If you fancy a change, you only change the style definitions once, then the presentation of the document will be updated automatically. This defines how different elements within your document should look (like Cascading Style Sheets defining styles in HTML pages). Latex is better as it uses a document style. The point is that this will then have to be applied to every header manually. This is opposed to the average Word user, who will immediately highlight a given section header and apply formatting to it: maybe a larger font, maybe underline, etc. You introduce structure explicitly by telling Latex when a new section begins, for example, but you don’t then faff around trying to decide how the section headers should look. When producing your Latex document, you are concentrating on the content itself. Not the most obvious advantage, possibly because a lot of Word users don’t understand why this so beneficial. Therefore, it’s not an interactive system that is the de-facto method for document creation nowadays. The Latex interpreter reads in a Latex marked-up file, renders the content into a document and dumps it a new file. Content is written in plain text and can be annotated with various ‘commands’ that describe how certain elements should be displayed. This extension became Latex (pronounced ‘lay-tech’). This allowed for a simpler approach for creating documents, where content and style were separate. However, the vast flexibility meant it was complex, so by the mid-80s Leslie Lamport created a set of macros that abstracted away many of the complexities. Around 10 years later, he froze the language after originally anticipating spending a single year! Tex gave extremely fine-grained control of document layout. In 1978, Donald Knuth – arguably one of the most famous and well respected computer scientists – embarked on a project to create a typesetting system, called Tex (pronounced ‘tech’), after being disappointed with the quality of his acclaimed The Art of Programming series. This article will not be a tutorial for how to use Latex, instead an overview of its benefits and why I think it trumps what word processors have to offer. I’m not the only one who’s glad to move away from the WYSIWYG world. I’m very glad I persevered because I wouldn’t want to use any thing else for my papers/reports any more. There was a learning curve, but for the typical documents that I often wrote, there was very little to learn. Undeterred, I stuck with Latex and realised that it wasn’t so hard after all. (Lesson: don’t try to learn something new in a rush!) Needless to say, I had a hard time of it and wasn’t Latex’s best fan that day. I jumped straight into the deep-end with both feet. The deadline was the same day as I found out about the call for papers. Actually, that’s not quite true, I wanted to submit a paper to a journal and it only accepted Latex documents. However, ever since my never-ending woes with Word during my degree, when I started my PhD, I decided to go and try out Latex. Nowadays, I can use OpenOffice because it’s come a long way and really is a decent product (the current v2 beta is very good). In all seriousness, I’ve written many words in large documents using Microsoft Word. Likelihood of you throwing your computer out of the window is directly proportional to the number of times Clippy pops up.Likelihood of a crash is directly proportional to the duration since you last saved.Likelihood of a crash is inversely proportional to the time left before its deadline.Likelihood of a crash is directly proportional to the importance of a document.Anyone who has used Microsoft Word for a reasonable amount of time will recognise my very own Andy’s Laws on Word:
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