21–26 of 26 posts
I never "learned" LaTeX, despite being an academic mathematician and using it all the time. My documents have headers which I don't understand. Indeed, learning it from scratch seems like a hassle, and it has features far beyond what I ever use. I simply obtained a document that was similar to what I was trying to create, made a copy, and then changed the content.
My response to this post is, what on earth for? While you can use LaTeX for a ridiculous number of things [1][2][3], LaTeX is primarily a tool for typesetting technical documents. Note that word "technical" in there; why would a non-technical person want that? It's complex; you have to type ridiculous things like "\textbf" to get bold text, and "\begin{enumerate}" to make a simple list. It's complicated; you have to…
But then I switched to law school, which required the use of MS Word. I found Word quite amenable to writing nontechnical documents, and it was much easier to explain how to make a table of contents in Word to my non-technical classmates than it would have been to explain Latex.
I love Latex within its field, but I do not see the point of evangelizing it to non-technical users.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Biology What would be the problem? I've both written papers in Latex and Word, but cannot think of a discipline-related advantage.
The big one, as I understand it, is inserting nice looking tables for ANOVA results. Both Stata and SAS can output their results tables to LaTeX.
My suggestion: teach people how to use Markdown and then use markdown2pdf (which first converts to Latex and then to PDF).
The greek for the letter _A_ is $\alpha$
My response to this post is, what on earth for? While you can use LaTeX for a ridiculous number of things [1][2][3], LaTeX is primarily a tool for typesetting technical documents. Note that word "technical" in there; why would a non-technical person want that? It's complex; you have to type ridiculous things like "\textbf" to get bold text, and "\begin{enumerate}" to make a simple list. It's complicated; you have to…
Even for non-technical documents, I would still choose Latex for its advantages in areas like references and index, amenability to line-oriented version control, and the quality of the typesetting. I agree that non-technical users might make a different choice and that Latex error messages are dreadful.
I use LaTeX exclusively (with Emacs as editor) for non-technical documents (I study languages), and for me, the most relevant advantages are tightly integrated bibliography and citation management, index and shorthand capabilities and the chance of "line-oriented version control", i.e. LaTeX in git.
And the thing for introducing beginners, help them set up a preamble with the packages they will need. My experience with LaTeX has been that no matter how long you have been using it, there will always be something you will have to alter or look up. But a basic setup is not hard to deduct and by picking the packages relevant to you, you keep your files lean and get to understand what each part does. If you then have other problems you can dive into weird code snippets that only make sense since someone published them saying "Ermh...look...it's complicated...but...works, so copy & paste & be happy".
Once you've set up a basic preamble, people can actually concentrate on the content, and if they have problems, let them write their content first, the beauty of LaTeX is that all formatting woes can be addressed after the content is done.
I've been using LaTeX for over 20 years and I still do not exactly understand what I am doing. I use LaTeX for papers in mathematics and computer science myself. But even at my relatively high-functioning level of misunderstanding, I have been unable to persuade environmental scientists and chemists to use LaTeX instead of Word.