LaTeX for Scientists Introduction: LaTeX vs. Word

Oh god yes formatting!! Having journal style files makes life way easier if your paper get rejected and u have to submit somewhere else.

How long will it take to complete this course because I need it😃

Lovely :)

how about asciidoc?

Sometimes LaTeX fans often hate on Word without knowing many of even its most basic or its advanced features. I've seen fourth year university students hate on Word, only to proceed to use it as if it was "WordPad", not even using styles for their headings, generally being unaware of its features and saying it's unusable to write equations with. (You even have the option to use LaTeX formatting for writing equations in Word these days...) Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware LaTeX is superior in many ways and I'll definitely be using it for my master thesis. But there's no need for fellow students or even professors to frown upon students using Word, if they are able to use it properly and get a decent result with it. But yeah, as you say, one will want to know LaTeX at some point, so why not start early right :)

Mmm I'm not convinced. Word can do all the stuff you mentioned, you just need to know how to use it.

Heading styles saves time with headings

Cross references provide updated figure captions

The inbuilt bibliography tool is awesome - keeps all citations ordered and formatted as required

The equations are so much faster to type in word. For example: the fraction A/B is simply typed as "A/B [space bar]" (3 button presses) in word, whereas in latex, it's "frac{A}{B}" (10 button presses) in latex.

Perhaps there are other things latex can do that word can't! Probably wouldn't hurt to try and find out 🙂

I disagree. Generally, journals require you to submit a document in .docx format.

Word documents enlarge with reflow and equations do as well. Generally speaking LaTex documents wind up in PDF. This does not enlarge with reflow and produce a readable result. Thus if you use LaTex and produce PDF output, you shut out people with low vision from reading your work without painful difficulty. I know this because I earned my PhD in mathematics with central retina damage. I never saw what my professors put on the board. And I had to read with a telescope in my glasses with a magnifying glass.
I learned LaTex. It was difficult because none of the documentation was accessible to people with low vision when I learned it.
Today Word is just better. It has a great equation editor that accepts a lot of LaTex. It has a "web layout" that permits any enlargement with complete word wrapping.
LaTex used to be superior, but not now.

good job!

awesome explanation!

I've playing with LaTeX for sometime. I think the main issue I run into is there's a lot of gotchas for the new user, or even user who needs to use some part of it they haven't used before. For example suppose I want to include the formula for the hyperbolic sine function. Like a fool I type:

\begin{equation}
sinh x = \frac{e^x - e^-x}{2}
\end{equation}

The only parts of that which work as expected are the \begin{} and \end{}, and kinda the \frac{}{}. The x on the e^-x isn't superscripted and there's no space between the sinh and the x so it's sinhx which makes it look either I've invented a new trig function or I'm looking for the sine of the product of two variables, h and x.

To get it to work I need to use:

\begin{equation}
sinh\: x = \frac{e^{x} - e^{-x}}{2}
\end{equation}

One I'm still struggling with is where I want to treat two or more equations as a single block, e.g. I want to where a variable is defined as a certain equation then an operation on that variable gives a certain results but the nearest I can get is:

Where\\
\begin{equation*}
y = tan\: ax
\end{equation*}

\begin{equation}
\frac{\delta y}{\delta x} = sec^2\: ax
\end{equation}

Which is inelegant.

For clarity and avoidance of doubt, I'm very much pro-LaTeX. That is probably why I find these gotchas so frustrating.

Thank you! As an undergraduate making my resume this is helping me!

Great points!

I published a 274-page PhD dissertation in MS Word 2000 + Mathtype 6.0 in 2000 in differential algebra
and 8 peer reviewed math papers across 4 different journals in MS Word 2000 and Mathtype.
I love MS Word because it frees me up to do mathematics. I literally do algebra and math within MS Word by cutting and pasting formula. I love that I just point and click and drag. There is none of this INSANITY of memorizing massive amounts of obscure code and then running it through some processor in the hopes of producing some document you can read.
You literally see exactly what you will get.

The ONLY negative you CAN say about it is that it's not open-source and is not saved as a small .txt file.

Now, in WHICH UNIVERSE is it YOU are living in where you are NOT freed up from worrying about formatting to work on math instead if you use MS Word?

Can you make a video on latex vs Rmarkdown?

If you have (I have) done your work in Word, can you easily convert it to Latex? Thanks

what are the most appropriate LaTex Editors where you instantaneously see the correct formatted output while you are typing?

Thanks for the advocacy. It looks like with the right templates, those of us in the social sciences can take advantage of Latex, I did see a Chicago, APA and MLA styles. The challenges of being in an interdisciplinary programme is that we have to juggle different style guides depending on professor's discipline. Since I'm doing the coursework stream, there's no thesis, but a lot of coursesand long papers. I also see opportunities in my day job where we disseminate research products. Combined with R or Python, a lot of documentation based on reporting quantitative data could be automated.

Said a whole lot of stuff without even showing one simple real world exmaple of Latex vs Word comparison. This video was a waste of time.

Thank you!

Thank you very much!

I'll give it a try!

It's much more complicated than what you said. MSWord can also do referencing and everything else LaTeX does. I did my thesis using Word and it was also quite a lot of learning. The LaTeX look can be initiated in Word using the same font that doesn't come in Windows by default. You'd have to learn LaTeX and Word very well to see which one is actually better.

you put oceans into a pond by highlighting the significance of Latex

Well you can open a latex file with 1000 pages in a reasonable amount of time and choose to only render certain parts unlike word. Latex's documentation is far far better than Microsoft's who hardly explain things well or even provide examples. Doing anything with pages numbers starting from different numbers in word feels so precarious with the section breaks.

Sally please, can you tell us how we can do word processing in Overleaf ?! laTex is awesome, but it lacks word processing features. Keep up the good work 👍

One mistake in Microsoft Word will lead you to "The Leaning Tower of Pisa" 😂😂

i am using latex because word cant handle many figures and citations

It is also nice that you can use it in combination with version control like git.

I recently started using LaTeX on Overleaf and have found it quite challenging. The compiler often returns fatal errors without clear explanations, even for small mistakes like a missing closing parenthesis or a forgotten $ sign. These minor oversights can lead to significant compile issues that take a long time to diagnose and fix. Additionally, the writing environment is far less appealing than the beautifully rendered final product. Why must authors work in such ugly space to produce something so visually stunning for readers?