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I'm trying to make the transition from Word to LaTeX for mathematical writing. But the more I learn about it, the less sure I am that I should make this transition.

Typographical Quality

For example people say you should chose LaTeX for its high typographical quality of the documents. But take a look at this document I created with Microsoft Word 2010: https://skydrive.live.com/?cid=8fea31c0accf70f0&id=8FEA31C0ACCF70F0%21183# You should view it in a PDF reader, otherwise the fonts are not loaded.

I can hardly imagine that quality of typography would be much better in LaTeX. Can someone give me some objective arguments why LaTeX would be of typographical better quality?

LaTeX is extremely customizable.

Isn't Word extremely customizable as well?

With LaTeX, you have the option to control "content" and "presentation" separate.

I agree that in programs like Word or OpenOffice it's easier (and pretty much the norm) to get sloppy and just do quick manual formatting with a shortcut instead of using proper style definitions and formatting for all your document elements. But, that's not really a good point to switch to LaTeX. I learned myself not to get sloppy while using Microsoft Word, and I think Office Word has as much as options as Latex has to render styles in your document the way you want it - with these font shapes and sizes, with such and such margins, footnotes, etc.

LaTeX allows typesetting math easily.

"Really - writing \alpha is quicker then searching alpha symbol in GUI. Similarly writing x^y is quicker then searching power in list of symbols. I guess with AMS packages included LaTeX have much more symbols then anything else."

Well, LaTeX allows typesetting math easily. But in Office Word you can use shortcuts for math symbols. For example look at those math shortcuts:

Σ in Word: S? vs LaTeX: \sum

ℝ in Word: R" vs LaTeX: \mathbb{R}

in Word: limn vs LaTeX: \lim_{n \to \infty}

You can make math typing as short as you want in Office Word, the same is not true in LaTeX.

PDF guarantees same-look on everything. You won't run into problems because the computer you're using don't have some fonts installed.

Word to PDF is as easy as anything. While you don't need to check how it looks in PDF all the time (as in LaTeX).

Word can't squeeze a Fourier series (a sum and a set of fractions) into a single baseline of text

Just not true..

etc. etc.

And so I find more arguments like this on the internet, but I'm not really convinced. Except for this argument:

"Superior cross referencing and bibliography management. This is a must for any lengthy work such as an academic paper or research report. Just three commands, \label, \citep and \autoref cover 99% of the use cases. The night before term projects are due, the groups who used LaTeX are sleeping soundly at home while the groups using Word are burning the midnight oil in the computer lab trying to get their cross references straightened out."

Can someone give me more of those good arguments in favour of LaTeX?

Glorfindel
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Kasper
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  • Just to exemplify: try to typesetting something similar to this in MSWord: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1210.7031 – Sigur Dec 09 '12 at 00:43
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    What exactly is the point of this question? If you like Word, use Word. If you like TeX, use TeX. I've voted to close this question as non-constructive. There's some discussion of this here: Why should I use LaTeX. One compelling reason is that Word is a proprietary document format, and TeX files are plain text. – Alan Munn Dec 09 '12 at 00:43
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    Short version of a long answer: Word has adopted TeX typesetting rules quite recently so that might give you an idea why math in LaTeX is better. Also try to introduce some math alphabet and watch your nice document be destroyed on your supervisor's computer. You are shooting your own feet with your argument You should view it in pdf reader, otherwise the fonts are not loaded. Next; try to switch to some other structure after you are about to finish your document and add at least 3 hours and two more complete rereading your document to make sure that you have fixed all the screw-ups. – percusse Dec 09 '12 at 00:45
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    In "LaTeX allows typesetting math easily" you are confusing LaTeX capabilities with the capability of your editor (and any good editor will allow you to create shortcuts) – Guido Dec 09 '12 at 01:07
  • @Alan Munn, I've read the "Why should I use Latex" dicussion, but because I didn't found much convincing arguments, I started this question. I'm very curious to good answers for the question: "Why do people chose Latex for mathematical writing?". And I'm very sad it's closed now. – Kasper Dec 09 '12 at 02:29
  • @percusse, you're right about that word has adopted the tex typesetting rules quite recently, but you do not mention that Luatex and Xetex has adopted the opentype math standards from word because of the reason that those standards improve the tex standards... If I would have made this pdf file in latex, I would also need to add "You should view it in pdf reader, otherwise the fonts are not loaded", because of the Latin Modern Roman fonts are not installed at most computers... I don't think you know word well, you can change structure in word very easily if you use it well... – Kasper Dec 09 '12 at 02:30
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    @KasperPeulen I've created a chat room for this if you want to chat a bit about the reasons. http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/6664/why-use-latex-chat – Alan Munn Dec 09 '12 at 02:40
  • It's always an interesting to see people becoming the defender of MS Word when it comes to LaTeX otherwise hating to their guts. I've used Word quite some time and still do. If you have written a document over 80 pages the discussion is futile. Word is a no-go. I've tried it many times and it fails miserably and instead of writing proper macros in VB I would choose to type it in LaTeX knowing that it will be the same 20 years later. So I would also argue that you don't know LaTeX well because then you would see that Word is no match to LaTeX. Try any example from this question and we'll talk – percusse Dec 09 '12 at 02:46
  • http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/1319/showcase-of-beautiful-typography-done-in-tex-friends – percusse Dec 09 '12 at 02:46
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    @KasperPeulen: concerning typographical quality, one can immediately see your example was typeset with Word as the text is badly justified (the spacing is too loose and irregular: if you care about typography, this is not something you want). See also http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/53071/word-2010-on-typesetting-math/53090#53090 for more problems of Word. – Philippe Goutet Dec 09 '12 at 08:33
  • @PhilippeGoutet I'm retyping the document in latex right now, so I'll see the difference in a couple of hours. – Kasper Dec 09 '12 at 13:53
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    You talk about mathematical writing, but one thing you (apparently) didn't realized (at least didn't mention) is that, in fact, most of the people which uses it use it for everything, not just mathematical writing. It's due to his typographical quality in almost every aspect related to text (as @PhilippeGoutet pointed). – Manuel Dec 09 '12 at 14:37
  • @Kasper I hope now you know exactly why TeX is better :) – f10w Oct 01 '20 at 10:49

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