Wow, my second post here… Well, the Twitter thing, you know, everything longer than 140 characters… just kidding, it’s not that bad… at least not yet.

Actually I did a lot of writing lately. This dissertation thing every doctoral student has to face, sooner or later…. And such a dissertation usually ends up being a very large document. In my experience Microsoft Word doesn’t do the greatest job when you are working on documents exceeding 10 pages, so when I started to write my dissertation I decided to try something else: LaTeX.

You won’t learn how to use LaTeX in 5 minutes, but it is definitely worth the effort, just read yourself:

‘LaTeX isn’t for everyone but it could be for you’ by Andy Roberts

Anyone who has used Microsoft Word for a reasonable amount of time will recognize my very own Andy’s Laws on Word:

1. Likelihood of a crash is directly proportional to the importance of a document.
2. Likelihood of a crash is inversely proportional to the time left before its deadline.
3. Likelihood of a crash is directly proportional to the duration since you last saved.
4. Likelihood of you throwing your computer out of the window is directly proportional to the number of times Clippy pops up.
5. That’s enough laws for now…

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‘Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient’ by Allin Cottrell

The word processor is a stupid and grossly inefficient tool for preparing text for communication with others.

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‘Latex vs. MS Word’ by Andrew Roberts

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Separation of content and style

Not the most obvious advantage, possibly because a lot of Word users don’t understand why this so beneficial. In when producing your Latex document, you are concentrating on the content itself. 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. That’s done later.

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Control

Even with simple documents, you can quickly become frustrated by Word’s rather unintelligent interference. And when it comes to large documents, the hours that are wasted trying to get that image that you know will fit at the bottom of the page, but Word refuses to put it there!
With Latex, you can – if you want to – have total control over the presentation of your document.

Output

It’s difficult to disagree that the output from Latex is far superior to what Word can produce. This is emphasised greatest when it comes to documents with high mathematical content, which is a major strength for Latex. It also has much better kerning, hyphenation and justification algorithms that simply make the output far more professional than what any word processor can do.
It also takes little effort to convert your document into a postscript or PDF file. There’s no need to buy additional software such as Adobe Acrobat like you need to do to convert a Word document into PDF.

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‘The Beauty of LATEX’ by Dario Taraborelli

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There is still a further reason that definitely convinced me to abandon MS Word when I wrote my dissertation: you will never be able to produce professionally typeset and well-structured documents using most WYSIWYG word processors. LATEX is a free typesetting system that allows you to focus on content without bothering about the layout: the software takes care of the actual typesetting, structuring and page formatting, producing documents of astonishing elegance.

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It allows fine-tuned control on a number of typesetting options, although just using the default configuration results in documents with high typographic quality.

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1. Kerning

Kerning is the process of selectively adjusting the spacing between letters pairs to improve the overall appearance of text. Examples of letter pairs that need kerning treatment are AV, AY, PA, and AT. These letter pairs often look awkward together, and need to either be moved closer together, or further apart manually. Professional typesetting systems and fonts allow fine-grained adjustments for such letter pairs. Popular word processors either lack support for kerning tables or disable kerning by default.

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7. Line breaks, justification and hyphenation

Readability results not only from a good selection of typefaces, but also from a correct distribution of characters and whitespace per line. To attain this goal, most WYSIWYG word processors use relatively dumb justification/hyphenation procedures (i.e. algorithms that establish the position for line breaks by processing text line by line). LATEX uses an advanced algorithm, based on seminal work by Donald Knuth and Michael F. Plass and enhanced by Frank Liang in 1983 for his PhD dissertation and, which considers paragraphs as `wholes´ in order to decide where to add line breaks. The algorithm uses language-specific patterns in order to decide the preferred position for hyphenation. The engine then selects line breaks so as to make paragraphs look as good as possible. Information that is taken into account for calculating optimal line breaks includes the number of consecutive lines ending with hyphens, word tightness on each line, the change of tightness between consecutive lines.

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Drop me a line if you need some help setting up LaTeX on your computer, we can meet at CIBU and I’ll help you get acquainted.