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Note: I wrote this page in some haste about three years ago. During the summer of 2005, I revisited this topic for an article published on OSNews.com and totally rewrote my opinions on this topic, whilst retaining the overall structure. I think this second attempt was a much better article, and I was especially pleased with the subsequent debate that ensued after its publication.
To read the article, go to LaTeX isn't for everyone but it could be for you.
Also, I was hardly the first person to compile such a document on this topic, and I won't be the last. I was recently alerted to another comparison that focussed more on the actual typesetting quality that Latex achieves, and is an excellent read. See Dario Taraborelli's The beauty of LaTeX.
I've kept my first attempt at this topic just in case people care to read it. Although, it's not the best piece of writing you'll find (the OSNews article is much better!).
Latex vs. MS Word
For those people who have never used anything other than Word for producing a document will be in for a shock when it comes to writing their first Latex document. In fact, it could be so much hassle, that why would you want to bother in the first place? It is fairly well known that Latex has a rather steep learning curve. Which means, other than simply being told by a journal publisher that your paper has to be in latex, there must be some compelling reasons for people to give up their Word WYSIWYG security blanket and adopt a system that will force them to get their hands dirty. And it just so happens there is...
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.
This is opposed to the average Word user, who will immediately highlight a given section header, and then apply formatting to it, maybe a larger font, maybe underline etc. The point is that this will then have to be applied to every header manually. Latex is better as it uses a document style. This defines how different elements within your document should look. And if you fancy a change, you only change the style definitions once, and then the presentation of the document will be updated automatically.
Word does in fact have a similar Styles feature. However, because it's optional, people often don't know it exists. Latex forces you to declare the document semantics, which is why you can rely on it to produce a consistent looking document.
Portability
Latex portability comes in multiple ways.
- An actual latex file is merely a text file, of which is just about the most portable format in computing.
- The Latex system that processes the text file and produces the finished document has been implemented on just about every mainstream platform you care to mention.
- The default output file format for Latex is DVI (which stands for device independent). This was around well before PDF was dreamed up, and the high quality files can be viewed via software viewers or printed out. DVI is an open standard, and so once again, readers are extremely portable and exist, like Latex on most operating systems.
Flexibility
You can get Latex to do just about anything you can think of! Over the years, there is an overwhelming selection of packages to extend its potential, or macros that can simplify complex tasks, most of which are freely available on CTAN.
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.
Scalability
In my personal experience, using Word for documents with more than 50 pages has not been a pleasant experience. Obviously, that could be my own bad luck, but that is also the impression I've got from other users too.
With Latex, you are free to split up large documents into smaller chunks, and then let Latex combine them altogether later. It can also create table of contents, indexes and bibliographies easily.
Stability
One of the reasons why perhaps so many people struggle with Word when creating large documents, is because it is prone to crashes. 'Document recovery' is now a high ranking feature of Word. I'm sure people would prefer if MS would just make their software more stable!
Because Latex is so mature, bugs are negligible. And even if it were, then there is very little risk of you ever losing your original source text. Where as with Word, almost any tool within its integrated environment is capable of corrupting your file if it causes a crash.
Oh, and you don't need to worry about macro viruses either!
Cost
Well, this is one area where Latex wins hands down, since it is free! And as with most open source software, the phrase "you get what you pay for" doesn't hold true. You get an extremely mature system, that is years ahead of its competition.
What about spell checking?
It's a good point. This is not a deficiency of Latex, because it just processes the words you give it. However, within your text-editor, you do not get fancy lines highlighting your spelling errors or bad grammar as you type, like you get with Word.
For starters, I do not really care for a grammar checker, and anyone who actually relies on it when using Word would be better off buying a book (or looking at the writing style guides) than taking the useless advice it provides.
Secondly, the autocorrect feature - whilst looking like a good idea - is not benefical in the long run. Sure, it corrects the common typos that we all make. However, the problem in my opinion is that it means we don't learn from our mistakes, e.g., you will continue to type 'teh' instead of 'the' because Word will sort it out for you. Having said that, if that's your thing, then you can easily configure any decent text editor to perform the same task.
And so on to spelling. The great thing here is that you have a choice! Aspell and Ispell are the most popular spell checkers. I personally use Ispell, which not only will check any text file you care to feed it, but you can easily configure a decent editor to integrate its functionality from within the editor itself. Ispell, along with its 35 or so langauge dictionaries are freely available. See my quick guide on how to get spell checking in (g)vim.
C'mon, be fair!
Ok, I am obviously biased here. But, I am someone who uses both systems. It's perhaps not really fair to compare Latex and Word, because they are different types of systems, which are suited to different jobs. However, for as long as people are using Word within academia and research institutions, I feel I should enlighten them and let them know what they are missing out on.
Sure, Word can be extended using its inbuilt scripting language. It also has document management features to help with large documents. And as mentioned, it has styles that can ensure manageable and consistent presentation. But very few people seem to take advantage of them. This is especially worsened by UI improvements that mean Word will hide features that you do not use, which makes it more difficult to remember what Word can actually do. Oh, and did I mention Word's bibliography management? Er, no... because it hasn't got any! To achieve this, you need to purchase an extra piece of software, such as Endnote, which will provide the functionality as well as integrating into Word.
Word may have the advantage of a GUI, which is good for beginners, and it reduces the cognitive load, as it's a case of recognition vs recall. If people really want a GUI, then there are ones that act as a front-end to Latex. It's not a WYSIWYG editor, because what you see on screen is not what you will get when you print it out. They still hold to the ideals of Latex that separate content from style. However, they are environments that allow a more visual approach to your content, which is handy for producing complex equations for example.
Where next?
Well, if I've whet your appetite and are willing to give Latex a go, then I'd recommend checking out some of the resources I listed under the Latex section of the Misc. page. You can also look at my Latex tutorials (Getting to Grips with Latex).
If you intend on sticking with word processors, then that's your choice :) Of course, could I advise that you look up using text formatting styles of your particular WP! At least then you'll begin getting used to thinking about the structure and content before presentation.
