[This is a guest post by Bryn Lutes, who is in the last months of being a doctoral student in Organometallic Chemistry at Washington University in St. Louis. She also co-teaches workshops on using technology in teaching, research and professional development for graduate students. You can follow Bryn on Twitter: @technobryn.) -- JBJ]
First, a disclaimer: I do not use LaTeX on a regular basis. In fact, I didn’t even know this program existed until I was enlisted to present it at a Using Technology to Support your Research workshop as a part of the Graduate Student Technology Workshop series…and then I fell in love with beautiful documents.
I also fell in love with perfectly formatted images and captions that don’t mysteriously disappear between pages, automatically generated (including page numbers) tables of contents, appropriately formatted equations without using an outside program, and using simple commands to insert footnotes. The documents had a much more “polished” look, partially due to output as a pdf, that made me feel like my document was really something important.
What is it?
To start with some of the basics, LaTeX (pronounced “lay-tech” or “lah-tech”) is a free typesetting program–it takes text and formatting commands, which are written in a plain text editor (TeXnicCenter shown here, and a comparison of editors can be found here) and creates a document. LaTeX was created with the idea that the author is an expert on the content, and not formatting or visual presentation. In creating the document, the author labels the text with commands such as table, figure, quote, and displaymath, and LaTeX uses those commands to format the document appropriately. The project site can be found here.
Why is it useful?
LaTeX is designed to create consistent, aesthetically pleasing documents, and can easily handle very long documents. It can easily apply the same formatting throughout a book, journal article or dissertation. In fact, many of these templates already exist. The only requirement is the author is inserting content. The engineering department at my university provides a LaTeX template that meets the dissertation formatting guidelines, and the American Chemical Society provides templates for all of its journals, for example, the Organometallics template can be accessed here.
How does it work?
The set up of the document is similar to computer programming in some ways (This made it more fun for me, and hopefully not anxiety-inducing for others).
Basic set up for composing a document in TeXnicCenter. (Click the picture for a full-size screenshot)
Parameters for the document are indicated in the preamble, content is added after starting the document, and when finished, the end is indicated.
Anatomy of the TeX file. (Click for full-size)
And some result documents…the first set of code produced this document.
And the second set of code produced this document.
How do you get it?
The various components of the program can be downloaded through the project site. The project site also provides a help page with links to outside sources of help. The Starting Out with TeX site lists very basic instructions for obtaining the software and also provides links. For fair warning, I spent nearly an hour just downloading the files.
And, in case you need any additional testimony, a band of science nerds has even written a song about it. Also, check out the comments section for a glimpse at the most controversial part of this program: pronunciation.
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8 Responses to Getting Started with LaTeX
Drew M. Loewe - April 9, 2010 at 3:28 pm
Jeffrey: many thanks for the heads-up on the Tufte LaTeX style! Gorgeous.
Nicole Wyatt - April 7, 2010 at 7:42 pm
There are a variety of LaTeX to word processor conversion (and vice versa) utilities available. A good overview is at http://www.tug.org/utilities/texconv/ I personally use LaTeX to rtf, since that works well for most word processors.
As a philosopher of language and logic I make heavy use of the LaTeX for linguists (http://www.essex.ac.uk/linguistics/external/clmt/latex4ling/) and LaTeX for logicians (http://www.logicmatters.net/latex-for-logicians/) sites. Perhaps there is need of a LaTeX for humanists site.
One of the important advantages of LaTeX was not mentioned in the article. LaTeX files are plain text files. They can be opened by any text editor. This means you never have to worry about your work being in a format that you now cannot open due to losing access to the program that created it.
Trent Tucker - April 7, 2010 at 12:01 pm
Thanks for the link re: Tufte-LaTeX. Its a thing of beauty!
sciedgrrl - April 7, 2010 at 10:03 am
I had some very grand plans for writing my dissertation using LaTeX, but I’ve gotten too close to the deadline to try it without a personal support staff :)
@Jeff have you tried taking the pdf created from your LaTeX work and using an online converter to get a word document? It’s not always the prettiest result, but you can use Open Office (for free) to manage the word documents for your committee without having to use the program for editing. Even though I am in the sciences, I run into the same issue. All files go to my boss as word documents because they are the only thing he can access.
Trent Tucker - April 6, 2010 at 9:42 pm
I used to give my students PowerPoint thumbnails of my lecture notes 6-up to a page. Now I do all of my student notes in LaTeX (with TeXShop on my Mac). It took me one term to transform my slide content into individual documents — fill-in-the-blank style, about 10 pages / lecture. This term, I used the power of LaTeX again to combine all 24 of those individual documents into two PDF notes documents (one for each half of the term). Some students get it printed and bound and bring their paper copy to class, others use PDF annotation software and follow along with the notes on their laptops. LaTeX has a steep learning curve, but once you’ve produced beautiful 100+ page electronic books with fully hyperlinked table of contents / keyword index, etc. you’ll never give your students 6-up PPT thumbnails again!
Jeffrey Windsor - April 6, 2010 at 11:51 pm
I have a love-hate relationship with \LaTeX. On the one hand, the documents really are lovely (and they get lovelier once you get into it). I type my notes using tufte-latex style which gives me such niceties as marginal notes and beautiful fonts. Using LaTeX really does make me a better writer.
Also, writing exams using LaTeX is easier than making them using the {exam} document class. I’ve used it for a few years and hope to never go back to making exams in Microsoft Word. It took a few classes before I really began to exploit the power, but now it’s cake to maintain or to create a new exam.
Most of the time, however, I find it easier to use org-mode (in emacs) and export to LaTeX for printing. Again, there is a (significant) learning curve for emacs, org, and LaTeX, but the benefit is that I can write easily human-readable documents in plain text, use many powerful tools to increase efficiency, and still have everything come out perfectly typeset. I can imagine no better set of tools for writing nearly anything. And, yes, that beats Scrivener.
The most frustrating part of the LaTeX world is the science-focus. I am a PhD candidate in English. Not only is there no real support for humanities-types using LaTeX, but there’s friction between myself and my committee as they want Word files and I write in another tool. It means that I wind up going back and forth between tools, and it sucks. I just hope that I can work it out to submit a lovely LaTeX-generated dissertation in the end.
I’ve tried to advocate the use of these tools not just because they’re open sourced, and not just because they work with free and open standards (like plain text files), and not just because the output is so much lovelier, and not just because it frees us from platform-dependence, but because they really are better writing tools. I’ve tried, but the learning curve is too steep.
Drew M. Loewe - April 6, 2010 at 7:02 pm
I wrote my dissertation using LyX, which is a WYSIWYM (what you see is what you mean) GUI to make LaTeX less daunting. I use Kile now. As you note, LaTeX is great for longer, elaborately formatted (or even moderately formatted) documents. It is total overkill for many other documents. Both LyX and Kile, like LaTeX, are free.
Jason B. Jones - April 6, 2010 at 7:04 pm
I don’t think I’ve ever come across WYSIWYM. Love that.
(I also love the YouTube link in Bryn’s post!)