Speaker 1: Welcome back to the channel, everyone. If you're new here, my name is Chris. I'm a professor down in the sunny state of Arizona. In my last video, I talked about how to take data and get it into your thesis through some choice of software. I figured I'd start today with your choice of writing software, and I'm going to discuss two of the most popular options. We've got Word and LaTeX. So let's talk about those pros and cons and why you'd want to use one over the other. Quick disclaimer, I've simplified a lot of things in order to get this into an eight-minute video, so please don't give me any hate over tech versus LaTeX, primitives, macros, different distributions, any of that stuff. Okay, first up, we've got Microsoft Word. If you've done any sort of writing, you're probably familiar with this, or you're familiar with one of its clones, for example, Google Docs. I'll just point out some of the details that are going to be important later. The way you do formatting in Word is by interacting with the GUI interface. So if I'm writing a paragraph and I want to make one of the words in that paragraph bold, I'd highlight that word, click the button for bold, or I could use the hotkey, which is in a drop-down menu too. Also, something that's going to be important in a minute, when you're writing in Word, the thing you're looking at is also the finished document. And by that, I mean what you see is what you get editor. So the thing you're looking at is also the thing that you are sending off to other people that they'll see. So what are some of the pros of Word? Another way to ask that is, what are some of the things that Word does well? Well, first up, it's got a very easy learning curve. You can just open it up and start writing. If you want to make something bold, there's just a button on the top of it that you can click. Another thing that it has going for it, it's fairly ubiquitous. So pretty much everyone's heard of it. Most people have access or they have access to something which is a free clone like Google Docs. And the last thing that I think Word does really well is this track changes function. So if you're writing with a lot of different collaborators and you really need to keep track of what is changing between draft versions, then that's a great way to do it. And it's really easy to use. All right, so what about the cons? Well, have you ever written a document with some formatting and then you've decided later you want to add another figure to that document? And when you insert it, it goes and messes up all the formatting you've done and you have to spend more time fixing it. Or how about copying and moving some text from one place to another, but the formatting in those two locations was different. And so now the new text has to be completely fixed. Well, this is because in Word the writing or the content is linked together with the formatting. Well, the main difference that you're going to see between Word and LaTeX is that LaTeX attempts to separate the content from the formatting. I want to back up for one second. If you Google criticisms of Word or Word versus LaTeX or don't send me Word documents, you'll probably find a lot of lengthy articles written from 2005 and earlier that talk about some of the problems in Word. For much of its history, Word hasn't had the capability that it has today. Take internal references, for example. This is where I want to refer to figure 3 somewhere in the text, but I don't actually want to use the number 3 because later if I add another figure, the number might be different. So I want to internally reference that figure with some sort of label. LaTeX has had this ability for a long time. Word can do this now with cross-references, but I believe this was introduced somewhere around 2010. I'm not exactly sure if it was in the 2007 version, but even though it can do it, I still think it's more difficult than it needs to be. My point is that some of these older criticisms don't hold up anymore because Word has been improved over time, but some of them do actually still hold up. Like the fact that when you try to print a Word document on different printers, it might look completely different. I'll go through some of my personal dislikes of Word when I hit on the LaTeX pros. So what is LaTeX? Well, the simplified explanation is that it's a programming language that lets you do writing and typesetting, and it's written in a markdown convention. Probably the best explanation is by example. So here's a sentence. If I want to make one of those words bold, I'd put a command around that word called textbf. Then when I compile my LaTeX document into say a PDF, that word would appear bold. Now you might be thinking, that's a lot of work to make a word bold, and you'd be absolutely right. But LaTeX is not just here to make a word bold here and there. LaTeX really excels at managing all the things that go into making a long and complex document, such as cross-referencing, internal references, citations, equations, tables, figures, all that stuff. So here's another example. I've created a section in my document called introduction. I haven't specified any information on the font, or the font size, or is it a one introduction, a introduction, iii introduction. If I want to change those things, I could set some details up in the preamble, or I could just use the defaults. If I then want to refer to that section in another spot, I would say, as seen in section, ref my label, or I call a reference command. I don't need to know the number of that section, and I don't even need to know if it is a number, or if it's a, b, and c, or iii. Basically, the longer and more complex your document is, the better LaTeX is going to perform over Word. So what is LaTeX good at? Why am I choosing to use LaTeX primarily over Word? First of all, it's great at making equations. If you're in a STEM field, and you need to write equations for what you do, you probably are already aware that the equation editor in Microsoft Word is hot garbage. Don't bother trying to convince me otherwise. Second, it's great at tables. If you need to present some data in a paper, it's got you covered. Next, it's great at internal referencing. If I'm putting figures on my paper, and I need to constantly talk about them, it's super easy just to keep dropping references everywhere. Fourth, we've got really good integration with reference managers. I think today, in 2021, Word is pretty good at this. So for example, it has pretty good integration with some of the more popular reference managers like Mendeley. But really, it's two decades behind on having this functionality. Finally, for LaTeX, I can write one document and put that document in many formats really easily. So let's say I'm submitting an article to a journal, and the first journal rejects it. I can simply take the style sheet from the new journal and apply it to the document I have, and I don't really have to change anything. It suddenly starts looking like the second journal instead of the first. Nowadays, most journals make their own style sheets for LaTeX, and they accept submissions in the LaTeX format. Of course, there has to be some cons. So I'd say the biggest con with LaTeX is that it's got a really steep learning curve. It takes a little bit to get into. You need to learn the markup commands. You need to learn a little bit of the syntax writing equations. Tables are kind of on a whole other level. I'm still learning with tables myself. Another con I'd say is that when you're compiling your LaTeX document into a PDF, sometimes the errors that you get are not exactly clear. So if I have a really long and complex document, I may not exactly be able to tell where the error is coming from. However, if I'm compiling regularly and I know what I just changed, odds are it was that thing that I just changed. So last as a con, a lot of people would complain that LaTeX is slower to write in. So if you're going to write a single page, it takes a little bit longer because you have to add in all these markup commands. I need to declare which ones are going to be bold. I need to write an equation. For me personally, the thing that holds back my writing is not the fact that I have to put in markup commands. It's the fact that I'm staring at a blank page and can't think of what to write. All right. So what are some of the reasons why you'd want to use LaTeX? Well, as I said, if you're in STEM and you're writing a lot of equations or you're using a lot of tables or you're presenting data, that sort of thing, that's a great use case. Also, if you're writing long, complex documents. So if you're a grad student and you've got to write a thesis, that's also a pretty good use case. Another reason you'd want to use it is if making these long documents is going to be a recurring thing. If you need to write a master's thesis and you never plan on writing anything similar again, it's probably then not worth your time to go through and learn LaTeX in order to write this document because you're not going to use it again. But I'd say the most important reason of all is if you want some sort of efficient software workflow between your data and a written document. If I add a new data point to my analysis, I can rerun the script that generates my figure. Then I can recompile my whole written document with one click and immediately see that figure in my new document. I don't have to go into Word, delete the old figure, insert the new figure, change any associated formatting like a resizing that I had done, and then fix anything else that Word decided to screw up just because. So if you're using LaTeX now or you want to start using LaTeX, share your experience down in the comments below. And if you found this video helpful, please subscribe so you can see my new videos when I make them. And I'll see you next time. Transcribed by https://otter.ai