Why I Use LaTeX to Write Professionally And You Should Too  

Use a reference book ... google Latex filetype:pdf

Good luck with your thesis 👍

Thank you. I will also look into your book which seems to cover or will be covering a lot of interesting topics in a compact way.

@@SonicEldorado I am currently in the same position as you were 8 months ago. Would you recommend Latex for a thesis? Did you have any problems regarding citations and your bibliography?

The video is fun, but I hope that Andreas will consider TeXmacs for his next video!

If you have equations and you want them to look nice, Word is a no-no. Likewise Libreoffice. If you have bibliographies, then bibtex manages everything nicely for you. I'd recommend using a git repo for version tracking. And separating your defs into separate files. And possibly chapters too (much like you separate stuff when coding, or having external .css and .js with web pages.

They never learnt it probably.

For larger and more complex documents, Latex can be faster and less tedious than MS Word.

Yeh I was thinking the same tbh word can do this all automatically

Word's native formatting is horrible. If you move a picture sometimes the whole document goes to shits. Word has so many "features" that are just a nuisance. Writing formulae is significantly faster in Latex. Whenever I search something in word, I have to search for minutes on end where to find it. Referencing figures is so much easier in Latex than it is in word.... And much more.

@@Vinzmannn And in LaTeX you need to know all of these 'commands' and to be honest just casually typing in word is more comfortable and faster than writing your text and also write the correct commands

@@erokex for someone who has experience in latex all these “commands” are more comfortable. There’s certainly a steep learning curve, but for those who learn it having complete control and all the formatting verbatim makes life easier.

Word ist just horrible 🤷🏻‍♂️

Dude, even my backward university still use Latex for scientific paper.

You and your supervisor might both consider switching to TeXmacs; you'll both be better off :-)

It’s unfortunate that latex does have a learning curve for those that are not tech savvy is very annoying. honestly, for me remembering which package to have for a documents makes setting it up at first kinda annoying, but that’s more a problem with overleaf

Same story =]]

Exactly

It may be hard in the beginning, mainly if you don't have an engineering-math-programming background (I'm from the philosophy-literature side of the spectrum). But it pays off, once you've learnt. It saves you a lot of time and headaches, and there's a big community willing to help to solve problems. Plus, if you work on the same kind of document repeatedly, you just reuse the same template you've configured and formatted. It's definitely worthwhile the effort. It looks professional, elegant and everything is always on its place.

You could also try TeXmacs.

You just format ONCE in latex, and then just focusing on the content. You should not overpopulate the preamble of the document. Just make a sty file and it will be more like html+css but simpler, and your wouldn't care about the formatting anymore. Just learn to write sty, your own commands, own formatting, so you have to do it just once and you are done !

This is the way with software people. Everything is so simple*. *if you use specific add-ons (half of which won’t be maintained in 2 years), and specific versions of dependencies, and are willing to come up with absurdly hacky ways to do some specific but incredibly simple tasks, and if something does break then you should just be able to write the fix yourself

Some of the advantages apply to markup languages in general, like having a completely free choice of text editor. Other advantages show up more with larger documents as well as academic contexts, like splitting up the document into discreet files, integrations with several programming languages, and compatibility with git-style versioning. In general it's better suited to larger scale work where you have multiple people working on a document/text or just even one person working on a single large document/text. This all being said, you can get a lot of the benefits of LaTeX with markdown without the same weight. Markdown syntax is designed to be easy and still give you access to the a features that LaTeX provides like math, the Pandoc version of Markdown is great in this way. Markdown is usually better than either Word or LaTeX at least if we're looking at common use cases. tldr; it's nice for big projects, but might not be worth it for everyone: use markdown if that's you.

Niet hardop zeggen, maar met TeXmacs is de friet lekkerder!

I don't think MS Word has a "VERY intuitive" equation editor. Don't get me wrong, It is intuitive, but that's all. It is a poorly designed function, barely usable, equation formatting could improve a lot and it doesn't really handles all kinds of equations, just the simple ones. Even though it dresses itself like It could be an equation editor, It's not pratical. You'd think MS Word would be able to handle just about anything you'd throw at It. Most of the times you'd be right, but there always were a handful of features that never were much useful, properly designed, fleshed out, or behaved as intended. Those can make MS Word feels a bit on the bloated side, and it gets worse when you start adding 3rd party software to fill for the editor's shortcomings. Latex can edit mathematical equations like no other software, It's sleek, lightweight, and extremely powerful, as long as you bother learning It's syntax, of course. Honestly, It's a novel and niche product for a niche group of people. It does things quite differently than MS Word and most other text editors do. Learning a new tool like Latex shouldn't be too difficult, we all had to learn Word and/or Excel at some point, I don't see much difference in that regard.

The main problem with this video is, that there is no real WYSIWYG editor involved - or the author just doesn't know, how a real writing program looks and/or works like - to me, as a non-mac-guy, it looks like a better version of M$ notepad. If you're bad at Word, it is as if you're bad at LaTeX (like I am bad at english :/). You just aren't able to compare them then - and if you have created many papers, like the author claims, you should actually know, what comparison really is about. In my opinion - which is also approved by some studies involving LaTeX beginners, LaTeX pros and Word beginners - LaTeX has lost its right to existence nowadays and is now(!) obsolete. Its main reason was typography, but today Word and Libre can do the same with less effort, faster, "nicer" and with more reliability: Using packages in LaTeX will create incompatabilities sometimes you will never ever experience in a program like Word, since it is from one factory: every part of the software (≙ packages) is meant to work with each other, especially when software is created by a large company who is interested in - who guesses? - money (and user-data). You just have to learn to use your software like you previously had to learn designing text with the LaTeX language. The difference is: Getting good results with Word / Libre / OO is much faster and easier (for everyone), than with LaTeX (even if you are a programmer or markup language designer or IT-nerd) - and that's what new technology is about and how many people (GUI designers and so on) earn a lot of money with.

First, CONGRATULATIONS on earning your Masters in Chem Engineering! I'm a fellow Chem E: a BChE (1986) U of Del. Secondly, AGREED to all else you said.

I couldn’t agree more. One can even add formula's in Latex-style in Word nowadays and if you don’t like Mendeley, Zotero is a nice alternative.

Spoiler alert: In video #113 he abandons LaTeX for Markdown. Regarding using Word for Professional writing---at least for scientific papers---everyone uses Word these days.

Ughh Latex, markdown, rmarkdown >>>> word

Personally, I think Latex is incredibly beautiful, it provides a lot of control and looks more professional than word. If you get used to latex you can write documents fast. Though if you wish to use Latex for one-time use only for some project I recommend using something easier like word so you don't have to spend additional time to learn latex. If however you are in for example a maths department or computer science department it is an absolute must to know latex (at least in my university).

I know, right?

Tex heads do not care about actually doing any math. All they want to do is spend their entire lives worrying about typesetting.

libre office sucks

i recommend coda and you?

That's because it IS dumb and inefficient.

True, but it takes care of typesetting automatically and allows integration of programming languages like R. You can directly import R graphs in Latex without losing quality of images as you would with word. And 1 major bonus point is that there is a huge community behind Latex which will help you with many questions you have.

@@Tntpker Word and Excel are able to handle Stata and R exported graphs and tables perfectly and efficiently. It's totally nonsense to use programming codes for texts. What a ridiculous software.😂😂😂

@@harrisonsituationroom Thats fine I can understand programming (I dont consider latex programming) is hard for some people. But I mean hundreds of thousands of researchers use it for a reason, so it is not ridiculous. I personally use it because it just looks more professional than Word (I havent seen any Word thesis look better than a thesis written in latex), easier citations and version control (gl doing that with Word lol)

@@harrisonsituationroom The point of LaTeX is that it produces better typography, can automate much of the formatting required for a paper, is more stable, and is much better for tasks required in academic writing (especially with math and science e.g. writing equations). There are even options to use LaTeX more like a word processor (like LyX). If you don't like that, fine.

@@Tntpker Citing in Word is just type sthg like "...(Chomsky, 1985)...". I see no benefit by citing with a made-up nickname and doing staff like \citet{...} or \cite{...}. Plus editing tables and figures in Word in so easy and editing a complex table takes forever in Latex by doing staff like cl cl cl ... 😂😂😂

Yes he is ;)

You're far better than me! I gave up after 1 minute.

Obviously. Agreed

No.

@@3nt3_ Could you elaborate in that?

@@matheusnb99 you can have vim keybindings

@@3nt3_ well, if you use vim, sure why not. But I assure you that you can do the same things in word, it will just take a bit more of time.

He's german.

I'm reading your line with Borat accent! 😂