Introducing non-technical people to LaTeX

Introducing non-technical people to LaTeX
texblog.net

  ("C:\Program Files\MiKTeX 2.9\tex\context\base\supp-pdf.mkii"
  [Loading MPS to PDF converter (version 2006.09.02).]
  )
  ! Undefined control sequence.
  l.66 Your text goes here. \agweagsd
                                    

[1] Crossword puzzles: http://www.tex.ac.uk/CTAN/macros/latex/contrib/gene/crosswor...

[2] Music: http://www.mab.jpn.org/musictex/mtex_lib_e.html

[3] Animations: http://pages.uoregon.edu/noeckel/PDFmovie.html

I've taught mostly undergraduates (while I was one), studying Biology, Chemistry, Linguistics, Psychology, Economics, English, Classics, and Architecture, so I'd like to try to answer the question "Why?"

LaTeX is worth learning if you're regularly writing papers of any length. In all of the disciplines above there's at least one problem with using word that makes composing a paper longer than five pages a huge pain. More often than not LaTeX is able to relieve some of the pain of that process. For example, in Linguistics, sentence trees are fairly easy to create using LaTeX[1], or for a classics paper, being able to switch between typing in Greek or English with a single command is a huge win.[2]

Besides the field specific features, there are a lot of other benefits to LaTeX. It's true that just about every person that I've taught LaTeX to has been a little skeptical at first as to what exactly it could provide. The thing that I tell them is that it is incredibly helpful in structuring their document. They end up loving being able to do an outline with section headers, and fill in the body paragraphs. They like having automatic reference and bibliography insertion, and they love being able to comment out sections of their document.

I think there's also a reason why it isn't hard to teach a non-technical person LaTeX. When teaching someone a programming language, the student will need to learn or already know a fair amount about how a computer works, and what programming can accomplish. With LaTeX, students generally already know how to write a paper, and will be able to easily map that process in to their learning process.

I'm a huge LaTeX evangelist. If you don't already know it, find someone who does, and have them sit down with you for an hour. Ask them to go through the steps of creating a document that has: Sections, subsections, tables, lists, figures, floats, references, and math. By the time you're done, you'll have a good enough knowledge to google for anything you can't reference in the document you just produced. You'll be amazed at how easy it was.

[1] http://www.ling.upenn.edu/advice/latex/qtree/qtreenotes.pdf

[2] http://www.tug.org/texlive/Contents/live/texmf-dist/doc/gene...

Making scientific authors who include a lot of equations in their work use Word because the journal can't handle dealing with LaTeX is just cruel. :)