Writing with LaTeX is beautiful
2024-11-29
As a surprise to myself and all my fellow students, we already have to start writing our first scientific essays in these early months at university. Having had a few weeks of experience with LaTeX now, I can already tell you that I truly love writing with it and don't want to miss it every again for anything more complex than a simple letter. So, let's talk about my experience with it as well its strengths and weaknesses in this article...
First things first, I want to mention that nobody forced us so early on to use LaTeX for our essays. Generally speaking, we are free to use whatever we like as long as the final result meets the given styling criteria. However, meeting these is quite a bit easier, if you can use one of the provided templates for Word or LaTeX. Word was immediately out of question for me though, since I could only run it on a rather locked down company laptop (since there isn't a Linux port of course) and more importantly just can't wrap my head around using many of it's more advanced features. Sure, this has also to do with a lacking willingness to learn it, but my solution was simply to give LaTeX a try and see where it leads me - I can always go back to the hot garbage most word processors (including LibreOffice) are, if needed.
Luckily for me, using LaTeX turned out to be an amazing experience - at least once you get it up and
running. Installing a full TeX Live installation was mostly straight forward on Linux via the
repositories (apart from the installer requiring you to spam
Enter
for some time to proceed), but the same story can't be told about the Windows company machines and
MacBooks some of my fellows use. Just using Windows doesn't seem to be a huge drawback in this scenario,
but not having admin rights and needing to install a whole Perl environment surely is. We eventually got
it working by extracting a portable release to the right folders and manually adding the executables to
the path variables, but this certainly wasn't a great experience. On the Mac side, using the MiKTeX
distribution was recommended to us, but we weren't able to get it working on several machines, even
after a few hours of debugging. Thankfully, switching over to a full TeX Live install via Homebrew did
the trick and we also got these machines up and running. So if you aren't as tech-savvy or just want to
start writing right away, using an online LaTeX editor like
Overleaf
can be a good alternative in my mind.
Once the LaTeX installation works however, the whole experience luckily somewhat changes and most things just start to work - quite a lot better than most word processors actually. Just like most programming languages, you can just write your document in a basic text editor and compile it via the terminal to a viewable PDF document, but this approach gets exhausting quickly. Instead, I highly recommend you use a more advanced LaTeX editor like TeXstudio or even better the excellent LaTeX Workshop VSCode extension . These provide sensible autocompleting, automatic compilation, (almost) live previews and many more quality of life features. Just like so many people on the internet tell you, setting up LaTeX is quite a bit more involved than installing Word or LibreOffice, but once the whole setup works using advanced features like proper citations, graphs et cetera becomes a breeze - especially compared to Word, which can drive you crazy.
Setting up your whole document to comply with the given styling criteria can be a bit cumbersome one last time - but trust me, it's certainly worth it. If you can use an already set up template just like I am lucky enough to, you are pretty much in a golden spot. You can just start writing and copy the example code for referencing sources or adding images where needed. The great thing about LaTeX is that you can basically just focus on producing sensible text and all the formatting happens automatically. Need to create a table? Simply look up the code online or in an example, change the data and it automatically looks great, shows up in your list of tables and can be interactively referenced in your text. The same goes for citations, abbreviations and many more. But the real power of LaTeX only starts to show, once you start using some of the countless specialized packages. These allow you to easily create circuit diagrams, molecular structures, flow charts or even chessboards - just to name a few possibilities. It's this advanced functionality that makes it so popular in the scientific community with its niche needs and quite addicting - once you got to know its power and possibilities, you can't see yourself using such a primitive tool as Word ever again.
With that said, I think it's easy to understand why I believe that writing with LaTeX is beautiful and you should give it a go too. Sure, for simple letters it's absolute overkill, but once you got it working why not enjoy its benefits there too? I'm really curious to hear about your experiences with it, so as always feel free to share your thoughts and experiences in the comments down below and have a lovely day...