Why tex is better than word

The advantages of LaTeX are that It's free. It's available for many machines. You can use the editor of your choice I sometimes use Word. The typesetting's better, especially the maths. Style changes are neater in LaTeX.

Style files for many periodicals exist. You will need to purchase additional software to fill the gap. Bibliography programs come with their own price, learning curve, and disadvantages. EndNote on the Mac is poor despite being widespread. Since LaTeX is open source many generations of scientists have written the extensions they needed. You will be able to find all commonly and most rarely used features. References are handled by BibTeX and a database front end like BibDesk but unlike in Word integration is seamless and the extensions are free.

You have to pay for Word and Referencing software. Your lab may do this for you, but how do you know the next one will and you won't end up with an EndNote database and the next place only uses Reference Manager forcing you to convert or pay up yourself. LaTeX is free of charge. Therefore, you can rest assured that you will have access to the software and won't experience lock-in typical for commercial software.

You may not experience that, because Word is so widespread. But even between flavors of Word there are compatibility problems, e. Article 03 NOV Article 10 NOV Research Highlight 05 NOV Article 08 SEP Technology Feature 01 SEP News 13 AUG Temple University. Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Advanced search. Skip to main content Thank you for visiting nature. Illustration by The Project Twins. You have full access to this article via your institution. Download PDF. Close banner Close. Email address Sign up. Microsoft has developed the use of shortcuts that produce mathematical expressions written in a similar way to that used in LaTeX. You'll also hear people talk about how easy the referencing system is to use in LaTeX. I've used the Word referencing system extensively and I find it very easy to use, but it takes maybe half an hour overall to read about it before you achieve fluency in it.

Having said these things, I did notice that someone mentioned above that LaTeX editions are consistent such that you can take what you've written decades ago and still read it. I haven't been working long enough for this quirk to hit me yet. Anyway, while I can read very old Word documents, the compatibility is sometimes unfortunate for older software. Fortunately it was quite easy since I could see the way the documents were laid out as I made the corrections instead of having to wait.

It was a bit painful though. What I do requires me to produce many complicated tables with spanning elements, different alignment settings for different columns etc. These always cause me headache in Microsoft Word. Latex gives you more control as to how things should behave at a very micro level.

It is also more transparent i. Sometimes in MS Word, things don't look right just because of some changes you have made but not aware of. In addition, many software packages support Latex so you can paste their outputs directly into your document. This must have been covered by other people. But equation editing in Latex is very powerful.

It does have a bit of a learning curve but, once you learn some basic syntax, it is much faster to write an equation in Latex compared to MS Word Equation Editor. Latex in general is quite intuitive if you have some basic programming skills. There are also many resources online such that you can get most of your questions answered by just putting them into a search engine. In my opinion, Latex is the best system to typesetting that I have ever seen.

Because the quality of its output is great. I strongly recommend you to use Latex and throw away systems like Word and Open office. If you have time to learn it, then Yes , you should shift from LibreOffice or Word etc. It's all done in script, like html. All you see is Type until you render the results unless you have your LaTeX Front End automatically render it on the fly. If you answer 2 then you should send plain text manuscript off to a professional to have them do it for you, and done right.

If you are comfortable scripting html for instance or don't mind adjusting to it, then learn LaTeX. Just know that it's potentially more complex than html because of it's software system of package distribution, documentation and there is other related software in the TeX family. LaTeX is just the most famous part of an entire Typesetting system, and it's really the only element most users need to know anything about.

It's very easy for an Indie Publishing Company to efficiently create a standard "look and feel" for their family of books, customizing their LaTeX Preamble settings for the documents look and feel like their finger print.

Then, every time you need to create a new memo, it's as easy as opening notepad or any text editor, then clicking process and send via email. Suppose you work in I. With LaTeX, that task is a piece of cake, much easier than a word processor. It works as a set of macro package programs that you use depending on the type and class of Look and Feel you expect from your type. So, due to it's packaging complexity, there will be a learning curve.

But, you can start out writing a Professional Looking letter that says "Hello World" about as easily as writing an html page that displays the same stuff. On the other hand, HTML typesets flowable, dimension-less text that falls into whatever the display size might be, 4" ebook reader or 24" computer monitor, for instance. That's the key output difference between html code and LaTeX code. So by default, the final Typeset product is a Technical or Academic Publication. Literary projects, like Novels, usually have simple typesetting requirements.

So, you will to have to add a few options to adjust the defaults for things like Chapter Headings. Word Processors only have a choice between flexible or monospace type. In Monospace every letter has the same width. Flexible type different letters have different widths, for instance an "i" is more narrow than a "w". That's about it for a word processor. So depending on the line, it might reserve a different amount of space for a "w" on one line, verses another line that needs more letters to fit.

Plus, LaTeX has automatic hypenation by default, and the ability to add custom words and their hypenation points within the Hypenation Package. And, if that weren't all, LaTeX features a "glue" between paragraphs, that is a slightly different potential spacing between paragraphs so that "orphans" are not left on a page by them self.

Finding all the documentation for setting various options, especially with one set of very powerful packages within the "Koma Script Classes" will seem to be an obfuscation of know-how, but once you learn the few options you need for your document, then you have a keen new advantage in efficiency, after all, you won't have to spend anymore time tweeking fonts and sizes and spacing and the table of contents and the Page Headers and Footers and Page Numbering.

You've done the hard work once, and you can easily repeat the endeavor time and again, just as fast as you can type. And you can count on the result being a professional grade of typesetting that you don't have to pay a professional to do for you.

Just consider LaTeX that professional, and always at your service. This is certainly a bit late to add a post to this question, but there is one advantage of using plain text sources that I didn't see in previous posts: it is very easy to make a search on dozens of file looking for a single word using external, console tools such as grep.

It is even very convenient to make serial changes with sed and awk. When writing my thesis, it was very quick to find among a huge amount of file the proper source and citation. It took much longer to find the same in my paper notes. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top.

Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Why should I use LaTeX? Ask Question. Asked 11 years, 3 months ago. Active 7 months ago. Viewed k times. I have heard a lot about LaTeX , but never used it myself. Improve this question. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Now, you shouldn't use LaTeX if You don't have time to learn it.

Improve this answer. If you have a LaTeX document from 20 years ago it will still compile and output identical probably results; cf. I didn't mean that you cannot use it to store documents reliably of course you can!

It's not that you can choose between saving as. LaTeX is more than that. I use Latex to make a web page. Even with the point and clicks systems, I find Latex easier. What you care about is the design of the document". Very important point that too often gets neglected in the pray of LaTeX. I found LaTeX very frustrating in the beginning because of this issue; today I am still sometimes puzzled how complicated even small design wishes can be to implement.

Nevertheless, I would never go back, as I am also still fascinated, how easy really complex tasks can be carried out.