positioning information. To define positioning information one must apply Cascading StyleSheets (CSS). CSS adds the ability to format and position the text in said markup languages; however, CSS is device dependant.. the result will format/position differently depending on the device/medium on which it is presented.

    Thus, if you wish to have your paper look the same regardless of the device it is displayed on; such as for a book, magazine, etc.. then DVI, PDF, or a subset of PostScript (some features are device dependant) will be perfect. If you're looking to display this information across a wide range of machines and faciliting accessibility features such as those used by the blind or the deaf, XML/HTML would be preferrable.

    One other mentionable is that the LaTeX macros for TeX really speed and facilitate the process of writing books and research papers by requiring the creation of chapters, sections, and paragraphs. BibTeX will aid in automatically creating a bibligraphy, and LaTeX can automatically create your Table of Contents. Additionally, LaTeX can be easily converted to HTML.
    • I'm fairly certain that PDF also has some features which are device dependant as well. DVI is the best/only truely completely Device Independant format for layout. Of course, Postscript and PDF are fine as long as you stay away from the programable features, which hardly anyone uses anyway :)
    • To amplify this:

      Latex is turing complete. It *is* a bitch and a half to program in, but you can do amazingly complex things behind the scenes. For example, I have a number of macros for laying out type derivation rules that lay out the rules differently depending on the sizes of the things laid out.

      The amazing listings package will automagically fontify your listings for pretty presentation.

      An experienced latexer doesn't write in latex, he writes in his own dialect of latex. Just like latex is just one d

  • Yes and no. It depends. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by pmz ( 462998 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @03:38PM (#6445570) Homepage
    For mathematics typesetting, I'm not sure LaTex/TeX can be beat. For large documents, it probably cannot be beat. LaTeX plus RCS/CVS and Make is truly awesome. Add gnuplot for graphs, GIMP for images, and you've got one hell of an Open Source solution for blowing away your academic buddies.

    I also used to do resumes with LaTeX, which made for a distinctive look. However, once I got StarOffice, I started using it for resumes. StarOffice/OpenOffice.org does just fine, although it isn't quite possible to replicate the look of LaTeX output.

    You should also ask around about Docbook, but I've never used it. Docbook, being XML-based, might be useful as a basis for web page output in addition to type-set output.

    The best part about all this, is that it can all be done without Microsoft Office!!!
    • DocBook is fine for technical documentation, which it was designed for, but doesn't really have the flexibility that TeX/LaTeX do -- and at least until Conglomerate [conlomerate.org], or some other graphical XML editor becomes usable on Linux, editing DocBook XML is a painful experience. The sheer complexity of the DocBook DTD makes it almost as hard to work with as most full-blown programming languages.

  • latex has its problems (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Jack Tanner ( 181565 ) <<ihok> <at> <hotmail.com>> on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @03:41PM (#6445616)
    There are many nice things about Latex, but here are some downsides.

    I recently had the experience of submitting a paper (bioinformatics) written with Latex to one conference, having it get rejected, and then having it get accepted to another conference. The first conference didn't have a style file I could use, and I had to go through a bazillion hoops and custom commands, packages and settings to get Latex to produce something acceptable. It was really painful to get Latex to then produce something acceptable for the second, since merely including a different style file didn't actually do what I needed.

    Verdict: use Latex only if the conference or journal provides you with a style file, and you think you'll need to make ZERO formatting changes to the source of your paper.

    Another painful moment about Latex is that it only does the basics well. For example, it's easy to create a table, and it's relatively easy (if crude) to create a two-column document. But it's difficult to get Latex to place that table into just one column of your two-column document, and it's a complete hack if you want to place it intellegently so that there aren't huge chunks of unnecessary whitespace due to how pages and sections break.
    • I don't know any TeX or LaTeX, but it seems to me that you should have created your own style file for the first conference/journal, and then since it was already factored out, you would have only to have created a different style file for the second conference, not revisit the whole document.
    • It is hard because it's hard.

      LaTeX does a really good job of getting stuff looking good. But it does so by disallowing you from micromanaging layout.

      those huge oceans of whitespace are there because putting something there would end up with a bigger gap later on, or somen similar.

      There are a few knobs you can twist to make tables and figures not end up on a float page:

      1) combine two short tables into one larger table. This will still become a float, but at least look better. Similarly, I tend to wrap tw
  • If the stuff you write will ever end up on paper, you'll end up having to learn TeX or LaTeX whether or not you write your documents in it, because the only way to get high-quality printed output from SGML or XML is through TeX. (Or through proprietary packages with TeX embedded in them.)
    • Um, but why do you have to actually learn (La)TeX for that? If you format your documents with jade or passivetex, you'll probably need to know DSSSL or XSL respectively, but you shouldn't ever have to hack the generated TeX directly.

  • LaTeX and a Makefile (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Michael.Forman ( 169981 ) * on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @03:54PM (#6445748) Homepage Journal

    For the technical writer, who plans on publishing conference papers or building large professional documents, such as a dissertation, there is no substitute for LaTeX. It is not a word processor or mark-up language but rather a true professional typesetting [bath.ac.uk] package. There really is no alternative (that you can afford).

    Given that you're a CS major, you might be interested in looking at my LaTeX source code for a conference paper and my dissertation [michael-forman.com]. Because LaTeX is so much like a programming language, I created a package containing subdirectories with the class file, images, and source code and perform the build using a Makefile. If you can code and you're familiar with Unix, it is a must have. To build the document, simply type make preview in the base directory. A word of caution -- don't even bother downloading this if you run Windows. It runs like a peach in all Unices and MacOS provided pdfLaTeX is installed.

    Michael. [michael-forman.com]
    • IIRC pdflatex hates eps file figures. At least it did a while back. So I get pdf via vanilla latex and dvipdfm.

      • Converting to PDF as the last step works, however you won't be able to take advantage of the hyperref package and automatically embed hyperlinks in your PDF document.

        The trick to graphics in pdfLaTeX is as follows:
        • Store vector-based graphics in PDF form.
          If you happen to have PostScript files, use epstopdf to convert them. It is easy to modify my Makefile to make PostScript files a dependency on the target and convert them to PDF on the fly, when you build the document.
        • Store raster-based graphics i
        • To quote gallileo: none the less, I do.

          You just need to be a bit careful about how you configure the hyperref package: it needs to know how it will be translated to pdf later on: with ghostscript's pdfwrite output device or dvipdfm, otherwise the link hotspot end up in screwey locations.

          I recommend dvipdfm. Not obvious to find unless you're lookinf for it, but it does an admirable job.

          It was a few months ago I fought with this, but I did succeed in generating and presenting a hyperlinked presentation. I
  • For physics publications, see the following: REVTex4 [aps.org]

  • Learn it (Score:3, Insightful)

    by kurosawdust ( 654754 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @03:59PM (#6445796)
    Right now it's mostly physics, but I'm a CS major...

    If you're a CS major you should learn TeX regardless of whether you're going to use it in a paper or not. It's open-source and one of the few major pieces of software that is for all intents and purposes bug-free. It's part of the CS canon, and you should learn it and read the source for that reason alone.

    • It is true that Knuth did an amazing thing (over the course of a really long time) with TeX and its companion book. But TeX is pretty fucked up in its design (especially the design of the input language) and many aspects of its implementation. It's a worthy museum piece, but don't study the source like it's a religious artifact!
      • yes.

        no one would suggest that tex is a well designed language by modern standard. But even so, being forced to work around its flaws and deficiencies will teach you why unhygenic macros are truly a PITA.

        The amazing thing is that no-one has sat down and written a better front-end language than latex. I would love a higher-order functional langauge.

        But no-one has. There may be a deep reason for it, or maybe latex is one of the first programs to achieve monopoly through popularity.
  • I just finished writing two lengthy term papers in LaTeX, and my first two LaTeX documents ever. I read one good tutorial [tug.org] and was off and running. Sure from time to time I had to google around for a snippet of code to do one thing or another, but really 90% of even most technical articles is text. Typesetting math formulas is a breeze. Tables and figures are a little tricky, but nothing new if you're familiar with html. Just go ahead and learn it, once you do you'll never turn back.
  • I first read this as "is latex still worth wearing?"
  • Check out MathType, from Design Science. If you've used the equation editor in MS Word, you've used a VERY stripped down version of this. They have a couple of different products, one of which is 100% free, which generates LaTex. Check them out at http://www.mathtype.com [mathtype.com]. I like it, and, once you set up (or learn) the keyboard shortcuts, you can bang out equations with little to no effort, and not have to write a line of Tex or LaTex.

  • careful what you look for... (Score:5, Funny)

    by cassidyc ( 167044 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @04:15PM (#6446017)
    I used LaTeX for my university dissertation, and I needed to know how to insert pictures into the document....

    Lets just say that you don`t want to Google for "+latex +pictures"

    Well, maybe you do, I dunno.

    CJC

  • Timeless Format (Score:5, Informative)

    by 4of12 ( 97621 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @04:22PM (#6446092) Homepage Journal

    While I still grapple with language idiosyncracies of LaTeX from time to time, the reason I keep coming back is that it produces the best quality output for mathematics-laden documents.

    WYSIWYG systems I've hated, especially when it comes time to learn yet another gui-based equation editor with yet another set of key mappings that is not like the default emacs set I have hardwired into my brain from writing code. After you learn a few of the basics in LaTeX, like $$ \int_0^\infty \alpha_i(x) dx = 5 $$ will produce a definite integral from 0 to infinity of greek alpha with an "i" subscript there's no going back.

    Besides being free (speech & beer), I have LaTeX source files from 17 years ago that still produces nice looking documents on todays computers even after changing hardware, OSes, etc. There were popular word processing systems available back then were such files would be next to worthless.

    That kind of timelessness in the age of planned product upgrades and binary proprietary formats impresses me.

    If you want to do version control or searching of document, then having its native format in ASCII text permits the use of CVS and grep and doesn't obligate you to buy some product to see your document.

    For the future, I'd like to see something like DocBook takeoff, but it's just not there yet, AFAICT.

    When someone gets a MathML parser to render as nicely as DEK's code, then I'll consider moving from LaTeX.

  • Absolutely (Score:5, Informative)

    by portscan ( 140282 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @04:27PM (#6446147)
    I am a mathematics major, with research experience. All my papers, reports, and even a few physics labs I had to do have been written in LaTeX, which makes automatic section labeling, theorem/proposition/proof labeling, table of contents generation, and bibliography generation a snap. Not only have I found that LaTeX has allowed me to create truly beautiful documents, but *every* handout I have received from any professor in Math, Physics, or CS has been in LaTeX (okay, there have been a few execptions--but not many!). This includes tests, homeworks, syllabi, etc. There have even been a couple times when a professor has stopped mid-lecture to wax romantic about how great LaTeX is and how easy it makes his/her life. Every journal expects papers to be submitted in TeX or LaTeX, and every researcher in the field knows it.

    As for previous comments saying that LaTeX is not extensible and that the formatting and content are not separate, that is bunk. You can write your own macros, people have written image drawing programs (for diagram generation) in LaTeX, and anything else imaginable. The formatting is done for you 99%. You just specify where paragraphs, sections, whatever start, and LaTeX takes care of the rest.

    The only capacity in which SGML or XML (including MathML) is used to publish scientific content (i.e., containing lots of equations and document structions such as sections, theorems, proofs, etc.) is to first write the LaTeX, then to use latex2html (or a similar program). Seriously, it is totally impractical to write MathML yourself. take a look at some [w3.org] sample [w3.org] code [w3.org] if you want. It is designed to be output by a computer program such as LaTeX.

    The learning curve on LaTeX is pretty low. Just google around for stuff, and it will be easy to find what you are looking for (usually). Start with the following references (there is *no* need to ever buy a book on LaTeX): but google is your best bet. I usually just type "latex ..." into google where ... is whatever I need help on (e.g., tables, infinite series, vectors, labelling theorems, etc.). You can't go wrong. Happy TeX-ing.

  • Latex is cool, but... (Score:3, Informative)

    by tigersha ( 151319 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @05:53PM (#6447157) Homepage
    I work as a org which publishes quite a bit of things and we use latex as a back-end typesteer and PDF creation system from all kinds of input.

    For instance, our invoicing system produces a large latex file from a database and then uses Tex to crreate the invoices. I also did a long report by using an XSL stylesheet (wchi I could send you) to convert some XML stuff into Latex. This rocks. The first thing my boss said when she pages through the document was "This look eally professional" Latex output really just looks more pleasing to the eye than Word or some other typesetting things.

    I also used this XML markup typesetting thing to mark up my GF's PhD thesis and the result was actually quite awesome. There some tweaking to be done but not more than normal. And none of the Microsoft-Worde-screws-you-with-image-placement shit that all her friends had to cope with. (This these was in Immunology so had loads of Microscope slides). In the end we did all the microscope stuff on glossy paper and rest on normal paper anyways so the image palcement, which IS sometimes a pain, did not matter too much. Btw, what the hell is it with Word that places an image so that only the little left part of the corner is actually visible on a page. Why on earth is this the normal, default behaviour??!!

    That said, recently I have moved our system to XSL, in particular, FOP. There are two reasons for this

    First, Latex sucks with some international characters. We have a system where people can apply for membership on the web and they use all kinds of weirdo character which sort of necessitates unicode. Every once in a while my invoice thingie croaks because some member from some country in Norhern Europe has a funny accent or something on his name and the end stages dies.

    Secondly, the, the difference in meta-characters is a pain to use, if someone uses a / in his company name I have to worry. and so forth. This is easier to handle in XML/HTML. The whole business of metacaharacters and the impedance mismatch this causes between stages of a publishing pipeline can be a serious headache. Our system produces text by exporting XML and using the XML to produce Tex. The meaning of a or a \ in an input string can get prety damn confusing.

    The third reason is more compelling. Our secretarial staff sometimes needs to update the templates from which we generate EMails. It is mucho easier to do this with a simple subset of HTML (which is what we use) because all of them know the syntax sort of and the other technical guy can help them much easier. I wrote a Java program to process this into XSL:FO and pump it all through FOP while looking up the embedded fields in Lotus Notes. THis works just beautiful, nor problems so far, and quite frankly, the amount of code to manipulate XML in JAva or any other language is muuuuuch more than that to manipulate Tex. A lot of the common metacharacter issues are automatically taken care of, for instance.

    Lastly, if you are doing complicated things such as this, Latex's philosophy of "leave the page formatting to me" jsut does not cut it. You can get it right, but it is extremely sensitive to small changes that breaks everything. XSL:FO handles this much better.

    I might also add that FOP uses the latex typesetting algorithm. Other XSL:FO rendering tools, RenderX in particular, does not and the output from FOP simply looks better. The output from RenderX looks awful.

    I hope that helps. Yes, it is being used in a business setting to produce all kinds of things from papers to invoices with tables and letterheads and whatnot. I might also add that we use these tools because we a a very cost-conscious nonprofit and use Linux for all our servers where a script that happesn to be a Lotus script program outputs fields into a xML file that is used by a PYthon program to convert the output to Tex and then uses Tex to format simply works :)

    There is also a XML syntax frontend for Latex AFAIK. If you are really interested I can only reco

  • Bibliographies (Score:4, Informative)

    by djmutex ( 533260 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @05:55PM (#6447179)
    I am a lawyer and thus not really interested in pretty math formulas or even images. I still use LaTeX for the dissertation I am working on. Aside from the obvious advantages mentioned earlier (separation of content and formatting, switching layouts, creation of PDFs, etc.), for me there is one killer feature: there is no less painful way to handle citing and bibliographies in a long document, and do it consistently.

    Admittedly, bibtex (Latex's bibliography subsystem) is a bitch at first, but there is an extra package called jurabib [dyn-fli4l.de], originally designed for supporting the awkward quoting/bib style of German law texts, but later expanded to handle about any style on the planet, as far as I can see.

    Latex is old and weird, and it has its quirks, but it works best for me.

  • While I would say it is good, note what ESR says about the info version of the jargon file at this link [catb.org]:

    ...Also note that the info version has been phased out; it's an HTML world now.

    ...So one use of *TeX (book typesetting) is sort of deprecated, maybe. BTW: Latex doesn't breathe.

  • What makes LaTeX so powerful is, IMHO, not just its ease of use but also its delivery format. You _could_ export to HTML if you so wanted, or you could typeset it as PDF, PS, DVI, or distribute the file as plain LaTeX. The PDF option is my personal favourite, and it's important, too, because it doesn't depend on what fonts the user has installed, works cross- platform, and looks good.

    That's enough to make me a happy LaTeX user. Also, if you might enter academia, many academic journals require submissions i
  • My wife got a M.S. from Virginia Tech in Math and was required to submit her master's paper in LaTeX. She used lyx for some of the writing but did the rest by hand. So, I know some schools (at least in 2001) required you to learn it.

    Personally, I would use Koffice if I needed to create LaTeX papers. The creator of Klyx (a KDE version of lyx) was one of the core developers on the KWord team, and Klyx was abandoned to support work on Kword. If you know a thing or two about LaTeX you start to notice that KWor
  • You should learn LaTeX. It is an awesome way to write documents. I've had a number of professors compliment me on my documents. They look really professional,

    Why? My reasons:
    #1) If you've done any HTML coding, or are a programmer in general, it is pretty easy to pick up the basics. You don't need to learn all that much to get the core of what you need to do- lists, bold/italic/underline, centering, paragraphs, tables, and some symbols.

    #2) You can use tools like LyX to do the work for you. Even if you never learn a lick of real LaTeX code, you still end up with a beautiful document, and any of the other benefits.

    #3) You can use LaTeX without having a GUI. Or a newer computer. Or a "full" word processor on a "full" OS. That is, you can write, compile and print out LaTeX docs on a DOS machine, from the console on a Unix machine, a PDA, etc.

    I initially decided to learn LaTeX because there was a simple TeX compiler for the NewtonOS, my PDA platform until recently. There was also NewtonWorks- a good mobile Office suite- but there was no simple way for me to output the document and print it without docking with a Mac or Windows machine. With TeX for the Newton, on the other hand, I could export the text to any machine, compile the TeX on the machine itself or on the university mainframe, and then print.

    I had to move on around a year ago from the NewtonOS, at least as my primary platform. On the Jornada 720, a Windows CE micro-laptop Handheld PC 2000 device, I started writing my papers using a real version of LaTeX- the same thing as I was using on my OS X machine. Editing the LaTeX code in emacs no less- all on a PDA! The whole cycle- editing, compiling, viewing (with WinDVI) and printing can all be done on a PDA. There are easy to install WinCE packages [rainer-keuchel.de]. I also had a PocketPC for a while, and the packages all worked very well there as well, but editing wasn't as nice as it was on the J720- it has a real keyboard. I've recently switched to the Zaurus SL-C760, and am a bit disapointed in that there aren't any easy to install ipkgs, along with a decent Qtopia LaTeX editor. Alas, I'll work on it soon enough- I'll need to be able to write up LaTeX docs and compile to PS before school starts. :)

    #4) I had another reason, if I remember, I'll put it here!

    #5) It's entirely free. Yeah, you could get OpenOffice. Or you could pirate/buy/get bundled MS Office. OO has generally just been a huge hassle for me; MS Office (I'm on OS X) is generally faster, more stable and less of a hassle than OpenOffice, but introduces its own set of problems.
  • I had the chance to be associated with a CS research group as a freshman. Everyone there used LaTeX so I just kind of picked it up with help from those guys. Sure it took me A LOT longer to write those first few papers, but now it is my preferred way to do things. Four years later I can say that learning LaTeX was one of the best things that I have ever done. Sure it is great for math, but I use it for almost anything. Why you ask? Well, using div2ps I can generate postscript...using pdflatex I can ge

  • This is yet another reason that LaTeX is Good.

    If you're doing anything at all with computer algebra (rather common in applied math and engineering science anyway) you'll find you can get maple [maplesoft.com] or mathematica [wolfram.com] to output your equations at any stage of processing in TeX. They even have little TeX-rendering front ends now.

    This is really really nifty, because it means that you can play with the algebraic form of an equation (or a whole table of related equations) and see what form of the same equation

  • Yes, unfortunately (Score:3, Informative)

    by Tom7 ( 102298 ) on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @10:00PM (#6449122) Homepage Journal
    There are a lot of really crappy things about LaTeX, but it is definitely the standard. All the journals and conferences I've submitted to assume you are preparing your document in LaTeX, and give you style files to set everything up correctly. citeseer [nec.com] , as far as I know, can only automatically get information from LaTeX-generated PS and PDF files.

    • There are a lot of really crappy things about LaTeX, but it is definitely the standard.

      Yep. I've always thought of LaTeX as being kinda C-like. Everyone knows it sucks in places, the syntax is hideous and the tricky bits require a minimum of guru status (and preferably demigod) to get right. And yet, it's awesomely powerful, it can do almost anything if you ask it nicely enough, and no-one has yet made anything with even close to the same level of power and a significantly nicer interface. For these rea

  • MathML ? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dargaud ( 518470 ) <slashdot2@@@gdargaud...net> on Tuesday July 15, 2003 @11:03PM (#6449533) Homepage
    Whatever happened to MathML [w3.org] ? I remember when it was announced, half a decade ago, I did think it would solve all those printing and compatibility problems. I have yet to find one app that supports it, particularly the browsers.
  • As the sysadmin for a large engineering department I always, *always*, recommend grad students learn LaTex if they're go to write any papers.

    Anecdotally, Word just seems to do weird things with the layout on way too many papers. This could because the studentsa aren't creating the papers properly or Word is crap.

    With LaTex you just have to worry about the content and the equations, the formatting is usely something that can be set once and forgotten.

    Equations are a pain no matter what you use. There is j

  • Absolutely! Plus, LaTeX is cvs-friendly (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ediron2 ( 246908 ) * on Wednesday July 16, 2003 @12:47AM (#6450099) Journal
    I repeatedly heckle my coworkers about LaTeX whenever we do proposals.

    1 - we're stuck using Word. Not likely to change. Proposals, like thesis work and peer-reviewed journals, are one of those times when you do *exactly* what the submission guidelines say, and everything we get says "submit in Word 97/2000 format." A couple of iconoclasts try to do their part in OOffice. Sadly, these proposals always get complicated enough that OOffice just destroys formatting throughout if any segment was created in OOffice. But we're trying to get off Word.

    2 - Most of my coworkers have used LaTeX.

    3 - We all depend heavily on CVS for our code work.

    So, about the umpty-fifth time that Something Horrible* happened to a 40-page document we're rushing to beat a deadline on, I muttered something about how much more fun things would be if we reverted to LaTeX and used CVS to do shared builds until the proposal was done.

    One of the guys almost was in tears... you could see him thinking back to how EASY LaTeX was, mentally superimposing a CVS framework, and literally melting down at the Criminal Stupidity* of using Word. Everone else either agreed, or (if they didn't have a LaTeX history) muttered that "anything beats the POS* we're using..."

    * Something Horrible, POS, and Criminal Stupidity are all (TM) Microsoft. This rant brought to you by Microsoft, proud maker of the Incredible Biodegradeable Access Forms, VStudio .net's Autoexpiring Builds Bug, The Four Horsemen of Apocalyptic Nullness, and Bob.
    • the known habit of M$-word to crash during saving, which ofcourse destorys not only your current work, but all SAVED work since the last backup.

      For comparison, LyX backs-up the original BEFORE saving, AND in case of crash, automatically tries to save and "emergency" save. This helped me several times when a network crash cut down my X connection to the server.
    • And why don't you put you .doc files in the CVS repository?
      • I'll take it you've never used CVS, and are not just Trolling.

        CVS is largely line/text oriented. There are capabilities in it to handle binary, but they're incompatible with most front-end tools (wincvs, cvsweb, jcvs are ones I've used) and they are by default turned to an 'off' position. This means that typically CVS just notes the change and keeps a copy of each revision. You can move back to an old version, but you can't diff two versions intelligibly.

        I believe I've read somewhere that Subversion (t
  • I used LyX to write out my masters dissertation a year ago. I did have to learn a couple of Latex codes for a few little changes I wanted to make, using ERT.
    I couldn't imagine using anything else these days.
  • But it's certainly still worth wearing :)

    Programs like Lyx will ensure it's popularity anyway, it's a lot less time consuming for documentation than buggy Word.
  • I got through my CS undergrad program using other programs (AmiPro or Word for papers, CorelDraw for crude flowcharts (Visio or something else would be better if you're doing a lot of charting)).

    Most of the CS professors used tex, and one or two advocated it, but we turned in most stuff on paper, and ascii if electronic, so it didn't matter what you used, and I never had any problem for not using tex.
    However, I wasn't doing much with formulae.

    If you're not planning on going to grad school or publishing, y
  • I worked at a financial software company that had a heavy academic background. They used LaTeX for lots of stuff.

    One day I was at lunch with the group admin assistant who was a visual artist who worked for us as a day job. She had no sci/tech background and had never heard of LaTeX. She told a story about how the boss had sent her an email saying something like

    "Hi, I need you to learn about LaTeX, come see me this afternoon".

    Of course the only thing she could think of was "i'm not that kind of girl".

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