As for the “focusing on content” thing… provided style files exist, you don’t see format so much as structure in the document. True, you may not like seeing the command \section, however, it has much more useful meaning to it than bold, slightly larger, and preceded by a number.

A quality editor precludes many syntax errors by providing keystrokes that match braces, etc. Further, for the faint of heart, a “GUI interface to LaTeX” is available through LyX, which provides a more visual experience while retaining the power LaTeX provides.

I recently downloaded your MacTex. While trying to typeset in TexShop, the program said that I was missing teTex or that I had the wrong path. As I would like to download MacTex - 2007, how do I uninstall the version from your page?

Thank you. I think you’re doing a great job.

Best

Novice

I also think that this was a fairly well written summary of the pros and cons of LaTeX. I do have one more suggestion for a very helpful LaTeX related tool. For those who use bibtex to handle their bibliographies, you should check out jabref. It is a bibtex organizer written in java. It has a very intuitive UI, and can import and export all sorts of bibliographic formats like Endnote, RIS, ISI etc. very easily.

The Beauty of LaTeX

And why do all these journals have their own typesetting preferences? It would indeed be easier if academics could focus on the content - and let LaTeX take care of the form. But more often than not, I spend days tweaking LaTeX or making Stylesheets to fit the requests of a publisher who thinks that his stylesheet is the best. If they would show a more professional attitude, they could provide free .sty files to make LaTeX work effortlessly with their own stylesheet requirements. But more often than not, they don’t provide any templates.

So far, I have collected stylesheet with 8 different way to do headings and subheadings. That’s really truly unprofessional. We have a tool that allows excellent type-setting, but it seems that publishers are not too keen to make us use it.

You have a really good point here - but your argument is sligthly sollipsistic. I mean to say that the fact that M$ Word is the de facto business standard document format is the reason why most people would resort to it for data exchange. Otherwise, people would use a more stable data format. Such is life :-). But your point is good: what’s my editor going to do with my lovely, hyper-linked, indexed and printer-ready pdf manuscript?

Of course, Real Men ™ would use cvs, or some other versioning system. For a programmer, nothing is easier than checking in a TeX source file into cvs. But writers need to write, not go for an IT degree, so this makes the accessibility of the system very hard indeed. (LyX 4.x incorporates change tracking, and it’s very nice, but that ties you to the .lyx document format, which is hardly an improvement).

I expect the current trend in web-based applications to eventually incorporate concurrent version tracking. You only need to put two and two together to realise that solutions like Writely (http://www.writely.com) can really benefit from such an arrangement. So here’s looking to the future.

Btw, there is a rather less known web-based office suite called gOffice (https://goffice.com) which is based on a TeX engine (the rather recent XeTeX variety, if I am not mistaken). Unfortunately, it has recently ceased to be free, for reasons which are beyond my comprehension, so I’m not even sure one can test-drive it for a while to see how it handles.

teTeX is simply one of the main current distributions of TeX - it includes LaTeX, of course, and MacTeX is based on it. So there’s no particular difference there.

Eric MacKnight:

“Superiority” is a complex term, especially in a public discussion. I am also not profficient in pages, but I do understand it is template- (and, therefore, somewhat structure-) based.

The “superiority” - let’s call it adequacy - of LaTex for large projects is centred mainly in its handling of structured data - it doesn’t matter how many hundreds of sections, subsections, footnotes, margin notes, paragraphs and headings you have, you can affect the appearance of all with minimal effort. This includes automatic page-, section- and note-numbering, as well as automatic generation of indexes and tables of content.

The algorithmic handling of typesetting is probably one of the best currently available ones - I believe only Quark Express comes close. You never need to worry about hyphenation, line-separation, orphaned or widowed paragraphs, etc. Not to speak of its brilliant handling of a wide variety of bibliography styles via BibTeX.

Conclusion - I wouldn’t trust my Ph.D. thesis to Pages. Or my Great European Novel. Not even my articles.

On the other hand, if I were to write a quick note, an in-company memo, or a brief list, LaTeX would be overkill - Pages, or Your Preferred Word Processor, are better at that.

So, it really depends on what, when, for whom, and how often you write. As it is with most tools.

If I were new to LaTeX, I would give it a try. I would consider the pros and cons of LaTeX and my existing word-processing software. And I would take my decision.

Can anyone else explain why LaTex would be superiour to Pages for, say, a book project?

While LaTex has an advantage of being a simple text format, it is just too weird for my tastes.

Thanks for the article however. A very well done piece. I think it will get some people to give LaTex a try.

My programming background makes me like LaTeX, and its output looks really sharp. But I never really felt like it let me “focus on the content” as everyone says it does. My short papers (less than 10 pages) always looked crowded with all of the LaTeX syntax (citations, enumerated lists, etc). When I write in Mellel the document looks clean and distraction free. I set the pararaph style I want and then just get to work.

I wish that I preferred LaTeX, but Mellel is too excellent for my needs.

cheers

But no, after LaTeX, no output looks satisfying. Thus marvellous Mac apps, like OmniOutliner, DevonThink, or VoodooPad, seem below par, bereft of a means to export to LaTeX.

Luckily, TextMate’s MultiMarkdown bundle does a great job of exporting from Markdown to good quality LaTeX - so my quick notes, lists, and memos can be exported straight into average rtf or pdf, whereas longer, more complex and ambitious documents can get the LaTeX treatment they deserve.

A dvi/pdf viewer I particulary like is TeXniScope - it’s also very good at following source specials, etc.

Another essential tool is what we can consider the best possible LaTeX environment - Emacs with the AUCTeX, BibTeX and RefTeX modes… But, as you mentioned in the case of Vim, asking a Word/Nisus/Pages/OpenOffice/TextEdit user to learn a) LaTeX, and it’s almost infinite depth and complexity, b) Emacs, and its almost infinite depth and complexity, and 3) AUCTeX, BibTeX and RefTeX and their almost infinite quirks and issues is more likely to cause them a brain tumor rather than increased productivity…

A possible option is LyX - a GUI front-end which attempts to avoid this complexity by hiding away the TeX source. LyX is brilliant, but, IMHO, not quite successfull - it has its own quirks, so, instead of avoiding the complexity and learnign curve of LaTeX, it adds it’s own…

Indeed, the steep and lenghty learning curve and the relative complexity are likely to keep LaTeX away from public focus… But remember, once you try it, there’s no going back. Honest.

I totally agree what a biaché Word is when trying to get your document to look just right, but then that’s what the other design packages are for.

Word is essentially a word processing application, that attempts to tackle the issue of page layout, whereas the Quark and InDesign are proper page layout applications that allow you to perform text processing.

I’ve used Quark for so long that even if I’m working on a simple one-page letter, I find it easier (and a whole heap less frustrating!) to do it in Quark than I do in Word =)

One little note in reference to LaTeX: The first version of LaTeX was published untested by the author. He hadn’t tested it live at all. He knew that it would work though … he had mathematically proved it

Now, three years later, I am ready to completely ditch Word. I am sick of watching it bounce in the dock 10 or 11 times before it opens, and I am sick of its slow performance across the board. I have started using LaTeX again to write documents, and it has been such a joy. The finished product looks extremely professional, and it is much easier to concentrate on the content rather than worrying about why Word wants to split your table across two pages!! I urge anyone reading this to give LaTeX a try.

HTML is a great analogy: Think of something like Word as a WYSIWYG editor: sure its easy to use (for the most part) but the end result is invariably ugly, and looks the same as everyone else; there’s no character, no personality. LaTeX is like coding your own HTML: you have infinitely more control and the results can verge on the artistic.

i not only write my own academic papers, but I also do technical support for a campus full of faculty who i know could really benefit from something like LaTeX. I’m am going to do my best to convert a few along the way. If you deal with any type of long-form document, deal with multiple references, make use of indexes, TOCs, etc, LaTeX is a breath of fresh air