807

I wrote a book about LaTeX, and my proud grandma wanted to have a copy. So she got it, said "What a beautiful picture on the cover!" and - "What is this, LaTeX?".

She doesn't know Word, never used a computer. But she reads books. How can I explain what makes TeX and LaTeX special to a non-technical person? I don't mean introducing in using, and the existing question "What are TeX and LaTeX?" with its answers is still much too technical.

Such challenges are not rare. I need to explain to my boss why I request some days off to go to a TeX conference, and soon my daughter will want to know what daddy does on the computer. My girlfriend needs to understand why I spend so much time at TeX.SE.

Does anyone know eye-opening words? Perhaps an analogy or a metaphor would help? So grandma, girlfriend, daughter, boss - all may roughly understand and say "Ah, such a thing? Useful indeed!"

Community
  • 1
Stefan Kottwitz
  • 231,401

34 Answers34

585

It does this but it uses a computer and so requires less manual labour.

enter image description here

(image from Wikipedia)

Werner
  • 603,163
David Carlisle
  • 757,742
  • 12
    +1 that sort of printing is totally lost to my/our generation :( always good to be reminded of how fortunate we are. – thang Jan 22 '13 at 22:40
  • 2
    @thang Screen printing is still widely used in T-shirts. – John Isaiah Carmona Jan 23 '13 at 04:37
  • 4
    did not know that. for t-shirt printing, I usually put the order in and the t-shirts arrive in the mail. – thang Jan 23 '13 at 05:46
  • 3
    @thang like the milk comes from the supermarket! – Philipp Jan 23 '13 at 10:47
  • 4
    @Philipp, everybody knows milk comes from the city milk reservoir :p – thang Jan 23 '13 at 10:51
  • 14
    @thang I once heard a little kid asking their parent "Which factories manufacture strawberries?" - I was both impressed (it already understood the concept of factories) and shocked at the same time... – Tobias Kienzler Jan 23 '13 at 13:59
  • 8
    I'm not sure about the whole "requires less manual labor" thing - I've hand-composed TeX/LaTeX, and I'm not sure I wouldn't have been happier with metal type and a composing stick :-) – voretaq7 Jan 23 '13 at 22:30
  • 8
    My grandma says that this picture doesn't look like her Word. So it doesn't answer. – Nakilon Jan 24 '13 at 16:57
  • 4
    @TobiasKienzler it? haha – Code-Guru Jan 25 '13 at 00:36
  • 3
    @Code-Guru "It" the kid - sorry, that's taken from German, should I have said "they" instead? – Tobias Kienzler Jan 25 '13 at 07:45
  • 3
    @Tobias "he" or "she", or if you don't want to identify the kid's gender, "they" also works. (Some people say "they" should only be used as a plural pronoun but I don't listen to those people :-P) – David Z Jan 25 '13 at 20:43
  • 3
    @David They must be one stubborn person :-7 – Tobias Kienzler Jan 26 '13 at 08:30
  • @TobiasKienzler I see what you did there. Although, I would add that TeX is somewhat of a throwback to these days, where instructions would be given to the typesetter who then did the 'manual labor' ;) (See Rico's answer.) – Sean Allred May 12 '13 at 22:13
  • 1
    @thang the "industrial history" museum here (in cambridge, uk) has that sort of stuff in it. i've actually tried it; plain tex (let alone latex) is much easier! – wasteofspace Sep 14 '13 at 10:44
  • 1
    @Nakilon Your grandma may know her Word, but the question says “She doesn't know Word, never used a computer. But she reads books.” :-) – ShreevatsaR Mar 17 '17 at 03:42
490

LaTeX is to a book what a set of blueprints is to a building.

Paul Dulaney
  • 5,310
  • 20
    The quality of this answer, takes a while to sink in. At first I dismissed it, but then 30 seconds later, it just felt so right. Good answer.
    • "The LaTeX user is the architect that, designs the blueprint, for the computer and printer to build."
    • "Any trade-y can throw together a shed without any kinda of plan, but a beautiful building requires blueprints."
     – Frames Catherine White Jul 06 '13 at 00:38
  • @Dror you can award a bounty – cmhughes Sep 29 '13 at 23:39
  • 8
    Shouldn't this be "LaTeX source files are to a book...". Because LaTeX, as a language, would be equivalent to the conventions shared by the architect (the book author) and the builder (the LaTeX engine) to interpret blueprints (LaTeX sources). – adl Oct 02 '13 at 07:47
  • 28
    @adl I think grandma lost you at "LaTeX source files"... – Jonathan Komar Nov 20 '14 at 07:43
  • I am new to Tex, I think it is probably a markup language to format a book or text, I don't know its importance! and that sentence also didn't light anything up! (maybe because the language barrier). Building is different from book! book? that's so simple, some pages and formatted text (It's the whole thing you try to build?) – Ahmad Mar 26 '15 at 09:02
  • 4
    @Ahmad Saying that books are 'so simple' isn't giving enough credit to the trade :) See this fantastic article. A lot of thought has gone into the document classes you take for granted (article, scrartcl, memoir, etc.). Don't underestimate that design effort. Likewise, it took centuries for blueprint convention to solidify into the robust toolset it is today. We can now use those conventions to produce exceptional works of both form and function. – Sean Allred Jun 05 '15 at 21:11
389

Hypothetical dialogue follows.

Dear <insert subject name here>,

I would like to spend a few minutes talking about something cool. In fact, it's not just cool. It's amazingly cool. It's not "Albert Einstein playing guitar" cool, neither "Abraham Lincoln riding a bear with a machine gun" cool, it's way more superb. Believe me, it's super duper ultra mega hyper kamehameha über cool. I'll talk about something called LaTeX.

googling latex is tragic.

No <insert subject name here>, it's not latex, but LaTeX. See the awesomeness right there? You have a completely different word, with caps and stuff. A word that you need to hold Shift no less than three times in order to get it right has to be good. Let's start with the basics.

Say lay.

Now, say techhhhhhh. The sound cannot come from the heart, it has to come from the throat. Some vocal exercises might help.

Good, now let's say those two words together: laytech. Good! Now you know how to pronounce this mysterious word. Please, clean up your monitor before proceeding (Don Knuth says monitors can get a little moist after such exercise). Who's Don, you say? Good ol' Donald Knuth, our guide! Here's a picture of him if you "don know don"! Ha! I'm funny.

Don

No, Don doesn't have a TeX.sx T-shirt. Yet

Back to the LaTeX awesomeness. Do you like using Word, Writer or <insert word application name here>? Have you ever encountered some sort of problem when using any of them? I did. File formats, images out of their original place, bad formatting. To name a few. Anyway, these programs are great. But what if I tell you there's something even greater than all of these programs?

What?

Yes, there is.

Think of a program that takes a bunch of text, plain text with some markup in it, enters inside a blackbox and voilà, a cool PDF magically appears in the other side! What's this markup thing?

Think of rules. Logical rules. Too fast? OK, let's start with some concepts. For example, let's say every time you want to write a text in boldface, instead of clicking the B button of your word application while selecting the text you want to apply this style, you will simply write this word before the text: QUACK. Wow, that's it? So

This is QUACK my text, yay!

will appear in bold?!

Yes. Of course, we need to define a range, so let's use another word to specify the end of the boldface range: POTATOES. Now,

This is QUACK my text, POTATOES yay!

Believe it or not, this is a markup rule! Awesome, isn't it?

In LaTeX, we replace QUACK by \textbf{ and POTATOES by }, but let's not worry with this now.

So, where should we type our texts? In any text editor! Yes, any editor. You just need to specify, via logical rules, how your document should look like. And guess what, LaTeX does the rest for you!

LaTeX is an application and it's free. Do you know what that means? You can get a high quality document and save money for beer!

Free!

LaTeX is shipped in something we call TeX distribution. Think of a toolbox. Everything you'll need is there. Just use and abuse.

We have something we call packages which help us make our documents look cooler. They are like LEGO blocks, just get the one you need for your project and use it!

So you see, <insert subject name here>, we can use LaTeX in virtually any kind of document! Think of newspapers, articles, books, calendars, children party invitations, CVs, songsheets. The list is endless!

LaTeX generates beautiful documents from plain text. Simple yet amazing concepts. Why do I use it instead of a normal word application? LaTeX works.

Cat

Writing a document in LaTeX is similar of baking a pie. You have the ingredients, you know the order and how to dispose them. Now simply arrange them accordingly, put the plate into the oven and hope for the best. A document follows the same logic, sadly it's not as delicious as a pie.

Speaking of food, LaTeX is much like Marmite. Either you love or hate it.

Marmite

Well, that's it, <insert subject name here>. Thanks for the pair of socks for my birthday, I really appreciate the thought. :)

I was tempted to post this link. :)

Paulo Cereda
  • 44,220
  • 29
    “and save money for beer” was the reason I started with LaTeX in the first place ;) – cgnieder Jan 22 '13 at 20:53
  • 1
    I was about to write something like this on my own blog, but I don't think it'd be as thorough (or as funny) as this one is. Brilliant! – Vishal Kotcherlakota Jan 22 '13 at 20:57
  • 30
    Saw the first picture, knew it was an answer from Paulo :) – doncherry Jan 22 '13 at 22:02
  • Don has some t-shirts from TeX conferences. :-) – Martin Schröder Jan 23 '13 at 11:39
  • 3
    Wonderful explanation! I'm new to this site and I didn't know what LaTeX was but now I do! – Jeel Shah Jan 23 '13 at 14:34
  • 16
    I signed up just to say you only need to hit shift twice for LaTeX if you have caps lock on, or no times at all if you alternate with the caps lock key. – Rob Jan 23 '13 at 16:30
  • Would -1 if I could. This is both funny and accurate, but uses a lot of computer specific terms. OP asked specifically for an explanation for someone who is computer illiterate. – evilcandybag Jan 23 '13 at 19:20
  • 2
    I want to give you a hug – Sevki Jan 23 '13 at 23:49
  • In my opinion the biggest advantages of (La)TeX are 1) you can automate cross-referencing (pretty much impossible without automation in a big document), 2) type out Mathematics easily and enjoy the results in a efficient manner. 3) Additional packages available offers flexibility and convenience. E.g. try typesetting bibliographies in say APA style manually. 4) Aesthetically pleasing typography, e.g. ligatures, spacing – Mobius Pizza Jan 24 '13 at 01:04
  • 1
    There's not enough upvotes for this answer! Awesome. – Habi Jan 24 '13 at 10:30
  • 3
    Made an account just to +1 this. – Camilo Martin Jan 24 '13 at 13:55
  • Signed up to vote up this answer. It's a gem!!! I didn't know what LaTeX is until I saw this answer. – noob Jan 24 '13 at 17:32
  • 21
    LaTeX to me is... NEVER HAVING TO USE A MOUSE... ever. – LordStryker Jan 24 '13 at 17:44
  • 2
    Made an account just to upvote this answer. Simply brilliant. But the only glitch is that Grandma doesn't know what PDF is (or Word for that matter - its clearly mentioned in the question.) – Green Noob Jan 25 '13 at 03:23
  • 1
    To write LaTeX properly, you need more than just pressing two or three shifts, the word LaTeX can only be written properly in LaTeX because it involves small caps and superscript and subscript and very precise kernings. – Lie Ryan Jan 25 '13 at 06:06
  • 2
    Would give you another +1 for Knuth reading the book Stefan wrote ';)' – Rico Jan 25 '13 at 15:29
  • I +1 because you went crazy overboard and I like it, though it's a crappy explanation of what LaTeX is. I think my grand-ma died reading this. – haylem Jun 19 '13 at 12:43
  • Ahahahahaha, my granny would collapse hearing this but THIS is great. – MattAllegro Apr 13 '14 at 14:15
  • 1
    What's the status on that T-Shirt? – Raphael Jul 21 '14 at 20:33
  • 1
    Nice pictures, I really liked reading this. – Mnementh Jun 18 '15 at 10:09
  • What? It's layytecch? I always thought it was layytecks. – Pritt Balagopal Jul 08 '17 at 10:37
  • Is the picture of professor Knuth holding the LaTeX beginner guide, which I suppose is written by the questioner, real? – youthdoo Jan 04 '23 at 04:19
  • @youthdoo no, it's not real. – Paulo Cereda Jan 09 '23 at 09:01
267

If people ask me what LaTeX is, I explain it like this:

Imagine you wrote a book and want to publish it. You, as an author, are good at writing and explaining stuff but you don't know how to "design" it.

When your book looks like this, you wouldn't earn a penny, selling it:

plain Text

What you need is someone how is trained at making text readable and looking beautiful at the same time. This guy is called lector. He creates a concept of your book. For him it is enough to know what kind of book you are writing, but he does not need to know what is in it.

After his work is done the concept could look like this:

concept

Now, that we have a concept we need to combine both parts together. The one who gets paid for this is called the typesetter. She takes both parts and puts them together.

The result could look like this:

typesetter

We've learned that it takes 3 people to create a book, the author, the lector and the typesetter. But what has this got to do with LaTeX? This is a pretty easy question. We are the author and LaTeX does the job of the lector and the typesetter. It creates a concept and combines it with the text we have written. We don't have to spend time thinking about how it should look like because LaTeX will find the best way and make it look great.

(About "Russischer Zupfkuchen" see e.g. here. It is some sort of cheesecake)

Rico
  • 6,097
  • 10
    Really nice! I'll use this one for my introductions. Where is the lectoring part taken from? – Uwe Ziegenhagen Jan 22 '13 at 18:30
  • hope its understandable even if the picturetext is in German. I'll create an english one as sone as possible – Rico Jan 22 '13 at 18:47
  • @UweZiegenhagen what do you mean by "where is the lectoring part taken from?" – Rico Jan 22 '13 at 18:48
  • 6
    I'm not sure that lector's the correct English term. I'm unable to find any definition not related to public speaking for it. – Dan Is Fiddling By Firelight Jan 22 '13 at 19:41
  • Wikipedia says its Literary editor but I'm not sure he does the job I was talking about. – Rico Jan 22 '13 at 19:46
  • @Rico that seems wrong too. A literary editor would be someone who edits (or more often suggests significant edits for the author to make) the content of a book. (vs a copy editor who does typo/spelling errors.) That said, I'm not sure what job title would have been used when layout design and physically placing the type in a printing press were separate jobs. These days for strait up prose IIRC I've seen type setter used for the person who picked the font size, margins, etc; but I believe that's a redefinition as technology has combined traditional rolls. – Dan Is Fiddling By Firelight Jan 22 '13 at 20:17
  • 1
    I did some researching looks like the Typesetter is doing the whole job I described in two parts lector (editor) and typesetter. This isn't a problem. I change my answer. – Rico Jan 22 '13 at 20:32
  • looking at the comments so far, i think "book designer" is what is meant. while that leaves out the editing part, which is important (but certainly isn't done even semi-automatically by latex), editing is intentionally absent from this discussion. – barbara beeton Jan 22 '13 at 20:32
  • 1
    I couldn't find anything explaining the job "book designer" it looks like the typesetter/typographer is doing the whole job of designing and putting the parts together. Please verify that and I'll change the answer. – Rico Jan 22 '13 at 20:38
  • 6
    I think this so far is the most compelling answer. It's not too technical, not too pictorial, and includes beauty. The chosen example (a recipe) is comprehensive. – Daniel Jan 22 '13 at 20:45
  • @Rico Hey, I also want writing my instructions like you showed. Can you send me the commands please? :) – Ford Prefect Jan 22 '13 at 20:49
  • 3
    @FordPrefect its the xcookybook Package. But beware, it took me some hours to get it work... – Rico Jan 22 '13 at 20:56
  • 8
    That would be a good example for a grandmother. Compare her recipe cards to a cookbook. "If you typed out your instructions from a recipe card, even if you added all the details, it wouldn't look like . This type of software converts your typewritten version into something that could go into a cookbook." – Art Taylor Jan 23 '13 at 04:56
  • @Rico Could you post the code somewhere for the xcookybook example? Looks pretty nice (you also answered my question) – Uwe Ziegenhagen Jan 23 '13 at 10:03
  • 2
    @UweZiegenhagen you can simply click the link I mentioned above. There you get an example. But if you want I can post my code somewhere. You would also get some nice recipes ;) – Rico Jan 23 '13 at 10:06
  • @Rico: That's why I ask! I like the layout and the recipe. – Uwe Ziegenhagen Jan 23 '13 at 16:33
  • 1
    A "graphic designer" designs the look of a publication, from an ad or logo to a brochure, book or annual report... – alexis Jan 23 '13 at 23:17
  • 2
    Hmm, Zupfkuchen :) Also: Mutti! hehehe – BandGap Jan 25 '13 at 19:34
  • Lektor is usually translated as copy-editor, but it might better be rendered as commissioning editor (though that would more likely be a Redakteur in German) or project editor. All these terms are a little fuzzy, because changes in titles haven't kept pace with the big changes in editorial practice over the last two decades. – Charles Stewart May 19 '13 at 15:05
  • @Ingo: its neither Vim nor zendburn :) – Rico Jun 25 '13 at 12:54
  • Hannibal Lector? – Nicholas Hamilton Jan 28 '14 at 04:50
  • 1
    Ich liebe russischen Zupfkuchen. Und ich schaffe den jetzt sogar ohne Mutti. :-) – Mnementh Jun 18 '15 at 10:11
  • 1
    This is by far the best answer for someone to understand what tex/latex does, going beyond Knuth's shallow "for making beautiful books", descriptions using words only, or images comparing latex to an automated print shop, – Pepe Mandioca Nov 30 '15 at 02:18
146

Why not use Donald Knuth's words? It's a tool "for making beautiful books."

michael kane
  • 1,461
104

I just explained it to a friend of mine the other night, in probably the same words that you might use for your daughter:

It's a tool that is used to tell a printer where to put words, lines, pictures etc. on a page and it's really good at that.

Scott H.
  • 11,047
  • 1
    communicating with lay people, one's spouse, and even one's peers is often a challenge ... i'd probably reword your suggestion as: "LaTeX is a system that interprets formatting instructions that are associated with an author's plain text so that a computer can make the printed output more pleasing to the eyes of the author's audience." ... i'm not claiming my suggestion is better than yours ... i'm simply trying to avoid "tool" and "printer" because grandma might think of "hammer" and the person who printed her wedding invitations. – gerryLowry Jan 24 '13 at 11:04
  • GNU pr is to ASCII as LaTeX is to everything else. – Joe Corneli Oct 30 '14 at 14:57
  • 9
    @gerryLowry, that is far and away too abstract. Wildly so. You lost 90% of your non-technical audience with "plain text" and 90% of the rest of them with the combination of "interprets" "formatting instructions" and "printed output". (Actually I think the percentages are higher.) Whereas even if grandma thought of hammers and weddings, she would at least get an idea of what the final result was—putting words, lines, pictures on a page. – Wildcard Oct 18 '15 at 05:26
72

A dubious analogy?... guess we'll see

Imagine that you are baking a cake, and that somehow you could magically get software on a computer to do it for you.

LaTeX would...

  • measure the ingredients
  • mix them perfectly
  • create very little mess
  • write down all of its decisions for you to follow later
  • would only ever ask you for clarification if it was absolutely necessary
  • bake the cake and produce among the best tasting cake you have ever eaten

Other software would....

  • probably not do it nearly as well, and you'd end up having to make the cake yourself

Once the analogy has been made, replace 'baking a cake' for 'typesetting a document', 'ingredients' for 'content', and 'best tasting cake you have ever eaten' for 'best looking document you have ever seen'.

Of course, the user has to provide the ingredients/content :)

cmhughes
  • 100,947
62

It is useless to explain some thing to some people. Your explanations will be too complicated or too boring.

Probably is better to explain first what is NOT LaTeX to keep you out of trouble when people look in Google to see where you spend your time. I've seen that Paulo Cereda also thought about this risks. In a second step you can explain that playing with \Latex is a type of serious work (I had thought just in the same image already uploaded by David Carlisle for this). Also it is worth to mention that you are not a slave of a strange glambling addiction. For thus I think in some examples of that anyone can learn just here ... but may be this is not a good idea.
WhatIsNotLatex

Fran
  • 80,769
44

I simply would say LaTeX is the way to produce beautiful texts that even you, dear grandma, who never typed an e-mail, can appreciate it.

Sigur
  • 37,330
37

Maybe using the traditional Before & After way:

Before

Before

After

After

  • 3
    Great picture! "Saint Jerome in His Study" by "Domenico Ghirlandaio" - year 1480: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Jerome_in_His_Study_%28Ghirlandaio%29 – Ho1 Jul 12 '15 at 20:11
34

Explaining technical tools to those with less technological context is often hard. Things they're most interested in tend to be who might use it and why that person might use it, as opposed to technical details.

  • What is LaTeX? LaTeX is a programming language for writing, most often for technical writing.
  • What problem does LaTeX solve? The problem is that there is a lot of useful technical jargon that doesn't get formatted well in paragraphs, such as formulas and graphs. LaTeX is often used to take that content that is hard to format, and lay it out in a visually appealing way.
  • Who uses it? Many writers use LaTeX, but especially technical writers who need to write out those mathematical or scientific symbols, graphs, notations, and other content that's harder to get or use in simpler word processors.

In a short paragraph, that might read as:

LaTeX is a programming language that a writer uses to get the computer to understand complicated ideas about how to lay out a document. It was designed for technical documents, with lots of support for math and science notation, so it's most often used by technical writers to help visually organize their material. A paper written in LaTeX is often pretty and well designed with much less effort than plain text.

rsegal
  • 441
  • 16
    If only there was an English word everybody knew that expressed the futility of trying to do something in Microsoft Word or OpenOffice, that should have been done with LaTeX. If we used the German way of doing things we could make up a word like OhMyHeckIHateMicrosoftWord. – Warren P Jan 22 '13 at 20:06
  • 5
    @WarrenP What's wrong with futile exercise? Admittedly, that's two words. :) – user Jan 23 '13 at 09:10
  • 4
    Just because LaTeX was designed for technical documents doesn't mean that's all its good for. I laid out a comic book in LaTeX. (Because scripting makes things easier.) – fluffy Jan 24 '13 at 18:30
  • Modified the wording to better represent that. – rsegal Jan 24 '13 at 18:34
  • @AudenYoung As a German, I would express it as "Textprozessorenunfähigkeitshass" (text processor inability hatred), which would actually be a valid German word :D Your examples are bad because we obviously don't call MS Word "Wort" (why would you translate the given name of a product?) and because German has very specific rules as to what word categories you can combine in what order to form a new word (for example, a combined word can never contain a preposition like "mit"). – DLCom Sep 24 '22 at 10:28
28

That's a problem I bumped into several times (I used to work on projects in which the aim was to produce e-learning material about the internet for seniors, who never used a PC - go figure...).

In such cases I try to explain by starting with an analogy taking an example from - well, you know it - the analog world. :) In the case of LaTeX I would focus on typesetting. It existed way before computers and should be pretty easy to understand as a concept. Then I'd sum up in a few words the motivation of the venerable master Knuth to typeset beautiful papers, mainly because of the botched way math was typeset back then (in the early days so to say) - because for cost reduction typewriters were used to do this - to finally jump to present day and oversimplify a bit by selling the computer as a very smart typewriter.

That's it roughly. Add details/anecdotes as required.

... and don't forget to mention your book was typeset with LaTeX! :)

Count Zero
  • 17,424
  • 1
    The publisher used InDesign, that's why it's useable but not perfect. – Stefan Kottwitz Jan 22 '13 at 17:36
  • 1
    Awww dang... would've been perfect (in a perfect world)! – Count Zero Jan 22 '13 at 17:37
  • 11
    but math used to be "beautiful" -- knuth followed the principles of the compositors who produced books and journals with metal type. it's only when typewriters (albeit super-functional ones) started being used (to reduce costs) and then computers were enlisted to make the decisions without human intervention that the quality went downhill. addison-wesley would never have used typewriter composition for a knuth book, but by the time a second edition of vol.2 was needed, there were no human compositors left to set metal type. – barbara beeton Jan 22 '13 at 18:58
  • @barbarabeeton: that's exactly my point, the quality was abysmal because of the (semi)automatic typewriters used back then. I probably wasn't specific enough. I fixed my answer accordingly, thanks! – Count Zero Jan 22 '13 at 19:01
  • If you can find a copy, read "The printing of mathematics: aids for authors and editors and rules for compositors and readers at the University Press", Oxford

    Theodore William Chaundy, Oxford University Press, 1957 - 109 pages

     – Ethan Bolker Feb 04 '13 at 02:37
27

"Well grandma, LaTeX is a typesetting language. It is a very precise way to describe to a computer what the text and images of a document should look like, and how they should be positioned. It's often used for entire books. In fact, the book I wrote was typeset using LaTeX! I wrote the book to teach other people how to use LaTeX too."

I'm assuming your grandma is old, not stupid.

Gustav Bertram
  • 371
24

Your oven = My computer

Your recipe = My code

Your mixer machine = My TeX engine

Your delicious cake = My beautiful book

Mario S. E.
  • 18,609
20

I would explain like so:

Remember the old printing presses? They would have some typesetters putting all the letters in place on the press. The typesetters would work according to rules about which font should be used where, how things should line up, where the pictures should go, what the margins would be, how the pages should be numbered and so on.

LaTeX is some computing software from making electronic documents. However, unlike using a word processor, people who use LaTeX are like modern typesetters. With LaTeX they can create rules about fonts, margins, colours, pictures, layout and so on, and then the document they are making will come out accordingly. What's even better is they can put these rules into a special file to share them with people. Then those peoples' documents will come out with the same formatting and style. This makes things really easy as none has to worry about formatting and can get on with writing.

All this control means that documents made with LaTeX look beautiful with little effort. The quality of LaTeX compared to a word processor can be like the quality of a newspaper compared to typewriter.

geometrikal
  • 487
20

I would order one of the (oh so many) self-edited books on Lulu or Amazon made with Microsoft Word, with page numbers inside the bindings, no justification, no hyphenation, no indexes, etc. and show her the difference: with LaTeX, this wouldn't have happened…

raphink
  • 31,894
19

LaTeX is a language that a human being can use to let a computer know how a manuscript should be typeset and printed.

Emanuele Paolini
  • 695
19

LaTeX is a bunch of superfluous abstractions built on top of the TeX typesetting language. A typesetting language which computationally imitates the work of a typesetter.

Explaining stuff to people doesn't have to mean spitting white lies between your teeth via misattribution.

morbusg
  • 25,490
  • 4
  • 81
  • 162
17

It’s kind of rough but normally I explain it like

TeX   is   a   software   to   typeset   books …
               tool            layout    texts
               program         make
               application     produce

 (it’s not like Word!: It’s build to make things look nice, readable
 and beautiful and not only to string letters, like Word does)

with alternatives set in columns

Tobi
  • 56,353
  • I don't know Stefan's grandma, but considering my grandma, we learnt her the difference between "charge a mobile with money" and "charge a mobile with energy". That's where here technology knowledge ends. She has no idea what is software etc., not speaking about Word. ;) – yo' Jan 23 '13 at 17:06
  • But she might know what a tool is ;-) The sentence about Word is intended for bosses … – Tobi Jan 23 '13 at 23:22
16

I think I would show what TeX can do. I think people are underestimating grandma. It doesn't take technical nous to appreciate beauty or clarity.

This leaflet was designed to advertise and explain TeX. It contains a mix of different things so might be nice to show a family group, for example, with lots of different interests. Karl Berry notes that you need to zoom in to really appreciate it - it looks much less impressive until you start examining the detail and it is packed with detail.

The TeX Showcase is excellent in part because you can select examples of particular interest to particular people. For example, your grandma might like this book sample or this more scientific one. If your grandma is from my part of the world The Book of Tea might go down especially well. Or perhaps this genealogy if grandma is interested in family history.

While not the best choice for somebody who doesn't use computers, there are plenty of suitable examples there with a more hi-tech feel as well. And linguists should have a field day, too.

For a young child maybe the movie example (I guess a small child won't care what it is really about!) or this spinning globe.

cfr
  • 198,882
  • What are the requirements for that spinning globe to work? (It does not work here.) – hkBst Jun 13 '16 at 09:47
  • @hkBst Sorry, but I'm not sure. I can't even see the globe now, let alone have it spin. Perhaps it needs Adobe Reader? – cfr Jun 13 '16 at 11:40
  • The spnning globe requires Flash Player, which is defunct. And the animation does not work with Adobe Acrobat Reader. – murray Sep 18 '23 at 14:41
  • The referenced leaflet is considerably out-of-date. Nearly all of the commercial TeX vendors listed are defunct; the list of operating systems is obsolete as is the list of LaTeX implementations for them; the edition of "The LaTeX Companion" is still the 1st (the current one being the 3rd); the requirement of "GhostScript/GSview or similar" is obsolescent; the requirement of "a 66MHz processor or above" is laughable; etc. – murray Sep 18 '23 at 14:49
  • @murray As an example of what TeX can do, it is still impressive. Some of it was out-of-date when I wrote this almost a decade ago (eek!). More of it was out-of-date two-and-a-half years later, as the discussion about the globe shows. But the main point of this answer was to explain an approach rather than to advocate for the use of any particular example. And remember the question. It matters the spinning globe doesn't work (or, indeed, even appear), but does it matter if the list of implementations is obsolete? You're not trying to convince grandma to use LaTeX, let alone install it ;). – cfr Sep 18 '23 at 18:59
16

The most important early warning that we have to mention is that LaTeX in question has nothing to do with the following types of clothing.

enter image description here

Instead, LaTeX is a computer program that can beautifully typeset almost everything.

kiss my armpit
  • 36,086
  • 2
    I think you will find they are not latex either. – Nicholas Hamilton Jan 28 '14 at 04:53
  • 20
    Fun fact on the side: Years ago I asked my professor whether it would be ok to write my final thesis in LaTeX (I pronounced it as it is written). He looked kinda confused and answered that my private life is--by any means--not his concern. – phx May 29 '15 at 11:40
  • I used to work in a group office with two more colleagues of mine while typesetting a scientific paper in LaTeX. They were unfortunately capable of seeing my monitor, so I always had to be ultra careful whenever I googled anything that involved latex as a search term, hahaha – DLCom Sep 24 '22 at 10:32
14

It's a way to do with a strange machine named "computer" what you did by hand.

The front page of one of my grandma's calligraphy exercise notebook:

enter image description here

One calligraphy homework of hers (1913):

enter image description here

A couple of accountancy homework of hers (1914):

enter image description here

enter image description here

I didn't inherit money from my grandmother but something more important: books!

CarLaTeX
  • 62,716
13

Looks like everybody is forgetting the girlfriend. You can tell her that is a tool to save you time that you will spend with her. ;-)

But it's better not to tell her the lots of time on TeX-SX site. :-)

percusse
  • 157,807
Smarzaro
  • 673
12

Latex is a tool for

changing atoms into characters,

molecules into words,

planets & stars into sentences,

solar systems into paragraphs,

galaxies into chapters ...

the Universe into text.

omtamal
  • 347
  • I think the implications of this analogy is a valid definition for a run-on sentence :) – Sean Allred Jun 05 '15 at 17:09
  • @SeanAllred I'm not that good with english. Does it mean that it is grammaticaly incorrect or written with poor style? – omtamal Jun 05 '15 at 19:46
  • Oh, no -- your English is fine :) The implication is that planets/starts are made of many molecules: sentences with similar proportions of words would be... untenable. :) Just a quirky observation. – Sean Allred Jun 05 '15 at 19:51
  • I got it -- maybe all this is just stardust. :) – omtamal Jun 05 '15 at 19:59
12

I would just say, "LaTeX is a computing system that makes it easier for people to layout and publish printed works," and take the conversation from there.

fluffy
  • 273
12

To quote Wikipedia:

LaTeX is a system used for making printed text look good using a computer. It is especially good at making mathematical formulas look right. It is used on Wikipedia. It is used mostly at colleges.

Martin Schröder
  • 15,156
  • Does Wikipedia use the real LaTeX? – yo' Jan 23 '13 at 14:15
  • @tohecz I doubt it uses the entire LaTeX system, probably just the math typesetting aspect (and possibly some other environments). It doesn't use mathjax but some hash-based renderer (which is rather irritating when you want to look up how an equation was typed up) – Thomas Jan 26 '13 at 23:35
  • 1
    as long as they do not use the Knuths math formula algorithm, I'm unwilling to call it (*)TeX. – yo' Jan 26 '13 at 23:38
12

LaTeX is like a recipe. It just text useless on itself, but with a seasoned chef and and some ingredients you'll get a actual meal. In the case of LaTeX it's just a computer instead a cook you'll need and piece of typography you ought to get.

bloodworks
  • 10,178
11

This is very grandma-specific:

LaTeX is for writing good-looking books what knitting is for making a warm pair of socks.

Dohn Joe
  • 1,912
8

This is hard. To most grandmas a computer is a magic and/or useless box which for some reason the younger generations can't get enough of. To most grandmas, a computer is indeed that big white box with a "tv" attached or next to it; the inner workings mean nothing to them (they wouldn't refer to a smartphone as a "computer", and perhaps not even a "phone" unless they see it being used as such... might as well be a remote). I know, some of your grandmas probably use facebook, have smartphones and whatnot, but that's not the case here or in general.

That being said, I think that the most reasonable way to exaplain it is to say "it's a way of making books look as nice as they do", and then you show her a printed book as an example, and point out certain details and how nice the book is because of it.

Pedro Tiago Martins
  • 500
  • 5
  • 10
8

I guess you could say that LaTeX is like a typewriter that doesn't print your words right away—it remembers them instead. Then at the end, when your document is done and you want to print it out on paper, LaTeX asks you how you want it to look. You say "like a nice looking book", and it prints out your words as a nice looking book, without you having to work hard to make it look like that.

But maybe you change your mind, and say "I like the way the New York Times looks, make it look more like that". So LaTeX prints out your words again and they look like the New York Times, and once again, you didn't have to work hard to make it look different because LaTeX did that for you. It's like a typewriter with a brain.

The example might be a bit simplistic, but the separation of content from the layout is probably one of the easier things to understand about LaTeX.

Faheem Mitha
  • 7,778
drgibbon
  • 568
7

A long time ago, every copy of every book was hand written. This was making books expensive and explains why they had no much diffusion.

Then, say in 15th century, one sharp person called John Gutemberg invented some new technology that made preparation and printing of books faster and more efficient.

In 20th century - quite a long jump, to keep this short - the use of typewriter became very frequent to produce long and short documents, just before computers became the standard.

Typewriter and computer have in common the keyboard, that we still use to type our text when using LaTeX on a computer.

When I use LaTeX to write a book or any text on a computer, I type my text on the keyboard, plus some additional text called markup (LaTeX markup) in some position I know.

We are now not interested in how a computer processes text and markup, I am also very ignorant in this topic. But all that is to be said is that while my text provides the content, the bit of additional text (LaTeX markup) I typed into it provides all the pagination and layout setting you can appreciate in any modern "professional" book of your interest, that you can leaf through in any bookshop.

...good nite grandma :)

MattAllegro
  • 1,546
6

A tool that enables you to create beautiful documents,article,reports and books and thereby attracts the attention of young and old.

murugan
  • 1,669
5

First of all, I am a bloody latex beginner..

I love it when I proudly present my latex-document to my girlfriend and she responses like "Oh, and where is the difference to word? In word, it looks identically!"

When I respond that you can spare a lot of time because your presettings are applied on the whole document and you don't need to do formatting again and again, she tells me that "she likes to have the control".

To sum up, I think that you must be confortable with using LaTeX by yourself. Rest should not count, otherwise I would proceed doing word. :)

Jens
  • 1,431
  • 1
    I really like it when people say "oh where is the difference to Word?" :-) most people don't see the difference between equations, or justified text or whatever. Once I typed the same test document, both in Word and TeX, including justified text, some equations and table of contents. For me the difference was obvious, but most people didn't care, unfortunately. And to be honest, I personally don't save much time using TeX because it offers more possibilities and therefore I am sometimes lost in some details - which is a bit of a pity because most people don't pay attention to these anyway. – T. Pluess Feb 21 '19 at 09:05
  • true words! and yes, sometimes one gets lost in details! :-) – Jens Feb 22 '19 at 18:30
2

LaTeX is the friend you appreciate once you really get to know them. On the surface, it may be hard and the "getting to know" curve is steep, but once you overcome it, there are great gems to be discovered and cherished.

That has been my experience with this.

Jennifer
  • 467
  • 1
    Good for you :). But, I am pretty sure this is irrelevant to the question at hand (it is relevant if someone asks you the difference between MS Word and LaTeX). – Cyriac Antony Jan 14 '23 at 14:38