@ -73,17 +73,19 @@ This sounds fantastic… but as you can expect from the title of this article th
- You are in academia, particularly in any STEM discipline. In this scenario manuscripts are everything. Content is really important and requires a tremendous amount of work. In the case of Ph.D. manuscripts, you MUST consider spending some time learning LaTeX to make the difference in your final outcome. I have seen Ph.D. manuscripts written in MS Word and I have to say that somehow (for me) it diminishes the value of the manuscript.
- You work with abundant bibliography. Professional works may manage hundreds of citations. Citations must have a consistent format, otherwise your bibliography section will be a mess. To save time, you must go with LaTex + BibTeX. Fill your BibTex file with your citation entries, tag them, and use the tag in your latex document as a reference. The compiler will do the rest of the work. I know there are plugins and solutions for MS Word and other text processors. But remember, for thirty years, this problem has been solved with plain text. And from my experience, these plugins result cumbersome.
- You are using formulas. Plugins can easily manage formulas like:
- You are using formulas.
Plugins can easily manage formulas like:
Other formulas like
can be impossible to write. Every decent solution around to manage math formulas is based on LaTeX. Why not use it directly?
You expect figures using the best quality possible. Formats such as SVG cannot be available for your text processor. With LaTeX, you can generate PDF documents with embedded SVG figures. Not many solutions around can offer something like this.
You want a free solution.
You want it to be forward compatible. LaTeX has been around for more than thirty years. We can typeset old documents and see how they were intended to be.
One entry point, several output formats. Because LaTeX is a typesetting system, you can get outputs in DVI, PDF, HTML, XML, etc. with a single document.
Forget about the document layout. LaTeX is somehow like HTML + CSS. Once you define the document structure, you use a markup language, and the compiler will make everything coherent for you. No more paragraphs separated with double spacing instead of a single space.
- You expect figures using the best quality possible. Formats such as SVG cannot be available for your text processor. With LaTeX, you can generate PDF documents with embedded SVG figures. Not many solutions around can offer something like this.
- You want a free solution.
- You want it to be forward compatible. LaTeX has been around for more than thirty years. We can typeset old documents and see how they were intended to be.
- One entry point, several output formats. Because LaTeX is a typesetting system, you can get outputs in DVI, PDF, HTML, XML, etc. with a single document.
- Forget about the document layout. LaTeX is somehow like HTML + CSS. Once you define the document structure, you use a markup language, and the compiler will make everything coherent for you. No more paragraphs separated with double spacing instead of a single space.
zeus
3 years ago