Speaker 1: Hello, dear viewer. Welcome to LaTeX for Scientists. I'm Dr. Sally, and this is the first part of my first ever Skills for Scientists series. If you've seen or heard people talking about LaTeX before, but you're not sure if you should learn it, this is the video for you. The short answer to that question is yes. Yes, you should. Absolutely. 100%. As a side note, if you're wondering why it's pronounced La-tech and not La-tex, it's because the X represents the Greek letter Chi, or He, and not the Latin script X. During my PhD, I learned a lot of little tips, tricks, and helpful shortcuts that I can now share with you, and hopefully by the end of this series you're going to love LaTeX as much as I do. Whenever I talk to students, the first thing they always ask me about LaTeX is, can't I just use Word? And I always tell them of course you can, but future you is going to hate you for it. It's definitely hard to see the point of learning LaTeX when you're an undergraduate. I mean, you can easily do your lab reports in Word, but when it comes to writing a 60-page dissertation, or even worse, a 200-page thesis, it's a lot easier to do it in LaTeX. The only problem is that if you leave it until that point to start learning, that's a whole pile of extra stress that you really don't need at that point. The learning curve isn't actually very steep, so why not learn it earlier and give yourself plenty of time to practice? After that, they usually give me a dubious look and say, but LaTeX looks so complicated. And I actually do agree with them. It does look complicated, but once you get started, it's actually a lot easier than you think. The biggest time investment is really in making your templates look good, but then once you have them, you can just reuse them as often as you like. This is especially great if you're an undergrad and you want to use it to write your lab reports with. For most PhD students in STEM, there are only two real reasons why you might still be using Word. One, you're submitting articles to journals that are stuck in the 90s. Or two, your supervisor never learned LaTeX, because they too are stuck in the 90s. Even though Word has caught up a little bit in the last few years, it's not really made for us. LaTeX is still objectively a million times better for people in STEM. It's more powerful, it's flexible, it produces much smaller documents but they still look clean and crispy and beautiful, and it takes much less effort on your part once you know how to use it. Still not convinced? Let's take a quick look at just some of the best reasons to use it. No distractions. You can just focus on writing your thesis without having to fiddle with all the formatting every 5 minutes, especially because you just added another figure and then suddenly everything is broken. Tracking stuff. It automatically tracks figures and tables and equations, so you can insert stuff wherever you want to, and it tracks and updates the numbering for you, so you don't have to worry about it. Easy formatting. You can change the formatting of the entire document just by tweaking a couple of commands. And if you don't like it, you can just change it to something else just as easily. Problem solving and portability. It's open source, so not only is everything free, but if you've got a problem I guarantee you that someone's already had it solved for them on the internet. And if you have to switch between different operating systems, which you usually do as a scientist, everything still works. Equations. If you have to use any kind of math or any complex non-Latin scripts on your work, it makes your life considerably easier. References. You don't have to waste hours fiddling with your bibliography. All the entries are formatted to whatever system you tell it to use, and many journals already provide bibliography entries for papers on their websites, so you don't actually have to fill in the data yourself or use any intermediate software unless you really want to. Templates. Most journals these days provide LaTeX templates for you to use, and most universities will also give you dissertation or thesis templates. As an added bonus, if you use the online platform Overleaf, you don't have to worry about saving your files, installing packages, or compiling. All of that stuff is handled for you behind the scenes, which makes it absolutely ideal for beginners. It also lets you work collaboratively, which is handy if you're writing papers or you need to get some feedback from your PI. Since it's so convenient, and free, I'll be using Overleaf for the rest of this series, so you can work along with me. For all of the videos on my channel, you'll find corresponding written resources and other free content on my website, so check out soswriting.co.uk. If I've managed to convince you of the virtues of LaTeX, don't forget to subscribe to the channel. In the next episode, we're going to do a quick start guide to help get you rolling. If you've struggled with LaTeX before, or if you're a bit nervous about starting, leave a comment down below and tell me what you'd like help with. I always try to read the comments, and I'll either incorporate your questions into the upcoming videos, or I'll do a quick Q&A session. So all that's left for me to say is thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you on the next one.