And modern, well-meaning, open-source Office clones are even worse: in trying to reliably imitate Word's codependent behaviour, they have produced software with even more quirks against which I must fight. Using Word to do anything more than a simple letter - anything which involved a list, or controlling varying font sizes, or tables (especially tables!) - involved for me a struggle against the software. But whenever I tried to do anything modestly non-trivial, such as bullet points, it would begin to exhibit what could at best be charitably termed "eccentric" behaviour. I once used MS Word happily, as this was a substantial improvement over WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS, and contemporary office suites offered e.g. You are not at the mercy of buggy word-processing software, proprietary or otherwise. Programmability and highest-quality are perks, but the fact that the input is plain-text has one extremely important consequence: I will echo Leo's point, about plain-text. For example, the datatool package can be used to do mail-merging from a list of names and addresses, which is common for business documents. Many of these have an academic focus but this is not true of every package. There are a large number of add-ons to LaTeX (called packages) that are designed to help with particular tasks. This structured approach helps when you want to do things that are repetitive, as the formatting is always taken care of 'behind the scenes'. For example, there are commands such as \section for document structure rather than making everything bold, italic or whatever. Of course, some set up is needed to get the correct appearance, but once it is done most of the source you write is focused on structure. LaTeX is intended to focus on document structure rather than appearance. It also uses ligatures where applicable, which means that letters which 'go together' look better than if the letter design is all done separately. For example, LaTeX uses a hyphenation algorithm which generates well-spaced out justified paragraphs. LaTeX does things that word processors do not do but that well-designed published material does do. For a critique of word processors, look at.
This is in contrast to a word processor, where you edit the text as it appears.
#Mynotes latex pdf
LaTeX uses source code to generate a document: you edit one file and typeset it to a generate the output (usually PDF nowadays). LaTeX is a typesetting system, not a word processor. There are a number of webpages with detail on the reasons to use LaTeX: I'll highlight a few. There are bound to be several answers to this question, and different aspects that people highlight. We would welcome your help in designing new document classes and templates! Having said that, if you are a designer, of course Notably memoir) that allow you to customize the look of your document, but thingsĪre not always straightforward. There are a number of packages (perhaps most Your own designs for your documents (rather than the content), LaTeX is perhaps not What you care about is the design of the document. LaTeX isn’t just anotherĭocument type to “Save-As”, it's a complete system to help you write those documents. You can do it, but the results won't be pretty. Written your thesis in Word, there isn't much point in trying to “convert” yourĭocument to LaTeX. That can help you with this, but don't try to learn LaTeX if you have, say, less than There are of course many guides and tutorials Unlike most other point&click systems, LaTeXĭoes take some time to learn. As a writer (scientist, researcher or not), this gives you the opportunity to focus on the “what”, the creative part of your work, rather than the “how” is it going to look printed out in paper (that is the work of LaTeX document class designers). This is particularly true for documents that are heavy on mathematics, but documents for any other area could also take advantage of these qualities.Ī less obvious advantage, but much more important, is that LaTeX allows you to clearly separate the content from the format of your document. Word or OpenOffice) is the high typographical quality of the documents that you'll be able to produce. Superficially, one of the advantages of LaTeX over other more traditional systems (e.g.
0 kommentar(er)
