In college, all my professors asked for the assignments to be in LATEX and I absolutely loved it because of the precision you get as the author. Being able to write freely and not have to deal with all the formatting quirks with word is a blessing. Now I mostly use Markdown, especially as the documents i create nowadays are wayyy less formal. Its super cool to learn the history of it! I always wondered where it came from.
Word formatting gets a bad wrap because it is easy to use incorrectly. I cringe whenever I see someone using spaces and carriage returns to "center" text and force the formatting in the worst possible way. While I absolutely adore the way LaTeX produces documents, modern Word documents with appropriate use of Styles, Section breaks, Page breaks, and Tab stops can replicate the sort of precision you seek for general purpose documents. Where LaTeX still has an advantage is its presentation of mathematical notation and the quality appearance of Computer Modern.
@@R.B. There is still one aspect of Word that makes me hate it and can be done much easier in LaTeX: Numbering, ordered and unordered lists nesting. Because sometimes it is just difficult to explain to Word what I want to achieve.
@@adameichler I'd argue that's still a problem with most people not understanding how best to use it, but since I don't know your specific example I can't really say. Besides being able to specify the way an outline handles numbering at different levels, you also can specify that a specific line starts with a specific number. I've never tried to use it to count down, so that might be a problem, but for typical numbering sequences you have a great deal of control when you know where to look.
I'm currently getting my masters degree in engineering, we were introduced too Latex during the first year, it wasnt mandatory at the time but HIGHLY encouraged since it would make it easier in later years. Oh my god I love it so much now. My fiance wrote her entire bachelors thesis in Google docs, and then moved it too Words (she's not in any form of STEM field). She had to spend so much time with checking every citation, Every inline etc etc to make sure they followed whatever system they were supposed to use. Meanwhile all we had to do was to specify our rules in the beginning of the document and then just write on. So nice
Properly, a "steep learning curve" is a _good_ thing. A small investment in training/experience (horizontal axis) gets you a big improvement in productivity/unit-cost (vertical axis).
Eitan: this was excellent. Love the care and precision you put into constructing the video. I will be posting the link for my students to use this as their introduction to LaTeX. Beautiful work!
This was very well done! IIRC, TeX and LaTeX predate PDFs, so the system originally came with its own "electronic paper" in the form of device-independent output files (.DVI) files. In those days, we used DVI viewers (e.g., dvipage, divout) to proof read our formatted documents and various programs to convert .DVI files to different printer languages (e.g., dvi2ps, dvi2lj).
True. One benefit of LaTeX is that if you have a group project you can easily include the texts of different authors. This at least of the word processors of the past was not easy-.
I used TEX at a company in 1989, where we made user manuals for software we had developed. Initially, all work was done on VT100 terminals, on a micro-VAX, and output direct to a Postscript laser printer. The boss had developed a strict set of macros, that standardised font, paragraph formats, etc. Once learned, all our documents read exactly the same, and errors were immediately obvious. Later, we got a few sun workstations, which gave us a graphical preview, and sped up the process. Very powerful. Word is powerful too, but only when you take the time to correctly build style-sheets, and FORCE people to use them properly. Reformatting broken word files into a style-sheet is a painful process. Also, word is notorious for version to version differences.
In 1984 the company I worked at decided to produce a large manual for our version of Prolog using TeX (LaTeX didn't even exist yet). They purchased one of the first "low-cost" laser printers which directly supported DVI. It was great fun (?) to work with ... it had its own video console which made a lot of sense as it kept crashing and had to be rebooted using that console. The document source was input on a Vax 780 and TeX run to compile into DVI. Since the manual was several hundred pages, a full run woudl take up to an hour (if memory serves). But TeX being TeX ... it was easy to develop macros which allowed the document to be split into multiple files for each section with a small harness where one could specify which sections to compile. And that probably summarizes the beauty of TeX in a nutshell. Something that in my experience few people know: the Equation langage of Word is essentially TeX/LaTeX math mode (with very few differences). So when I need to, I just directly write the LaTex code for equations after pressing Alt-= ... the memory is in the fingers.
Once I prepared my presentation (for a talk) in Latex and it came out ok in pdf. I copies the pdf and went directly for the presentation. And there I find that all the figures are missing! I have copies the pdf but the figures were not embedded. It was a real embarrassment.
@@kovesp1 About Word equation editor - you are referring to current version thereof (you can even change one option in Word config to be able to simply input \TeX{} or \LaTeX{} formulae there). Old Equation Editor (which dates back to 1993, when Word 6 was released) was only a pain in a..
I started learning latex at some point and fell in love: suddenly you didn't have to keep jumping between keyboard and mouse, you didn't have to click 100 things on graphical UI to get a single line of equation, and things behaved like I ordered or thought I ordered them to behave. Nothing exploded when I changed a thing in the code document. It was a pleasure to use because you could focus on creating the work instead of battling with Word. And it looks professional print instead of your personal memo notes.
Hello you Can write équation in word only with keyboard woth alt and + with synthèse similar as latex. For images management latex is indeed easier to format. But figure imports in latex are a pain.
Don't forget LyX! The "ease" of Word combined with the beauty of LaTeX. Personally, I save a LOT of time using this program. It's just define your properties and let's go! No need to struggle with your layout, it's just typing the thing you want to say.
Agreed. I also recommend trying GNU TeXmacs, because I found it good at: 1) WYSIWYG, 2) Syntax similar to LaTeX (it doesn't use it to typeset!) and 3) Edit equations like flying ("just pressing tab"), and 4) Open source. Also it is really extensible in its own way ie. built-in styles, bib support, etc. I only had to give up for LyX because it crashed at open due to my PC malfunctioning :/
It's crazy to think that during my entire education (high school, university - mechanical engineering) no one ever told me this. I kind of stumbled across LaTeX somewhere along the way, but there was no effort on the part of the education system to introduce me to it.
Depending on your field, it's common to start using LaTeX at grad school. I knew of LaTeX but never really had to use it prior to my first paper and my Master's dissertation.
I was lucky enough to have a professor that would give bonus marks to anyone who used Latex. Never would have bothered otherwise and now I'm really glad I spent the time.
My own experience is the same as OP's, and I like to think that most TeX users get to learn it by imitating that one weird friend that introduces you to "this document thing where the result is not what you see when you make it". After two years, I had imitated enough of my friend's work to be fluent in TeX myself, and the imitation cycle repeated itself for students who got to work with me in group projects, in turn. Fast forward another year, I've helped a professor retypeset his whole textbook from Word to LaTeX.
I did all of my physics and chemistry lab reports in LaTeX and only one of my professors immediately asked me if that’s how I did it. He was so keen about it he wanted to see the source file too. It’s interesting how that look is so recognisable!
In my position as a quantitative analyst, I used a pipeline consisting of Vim, R, and LaTEX. I used Vim as my text editor. I used R for data manipulation, statistical analysis, and to produce graphics. I put the report in an Rnw file and compiled it with LaTEX. Gat wonderful results.
Hello, my friend. Sorry to be bothering you but, can you share with me which type of resources you used to gain experience in using these tools? I'm also a quant and I would like to make more professional-looking reports
I made it all the way to Linear Algebra only having heard of LaTeX. After a week of painstakingly writing systems and matrices, I said to myself, there is NO way this is how this subject should be studied. I found someone using Vim and Latex to write math notes live, made an account on Overleaf and never looked back. The speed at which you can take notes is astounding. It took about a day just to figure out how to make a document and produce some equations, another day to learn formatting, and by the third day, I had 19 pages of notes. Amazing software.
LaTeX also has a bunch of neat built-in environments you can use. Article (the default one) is fairly simply laid out Book gives you chapters and shapes the margins so they make sense in a book Beamer gives you Power-Point-esque slines (and many more) All of these are additionally packed to the brim with presets and options to make them virtually fully customiseable
The other huge advantage LaTeX has over any other program is that, because you deal with a plain-text file, you have no issue with very large documents with loads of references or figures. I've seen Word crash or bug countless times even with small documents. You never experience that with LaTeX. Plus, dealing with bibliography, cross reference, citation style is just ridiculously easy.
I had to learn LaTeX for a paper in one of my classes in college, and while at first I had the reaction of “Why can’t we just use Word?”, as I continued learning how to use it, I began to appreciate the ability to just write, and then check formatting later when my content was done.
I once participated in a math course the notes for which were transcribed by hand during lecture and asked why wasn't the transcription done with LaTeX. Got a really snippy answer of "If it's so easy, why don't you do it yourself?". Admittedly I sometimes had to take pictures of the last thing on the chalkboard and transcribe it after lecture, but not every lecture.
Life vibrates through the work and existence of the many amazing people birthed on this earth, the creator of this video and the overall pupils of knowledge are a primary exhibit.
Since I've learned about LaTeX in my first year of University, I've used it for every report and assigment there. Other students just passed the mandatory class and never touched it again. For me - I simply can't use Word or Google docs anymore. I really love the look and the fact that there is a latex package for everything I would need.
I was able to compile my 2003 diploma thesis (Latex) in 2020 from scratch without any adaptions. Content focused mean you can "\emph{This is impotant}" do this and decide later if the content should appear in Bold, in color (or both), or if it should be "blinking" on a screen. You get table of content, list of figures, list of tables, bibliography, etc. the right way from the beginning. By using e.g. bibtex you can built up "your" bib-database with entries downloaded directly from the Journal. The bibliography might look different in a thesis or an article but it is derived from the same datasource (and of course can be adapted to your needs). If you write a thesis get a latex file from somebody who recently graduated. You can use the "body" and delete the content - so all requirements from your University are met. Printing out a latex generated ps or pdf will look exactly the way you see it on the screen. With Word i had problems, that during the printing process the programm rearranged pagebreaks messing up all references. References e.g. to equations are very easy to implement and also longer equations or tables are easy to built. For drawings and plots i used xfig and gnuplot with latex-output, thus the text inside the graphs and pictures had the same font (and size * scaling factor) as the text - try this with word! A latex file (since it is plain text) can be checked into a cvs or subversion system (also a bibtex - database). Your research group can built up an common bibtex database for your field which you can use. I can only recommend it.
RUclips has been tossing me some really disappointing recommendations recently. I'm glad the algorithm got at least ONE recommendation right. Love the format and presentation, and the topic is really interesting as well. Subscribed and looking forward to more content! (hopefully)
I am a retired software engineer, and I spent my career in pre-press, typography and DTP. Knuth is widely regarded as a great typographer. Except inside the typography industry. 🙂
In my first programming job I built a program to personalise a data analysis process for customers of an energy firm. It was perfect. I could hook it up to my model in R, typeset all the corporate branding and styles, and then parameterised the output to operate specifically on each customer's data. It spat out pdfs at 40 seconds a customer from database access to file written to disk. It was a really successful project, and would have been tragic without LaTeX
I think “Word” gets a bit too much unnecessary aversion from LaTeX users. I am a LaTeX/Overleaf user myself, but the possibilities in Word are vast as well. Word usually offers multiple ways to execute a certain action. One obvious but tedious way and one advanced but faster way. Most people just know the obvious way and complain about it until finally switching to LaTeX, without even properly knowing Word. For example, you can easily write equations, matrices etc. in Word without clicking through the equation editor even once (by using backslash commands as you do in LaTeX). You can also define your own keyboard shortcuts for specific commands. But at that point, you’re probably advanced enough to properly use LaTeX, which is likely superior in the long run. But it’s not like LaTeX is superior to Word in every single way. Every LaTeX user surely knows that Word has its merits, let alone that it highly depends on what field you’re working on
word is good enough for office work, and short documents... for professional publications or long texts, it is terrible (crashes and what not) and looks horrible...
@@Gunnl I do agree obviously, but that’s not really what I was trying to say. If I were to compare both, I’d be here until my next life, though. I think it’s just wrong to unjustly demonize Word for what it’s worth. Most of my LaTeX user friends love to sh*t on Word for things that they think Word cannot do (or at least only in a complicated way), just to be surprised when I tell them how you could actually do it. But as a sidenote for your comment: I would take the occasional crashes (since it usually saves the file before the crash happened) for large files over taking a bit longer to navigate through LaTeX than Word. It’s obviously not much, but it’s still an important QOL. Besides, if you take in the effort, you can actually make Word documents look decent. Luckily, the “default” in LaTeX already looks pretty good. The pros of LaTeX just outweigh the cons for me (again, I ain’t wasting my time comparing both)
@@Gunnl Sorry, I disagree. I have done lot of work in Word and LibreOffice Writer. I have never understood how LateX is supposed to be superior. It's just more arcane so that certain "professionals" can feel good about themselves. But it virtually can't do anything that Word/Writer can't. And who can actually do their own marcos? What LateX is better at, though, is being version controlled in Git et al.
@@Elite7555 as i explained... I am guessing you never had to work on a 600+ page word document in a team and make it look professionally written ... Ensure everyone uses the whitespace the same way, formats the images the same way, etc... I have never done such thing in Latex, but i am pretty sure it would have just worked...
@@Gunnl Few weeks ago had to update a lab manual and was written in Word. Spent three hours trying to "convince" Word of the correct sectioning and it almost won. Thanks but no thanks! If you give me choice I will always chose LaTex over Word for any relatively complex document. Compared to older versions Word has degraded overtime, I never had such issues when using Word in university and I got pretty good at it because I had to write some many reports back then. When they brought in the "new look" they not only removed some features (like different fill patterns I used a lot for graphics) but also made it harder to use some features (had to click several stuff to get to the point). I only use Word now when I cannot do otherwise or if I'm writing a very simple doc. Even letters I do on LaTex, word sucks but LaTex is not for everyone.
Latex is so good. I learned latex to write screenplays. It's not as fast as markdown (at least once I made my own custom CSS) but it works surprisingly well.
I’ve been using LaTeX on sites like Piazza for writing math equations for over two years now but never really knew what TeX or LaTeX actually was (whether a language, an application, etc), or the history behind any of it. Thank you so much for this amazing video.
@@alanjrobertson Hehe, Scottish "ch" sounds like moving cooking pan through the gravel 😀But surely it's closer than "k" 🙂I've noticed reversed problems; people in my country badly pronounce for example "technology" with that "ch", same all other words with "ch" in English. 🙂
The thing is the sounds in loch and bach are different, although they might sound similar to people who don't have much experience with them (like English speakers). Loch is (supposed to be) pronounced /lɒx/, with the unvoiced velar fricative /x/, while Bach is /baχ/, with the unvoiced uvular fricative /χ/. With /x/ the tongue (almost) touches the velum (soft palate) - the same place as for /k/. To pronounce it, put the tongue in the position you'd use to pronounce a "k", and let out air, keeping it in the same position. On the other hand, /χ/ is pronounced with the back of the tongue (almost) touching the uvula - the little thing that hangs at the back of the mouth. It is the same place that French "r" or Arabic "q" are pronounced. According to Wikipedia, TeX is pronounced /tɛx/, using the /x/ from "loch".
While I've known about LaTeX for a while now, it was only in the last couple of months that I actually seriously started using it. Services like Overleaf greatly simplify some of the tasks and allow you to use templates that are reasonably straightforward to figure out and modify for your own purposes. It also allowed me to actually understand what was going on, making the very steep learning curve significantly shallower. I also found it significantly lessened the amount of time I was wasting getting formatting correct for figures and references. I just didn't have to worry about the numbering at all, where as with Word, you've almost got to leave that for last in order to avoid having to do it over and over again, at which point it just gets tedious.
Giving LaTeX more reach is always a good thing, though creating a grocery list with it is a bit OCD...
2 года назад+1
I used LaTeX for my minithesis and because of the country and the rules of the school, I had to include a ton of packages just to make it look less professional by making it look like somebody had used *specifically* Microsoft Word. No other text editor, but Microsoft's. I loved it just because of how flexible it proved to be
On that front, a single-column sans-serif document goes a long way in looking conventional while still benefitting from especially nice typography -- this has become my default for non-scientific documents, as I don't want to spook teachers by coming across as pretentious.
2 года назад
@@GoldenBeholden Oh yeah, but they were so ridiculous with their demands that let's just say I required this header just to import all required packages (and mind you, this is for the core of the minithesis, because the front cover and back cover had their own special rules and so I used other 2 LaTeX documents for them and merged the PDFs together): \documentclass[a4paper,12pt]{article} \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} \usepackage{lmodern} \usepackage[spanish]{babel} \usepackage[super,comma,sort&compress]{natbib} \usepackage{url} \usepackage{textcomp} \usepackage[version=4]{mhchem} \usepackage{tabu} \usepackage{pdfpages} \usepackage{booktabs} \usepackage{pbox} \usepackage{microtype} \usepackage{parskip} \usepackage{natbib} \usepackage[hidelinks]{hyperref} \usepackage{graphicx} \usepackage{filecontents} \usepackage{mathptmx} \usepackage[left=3cm,top=2.5cm,right=3cm,bottom=2.5cm,bindingoffset=0.5cm]{geometry} \usepackage{longtable} \usepackage{listings} \usepackage[pagestyles,extramarks]{titlesec} \usepackage{enumitem} \usepackage{fancybox} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{color} \usepackage{tabu} \usepackage{framed} \usepackage{afterpage}
Odd, you didn't put in your chief reasons why I would use LaTeX. The thing with WYSIWYM and LaTeX is kinda like installing Linux. It's unfamiliar at first, and it invites you to do a lot of initial effort, and it can get confusing when you're particular about getting something done, and it's not worth all that effort for just one document, but once you get over that hump, you now have a format template you can use to produce a ton of documents from. Reproducible format that in an economy of scale sense, beats the pants off WYSIWYG editing on MS/LibreOffice or G!Docs. Once you have it the way you want, from then on all you do is the plain text typing, until you need to extend functionality again. And in general, it's harder to break the formatting of a good LaTeX template than the tiniest thing that can infamously ruin a Word template. (Bad hbox on misbehaving format text aside... which still isn't as bad as an entire page moving.) What I like most about LaTeX' WYSIWYM approach is exactly that you have much finer grained control over your formatting, and theoretical perfect reproducibility no matter the content that uses that formatting. And the more you use it, the better it gets.
Another thing that I missed is the simple act of compiling gives so much more security. If my LaTeX file compiles without warnings, I know it's structured exactly how I want it to. If it throws a BibTeX error partway through, I know my reference list got messed up somewhere. Word's in-text referencing (sources or figures) has gotten a lot better, but it will still sometimes magically lose a source and then the final product will just read [???]. In LaTeX this will never happen without an error (or a warning) alerting you to this.
I learnt LaTeX during 2020. And for almost past two years I use it for everything. Even writing a letter, for presentation, Dissertation and so on... You will get addicted to it.
What you don't mention is that Knuth worked with Hermann Zapf to design Computer Modern. Zapf was one of the giants of 20th century type design. His designs include Palatino, Aldus, Zapf Chancery, Melior, Optima, Zapf Dingbats to name a few. And of course the incomparable Zapfino.
It is helpful to also learn PlainTeX and its basic concepts like glue, badness, boxes, output routines, etc., because then you can tweak little things. (Like, for example, if you do ightskip=0pt plus 2em your text will be ragged, but only slightly so it won't be distracting. Try that in Microsoft Word!) If you learn PlainTeX, you'll be able to make your own mini-LaTeX macro package with which you'll be able to write documents. It's actually really interesting to learn.
Wrote my humanities dissertation in some version of $\TeX$ back in the 90s, and I've used some variation for anything that might be heading toward being printed every since. Guessing that YT comments will not render the above snippet?
I may have missed it, but I didn't see any comments that brought up the fact that since you use a plain text document for the content it is now possible to programmatically generate documents. Also, if for no other reason than that I finally found out how to pronounce LaTeX this was a terrific video. :-)
It's amazing to me how many people use and even love LaTeX but don't know anything about its history and development. It is a fascinating rabbit hole to go down. I first learned of LaTeX in the early 2000s at university. I learned it and started submitting math and geophysics assignments using it. If I'd been in the physics department it would have been a requirement. I'm disappointed that the math department did not require it. Sadly, the geoscience department had already moved to using Word for thesis preparation. Ugh.
I used it quite a bit in the 80's. I used SAS to program LaTex for form letters and summaries. It was a pretty slick system at the time for what I was using it for.
Excellent video. After using LaTeX for many years, I never thought about investigating its history (shame on me), but turns out it is extremely interesting! I'm curious about the mathematics of font design behind metafont and Computer Modern in particular.
Chemical and biochemical structures and reactions and mechanisms are things that are real tough to do in word or libreoffice. They are much more complex and messy compared to simple text or an occasional equation.
I started out with LaTeX around 1990 (back then on an Amiga 2000) when I commenced studying math, and handed in most of my homework in print. A fellow student happened to be one of the big dogs of DANTE, the German TeX user association, so I had a great expert to exchange experience with. After my master’s thesis in 1996 I’ve only used it sparingly though.
When I was writing a book once I asked the publisher if LaTeX would be ok and they told me yes, and in fact they would anyway convert everything to LaTeX first as part of their workflow; so if they get a, say, MS Word document, that would first converted before they further process it. Proper layout, footnotes, pagination, index etc. just is spot on and works well -- needed for a publisher.
In my last year of university we had to use LaTeX to format our papers and I HATED IT. Seriously, getting it to put things where you need them and not do weird, random page breaks and unusual spacing, or graphics in the wrong place was an absolute nightmare. And that's not even getting to the wait time getting it to compile. I always had to go through a dance of build+clean+build+build+clean+build+build before it would produce an accurate pdf. Thank god I don't deal with that any more.
I live it, all of my research and papers are written using LaTex. Some of my draft papers are hundreds of pages long of mathematics (my wife says that they are impossible to read, she hates math!) and just works of art, the beauty of the math is stunning, and even the LaTex drawing capability is just amazing. I have tried to duplicate such works in Word. One should not have to work that hard to only approximate what LaText does with simplicity.
I first got used to WYSIWYM with Markdown and from there, it was only a small step to LaTeX. I still write most of my college notes, and presentations with Markdown, but for any essay or currently my bachelor thesis, LaTeX is the way to go
Nice presentation. I had to use plain TeX for typesetting (around 1982-1984) my almost 300 page PhD Thesis, with my own custom macros as LaTeX only supported 10-point fonts at our installation. Basically had my own VT100 terminal hooked up to a DEC-10 (36-bit PDP-10) using TECO (as my favourite editor) and sent dvi files via some command (or PostScript directly) to get typeset output from the PostScript printer at the Royal Military College Computer Centre - some graphics were done using custom plain-TeX (migrated to TeX82 from TeX78) macros and some were inserted scans from a Zeta Plotter ... lots of history ... I was so much more productive on a VT100 than the rather distracting GUI oriented OSes ... heading back to optimising my own environment now I have a bit more time for myself. (from memory).
Thank you for the video and the interesting history. I like LaTeX for its robustness in combining large files into one, and I do not like to use Windows. But I disagree with the equations writing experience. For me it is more like: - Word: As if I use my pen, without lifting my fingers off the keyboard, what I want to write appears instantly, including matrices, divisions, Greek letters, integral signs... I do not need to compare what I want to what I intent in the code. - LaTeX: I have to think a lot about how to organise curly brackets and use correct environments and calls for different equations etc, often requiring me to actually write the formula on a paper first and go about trying to put elements into pages-long LaTeX code, scrolling up and down, diagnosing more than reviewing I do in Word. One last comment: Default LaTeX-generated documents are beautiful out-of-the-box, but it is not a result of coding it as a plain text, it is rather a default style choise (fonts, spacing etc) LaTeX makes over Word or LibreOffice.
I'm an experienced LaTeX user, but use both Word and Markdown (both with equations) when appropriate. It's so strange to think back to when I was first introduced to LaTeX near the end of high school; my brain just could not grasp the concept of non-WYSIWYG text editors. Funny how times change, because nowadays, people come to me for LaTeX recommendations.
It seems to me that WordPerfect (at least back in the late '80s when I used it as my primary word processor on the family Amiga) was a bridge program between WYSIWYM like LaTeX and WYSIWYG like current "modern" word processors (like Word, Google Docs, Star Office and all it's branches). It was mainly WYSIWIG, but there was a show codes window that you could pull up to see the formatting commands. Man, I miss the show codes window on "modern" word processors.
My main reason to use LaTeX is "if it's in LaTeX so must be true". And the combo neovim + texlab + luasnip makes me write papers at lightspeed (in comparison to MS Word and others)
I really really honestly cannot understant all thtose people who claim that they feel so good for using latex in their text typing. Especially those who still insist on the fact that it makes them focus on their "work" rather than "formatting"... First of all I have to admit of course that, without a single doubt, latex (or tex) produces, excellent looking, professional, beautifully formatted outputs, 100% committed to its very purpose of existence in the first place... Point clear, file closed. Now, however, what's the justification for the claim that it makes you focus on your "ideas" ? Considering the fact that anything written in latex looks more like *MACHINE CODE* (both in terms of page formatting and in terms of mathematical equations), than anything else, how can we claim that *writing & reading* machine code would ever improve a programmer's productivity? In fact, didn't we have all invented a number of *high level* and visual (WYSWYG) languages, in which a programmer doesn't have to deal with low-level stuff in favor of focusing on his ideas, and to just releive the pain and inefficiency that would happen from using low level machine code to produce the same program ? Therefore, if latex is a text production language, then it's at the machine code level, and using such a tool could hardly improve your mental productivity. I would only suggest using latex at the very end stage of a production though... [NOTE: using a mouse to click there and there for every equation element is of course not any more efficient though...]
I have never used Latex. As a professional typesetter i use Adobe Indesign. Back in the 1990s i have seen guys working on Agfa Compugrafix and Linotype systems. The bromide outputs those machine gave us were incomparably perfect. I don't think even Latex can beat it. Miss those Agfa beauties.
I published a 274-page PhD dissertation in MS Word 2000 + Mathtype 6.0 in 2000 in differential algebra and 8 peer reviewed math papers across 4 different journals in MS Word 2000 and Mathtype. I love MS Word because it frees me up to do mathematics. I literally do algebra and math within MS Word by cutting and pasting formula. I love that I just point and click and drag. There is none of this INSANITY of memorizing massive amounts of obscure code and then running it through some processor in the hopes of producing some document you can read. You literally see exactly what you will get. The ONLY negative you CAN say about it is that it's not open-source and is not saved as a small .txt file. Now, in WHICH UNIVERSE is it YOU are living in where you are NOT freed up from worrying about formatting to work on math instead if you use MS Word?
If you spend a little time working with LaTeX it will be better in everything. It's faster and the result looks better. Might take a week or so but the result is worth it.
TeX and LaTeX didn't exactly revolutionize mathematical typesetting, they just recaptured what was once possible with movable type, in computer-generated type. There were contemporary systems like troff (Bell Labs) which were a little less flexible and with much more unintuitive macros that could also be used, and which worked correctly in fewer situations. I have written papers with troff, latex, ms-word 3.0 - 8.0, and Xerox STAR 8010 editor, MacWrite, and google docs. There are 2 levels of editors : Basic and advanced. Basic editors are MacWrite, Star 8010, Google Docs. They can render characters side by side across the page, with subscript, superscript, font changes, styles, etc. Then there are advanced editors like troff and latex that can render and edit things like integrals, summations, huge quotients, diagrams (graph theory), and much-more nonlinear typesetting with some symbols (sum, integral, parenthesis, quotient) taking on an almost unlimited number of sizes.
Also there were other text processing things around such as TROFF and so on, but maths needed a second pass with a greek character set. Latex resolved this.
My Ph.D. thesis was typed on a DEC-10 terminal and processed on troff and output on an IBM selectric and digrams and greek letters were inserted by hand or cut-and-paste. I know the value of cut-and-paste.
Great video! I didn't know about METAFONT. That's pretty cool! I find myself writing in Markdown, translating to LaTeX with Pandoc, or just Markdown to Pandoc to PDF using LaTeX as the engine. I need to redo my Resume in LaTeX so that it's easier to understand. Another tool that I find nifty, but also equally confusing for noobs is Groff/Troff/Nroff/Roff.
Hello from New York City! Can LaTeX be is used to create documents from Templates that have slight variations like resume and cover letters? Thank you for your informative video.
3:10 Some people pronounce LaTeX as la-teh (with "h" at the end, not "k"). Because that sound at the end of Bach and Loch is also similar to "h" (in German and Scottish respectively).
The few of us who use Latex outside academia pronounce it like the liquid rubber is made from. ;) I love it not so much for the results but for the fact I can do nice typesetting in an ordinary text editor and my documents remain portable and easy to store in version control.
I started using LaTeX as the first thing when entering Uni. Even just a month into it when we were at a status seminar with the other groups I was already repulsed by their formatting in word.
3:09 I want to mention that Loch Ness Monster and Johann Bach are german names and therefore should be pronounced differently if you want to have the right german pronunciation. So if you speak them with the right german pronunciation it's ch (like a cat getting angry [I don't know any other analogy 😅]), rather than k. Otherwise, great video 👍🏼
@@jackjenny8111 Yes, I think xX12... was mistaken there. But Bach is a german name (and word, meaning creek or small stream) and not pronounced like "bak" or "tex". The english Wikipedia-article about him has a little icon near his name in the title that you can click to get a sense for how it sounds. It's not a sound you find in english, so I can't give you a word you might be familiar with and say: "like that".
@@LandoLi sorry, yeah. I was thinking "Johann Bach" -> german, "Loch Ness Monster" -> Monster, is german and it is next to a german Name (Bach) -> also german. I just missed that Monster is the same in german as it is in english😂.
I hear the arguement that it allows you to focus on content more and I don't know if I completely agree. I think it depends on what you need at that moment. Sadly in exerpinces where you are trying to transfer information and recreate it in the form of LaTEX, I am gonna have to say that if anything you end up having to focus much more on having fifty tabs open to remember how to do a certain organization thing in LatEX while with more advanced papers where you are more starting fresh it may legitimately allow you to focus on content more. I also am mixed that I feel it does indirectly encourage a bit of elitism around what papers are accepted and ironically one that is more usable by those who are scammers and thus know latex while blocking out those who may have a more novel idea but don't know anything about latex or similar codes. There can also be difficulties with say when there is an expectation for a change of format such as when you need rows to be inlined directly in the middle because that is how the papers themselves are supposed to be arranged. Not impossible but latex own features work against it. Also I admit a lot of the palete looks washed out to me which is something I always didn't like about papers lol but I know you can change that but still
I'm an IT guy in his 50s and only recently started using LaTeX as I had to write a lot of mathematics. I quickly gave up trying to use WYSIWIG equation editors, they are so difficult to use.
Very nice video! What I would have included is a comparison of the art of typesetting between Word and LaTeX. I have the feeling being able to read LaTeX twice as fast. And Word typesetting is so ugly, no fine adjustments of the spacings within a word or on a line or within a paragraph. Another nice add on is BibTeX. You create one database and all your citations are so easy. You can define styles for each journal to fulfil its requirements and just by exchanging one word in the documentstyle brackets you can switch between different journals.
Great Video!! So can you use this with print on demand publishers like Kindle Direct Publishing, Lulu and Ingram Sparks, for instance if one wanted to self publish a math workbook, cookbook or novel? (using Print On Demand)
@Bill Woods So never being able to use something because the learning curve is so steep is a good thing? So choosing user unfriendly tools over user friendly tools is a good thing? So tools are supposed to be unfriendly and useless rather than easy to use and useful?
It is also easy to give full proofs in tex, since term rewriting can be done with copy and paste. So after a while I even started to do my math in tex because copy and paste of complex formulas and adding the change in one step is much faster in tex then in hand writing. So, if a lot of math is to be done and definition shortcuts introduced tex becomes an quite efficient tool. It is the fastest tool to do complex and/or lengthy math with I am aware of. However, it is not universally accepted in academia. For not math related fields it does not offer a working speed advantage. For math related fields the rejection of tex is usually a way to avoid the hard stuff. There the rejection of tex is an indicator of theoretical incompetence. If you have a professor bad-mouthing tex he is likely not a good theorist, and tries others to stay away from better work then his - which likely is written in tex. If you math is on the level, that the Microsoft Word math capabilities do not inhibit you, you have not come very far with respect to mathematical maturity.
Loch Ness Monster isn't ether. That are german names, so if you speak them with the right german pronunciation it's ch (like a cat getting angry [I don't know any other analogy 😅]), rather than k.
@@danilotsarThe X in LaTeX is actually meant to be the greek letter chi (with a hard k sound). So the correct pronunciation would be either Leitekh, or Latekh (it’s generally fine whichever one you use)
Great video, thanks! Can you share some Latex presentation formats that can be used in academia such as a project presentation or a Ms/PhD thesis defense? If there is a repository of such examples that would be very helpful.
Started using Overleaf last year 2022 because I find it easier to make multiple choice Mathematics exams in LATEX. Tried doing exams in Word and it automatically adjusts the indentions, which i find annoying.
Overwhelmingly the Graphic Arts sector use WYSIWYG and except for reasons of computer/software history and development a leading program is Adobe InDesign, InCopy can be use if one wishes to separate the writing from the design. Extensions are available for mathematical and scientific equations and formulas. It is of course software that must be "rented". With the final output generally required by printers as a PDF which they can run through professional PDF check software before committing to press. Having produced a number of academic books, InDesign is the go to publishing software.
In college, all my professors asked for the assignments to be in LATEX and I absolutely loved it because of the precision you get as the author. Being able to write freely and not have to deal with all the formatting quirks with word is a blessing. Now I mostly use Markdown, especially as the documents i create nowadays are wayyy less formal. Its super cool to learn the history of it! I always wondered where it came from.
Word formatting gets a bad wrap because it is easy to use incorrectly. I cringe whenever I see someone using spaces and carriage returns to "center" text and force the formatting in the worst possible way. While I absolutely adore the way LaTeX produces documents, modern Word documents with appropriate use of Styles, Section breaks, Page breaks, and Tab stops can replicate the sort of precision you seek for general purpose documents. Where LaTeX still has an advantage is its presentation of mathematical notation and the quality appearance of Computer Modern.
@@R.B. There is still one aspect of Word that makes me hate it and can be done much easier in LaTeX: Numbering, ordered and unordered lists nesting. Because sometimes it is just difficult to explain to Word what I want to achieve.
@@adameichler I'd argue that's still a problem with most people not understanding how best to use it, but since I don't know your specific example I can't really say. Besides being able to specify the way an outline handles numbering at different levels, you also can specify that a specific line starts with a specific number. I've never tried to use it to count down, so that might be a problem, but for typical numbering sequences you have a great deal of control when you know where to look.
@@R.B. i agree with you for the most part. but the white space management part in latex is just unbeatable. in my personal opinion.
@@R.B. there’s no defending the absolute stupidity of word
I'm currently getting my masters degree in engineering, we were introduced too Latex during the first year, it wasnt mandatory at the time but HIGHLY encouraged since it would make it easier in later years. Oh my god I love it so much now. My fiance wrote her entire bachelors thesis in Google docs, and then moved it too Words (she's not in any form of STEM field). She had to spend so much time with checking every citation, Every inline etc etc to make sure they followed whatever system they were supposed to use. Meanwhile all we had to do was to specify our rules in the beginning of the document and then just write on. So nice
I’m totally devoted to LaTeX but I must admit there was a steep learning curve, especially when it came to diagnosing errors.
oh yeah the Overfull of doom
Properly, a "steep learning curve" is a _good_ thing. A small investment in training/experience (horizontal axis) gets you a big improvement in productivity/unit-cost (vertical axis).
@@wwoods66 you don't know which axis represents which thing for him...
@@RB-mm7ce Normally, the x-axis represents the independent variable: f(x) = y.
yeah, but this builds character and debugging skills
Eitan: this was excellent. Love the care and precision you put into constructing the video. I will be posting the link for my students to use this as their introduction to LaTeX. Beautiful work!
Thank you! I hope they find it useful :)
People who write their grocery lists in LaTeX are truly a different breed
thanks for the idea
Even Knuth wouldn't do it !
This was very well done! IIRC, TeX and LaTeX predate PDFs, so the system originally came with its own "electronic paper" in the form of device-independent output files (.DVI) files. In those days, we used DVI viewers (e.g., dvipage, divout) to proof read our formatted documents and various programs to convert .DVI files to different printer languages (e.g., dvi2ps, dvi2lj).
True. One benefit of LaTeX is that if you have a group project you can easily include the texts of different authors. This at least of the word processors of the past was not easy-.
I used TEX at a company in 1989, where we made user manuals for software we had developed. Initially, all work was done on VT100 terminals, on a micro-VAX, and output direct to a Postscript laser printer. The boss had developed a strict set of macros, that standardised font, paragraph formats, etc. Once learned, all our documents read exactly the same, and errors were immediately obvious. Later, we got a few sun workstations, which gave us a graphical preview, and sped up the process. Very powerful. Word is powerful too, but only when you take the time to correctly build style-sheets, and FORCE people to use them properly. Reformatting broken word files into a style-sheet is a painful process. Also, word is notorious for version to version differences.
In 1984 the company I worked at decided to produce a large manual for our version of Prolog using TeX (LaTeX didn't even exist yet). They purchased one of the first "low-cost" laser printers which directly supported DVI. It was great fun (?) to work with ... it had its own video console which made a lot of sense as it kept crashing and had to be rebooted using that console.
The document source was input on a Vax 780 and TeX run to compile into DVI. Since the manual was several hundred pages, a full run woudl take up to an hour (if memory serves).
But TeX being TeX ... it was easy to develop macros which allowed the document to be split into multiple files for each section with a small harness where one could specify which sections to compile. And that probably summarizes the beauty of TeX in a nutshell.
Something that in my experience few people know: the Equation langage of Word is essentially TeX/LaTeX math mode (with very few differences). So when I need to, I just directly write the LaTex code for equations after pressing Alt-= ... the memory is in the fingers.
The last time I saw this in widespread use was on Sun workstations in the 1990s.
Once I prepared my presentation (for a talk) in Latex and it came out ok in pdf. I copies the pdf and went directly for the presentation. And there I find that all the figures are missing! I have copies the pdf but the figures were not embedded. It was a real embarrassment.
@@kovesp1 About Word equation editor - you are referring to current version thereof (you can even change one option in Word config to be able to simply input \TeX{} or \LaTeX{} formulae there). Old Equation Editor (which dates back to 1993, when Word 6 was released) was only a pain in a..
I started learning latex at some point and fell in love: suddenly you didn't have to keep jumping between keyboard and mouse, you didn't have to click 100 things on graphical UI to get a single line of equation, and things behaved like I ordered or thought I ordered them to behave. Nothing exploded when I changed a thing in the code document. It was a pleasure to use because you could focus on creating the work instead of battling with Word. And it looks professional print instead of your personal memo notes.
Hello you Can write équation in word only with keyboard woth alt and + with synthèse similar as latex.
For images management latex is indeed easier to format. But figure imports in latex are a pain.
Don't forget LyX! The "ease" of Word combined with the beauty of LaTeX. Personally, I save a LOT of time using this program. It's just define your properties and let's go! No need to struggle with your layout, it's just typing the thing you want to say.
Agreed. I also recommend trying GNU TeXmacs, because I found it good at: 1) WYSIWYG, 2) Syntax similar to LaTeX (it doesn't use it to typeset!) and 3) Edit equations like flying ("just pressing tab"), and 4) Open source.
Also it is really extensible in its own way ie. built-in styles, bib support, etc. I only had to give up for LyX because it crashed at open due to my PC malfunctioning :/
Tried for the first time today, tried to find a dark mode & immediately switched to Texmaker. 😐
It's crazy to think that during my entire education (high school, university - mechanical engineering) no one ever told me this. I kind of stumbled across LaTeX somewhere along the way, but there was no effort on the part of the education system to introduce me to it.
Depending on your field, it's common to start using LaTeX at grad school. I knew of LaTeX but never really had to use it prior to my first paper and my Master's dissertation.
I was lucky enough to have a professor that would give bonus marks to anyone who used Latex. Never would have bothered otherwise and now I'm really glad I spent the time.
I'm in undergrad (math and physics), and though it was casually mentioned in a few physics classes, it was formally introduced to me in a math course
@@gp5121 same, I’m in undergrad and I’ve used it a good bit in math and cs courses
My own experience is the same as OP's, and I like to think that most TeX users get to learn it by imitating that one weird friend that introduces you to "this document thing where the result is not what you see when you make it". After two years, I had imitated enough of my friend's work to be fluent in TeX myself, and the imitation cycle repeated itself for students who got to work with me in group projects, in turn. Fast forward another year, I've helped a professor retypeset his whole textbook from Word to LaTeX.
I did all of my physics and chemistry lab reports in LaTeX and only one of my professors immediately asked me if that’s how I did it. He was so keen about it he wanted to see the source file too. It’s interesting how that look is so recognisable!
Indeed. TeX and LaTeX is very recognizable ... at least for us old hands.
@@kovesp1 … or to anyone who has spent 30 seconds asking academics about how best to prepare reports
In my position as a quantitative analyst, I used a pipeline consisting of Vim, R, and LaTEX. I used Vim as my text editor. I used R for data manipulation, statistical analysis, and to produce graphics. I put the report in an Rnw file and compiled it with LaTEX. Gat wonderful results.
Hello, my friend. Sorry to be bothering you but, can you share with me which type of resources you used to gain experience in using these tools? I'm also a quant and I would like to make more professional-looking reports
I made it all the way to Linear Algebra only having heard of LaTeX. After a week of painstakingly writing systems and matrices, I said to myself, there is NO way this is how this subject should be studied. I found someone using Vim and Latex to write math notes live, made an account on Overleaf and never looked back. The speed at which you can take notes is astounding. It took about a day just to figure out how to make a document and produce some equations, another day to learn formatting, and by the third day, I had 19 pages of notes. Amazing software.
LaTeX also has a bunch of neat built-in environments you can use.
Article (the default one) is fairly simply laid out
Book gives you chapters and shapes the margins so they make sense in a book
Beamer gives you Power-Point-esque slines
(and many more)
All of these are additionally packed to the brim with presets and options to make them virtually fully customiseable
The other huge advantage LaTeX has over any other program is that, because you deal with a plain-text file, you have no issue with very large documents with loads of references or figures. I've seen Word crash or bug countless times even with small documents. You never experience that with LaTeX. Plus, dealing with bibliography, cross reference, citation style is just ridiculously easy.
I had to learn LaTeX for a paper in one of my classes in college, and while at first I had the reaction of “Why can’t we just use Word?”, as I continued learning how to use it, I began to appreciate the ability to just write, and then check formatting later when my content was done.
Switching from Word to LaTeX was a really good decision, as the time I spent on headaches caused by cites/references disappeared.
This is hands down one of the best video presentations I have ever seen in my entire life. You should do more of this.
I once participated in a math course the notes for which were transcribed by hand during lecture and asked why wasn't the transcription done with LaTeX. Got a really snippy answer of "If it's so easy, why don't you do it yourself?". Admittedly I sometimes had to take pictures of the last thing on the chalkboard and transcribe it after lecture, but not every lecture.
Life vibrates through the work and existence of the many amazing people birthed on this earth, the creator of this video and the overall pupils of knowledge are a primary exhibit.
Since I've learned about LaTeX in my first year of University, I've used it for every report and assigment there. Other students just passed the mandatory class and never touched it again. For me - I simply can't use Word or Google docs anymore. I really love the look and the fact that there is a latex package for everything I would need.
I was able to compile my 2003 diploma thesis (Latex) in 2020 from scratch without any adaptions. Content focused mean you can "\emph{This is impotant}" do this and decide later if the content should appear in Bold, in color (or both), or if it should be "blinking" on a screen. You get table of content, list of figures, list of tables, bibliography, etc. the right way from the beginning. By using e.g. bibtex you can built up "your" bib-database with entries downloaded directly from the Journal. The bibliography might look different in a thesis or an article but it is derived from the same datasource (and of course can be adapted to your needs). If you write a thesis get a latex file from somebody who recently graduated. You can use the "body" and delete the content - so all requirements from your University are met. Printing out a latex generated ps or pdf will look exactly the way you see it on the screen. With Word i had problems, that during the printing process the programm rearranged pagebreaks messing up all references. References e.g. to equations are very easy to implement and also longer equations or tables are easy to built. For drawings and plots i used xfig and gnuplot with latex-output, thus the text inside the graphs and pictures had the same font (and size * scaling factor) as the text - try this with word! A latex file (since it is plain text) can be checked into a cvs or subversion system (also a bibtex - database). Your research group can built up an common bibtex database for your field which you can use. I can only recommend it.
RUclips has been tossing me some really disappointing recommendations recently. I'm glad the algorithm got at least ONE recommendation right. Love the format and presentation, and the topic is really interesting as well. Subscribed and looking forward to more content! (hopefully)
I am a retired software engineer, and I spent my career in pre-press, typography and DTP.
Knuth is widely regarded as a great typographer.
Except inside the typography industry. 🙂
In my first programming job I built a program to personalise a data analysis process for customers of an energy firm. It was perfect. I could hook it up to my model in R, typeset all the corporate branding and styles, and then parameterised the output to operate specifically on each customer's data. It spat out pdfs at 40 seconds a customer from database access to file written to disk.
It was a really successful project, and would have been tragic without LaTeX
That sounds so great. Any recommended links on how to get started implementing something like that?(:
I think “Word” gets a bit too much unnecessary aversion from LaTeX users. I am a LaTeX/Overleaf user myself, but the possibilities in Word are vast as well. Word usually offers multiple ways to execute a certain action. One obvious but tedious way and one advanced but faster way. Most people just know the obvious way and complain about it until finally switching to LaTeX, without even properly knowing Word. For example, you can easily write equations, matrices etc. in Word without clicking through the equation editor even once (by using backslash commands as you do in LaTeX). You can also define your own keyboard shortcuts for specific commands. But at that point, you’re probably advanced enough to properly use LaTeX, which is likely superior in the long run. But it’s not like LaTeX is superior to Word in every single way. Every LaTeX user surely knows that Word has its merits, let alone that it highly depends on what field you’re working on
word is good enough for office work, and short documents... for professional publications or long texts, it is terrible (crashes and what not) and looks horrible...
@@Gunnl I do agree obviously, but that’s not really what I was trying to say. If I were to compare both, I’d be here until my next life, though. I think it’s just wrong to unjustly demonize Word for what it’s worth. Most of my LaTeX user friends love to sh*t on Word for things that they think Word cannot do (or at least only in a complicated way), just to be surprised when I tell them how you could actually do it.
But as a sidenote for your comment: I would take the occasional crashes (since it usually saves the file before the crash happened) for large files over taking a bit longer to navigate through LaTeX than Word. It’s obviously not much, but it’s still an important QOL. Besides, if you take in the effort, you can actually make Word documents look decent. Luckily, the “default” in LaTeX already looks pretty good. The pros of LaTeX just outweigh the cons for me (again, I ain’t wasting my time comparing both)
@@Gunnl Sorry, I disagree. I have done lot of work in Word and LibreOffice Writer. I have never understood how LateX is supposed to be superior. It's just more arcane so that certain "professionals" can feel good about themselves. But it virtually can't do anything that Word/Writer can't. And who can actually do their own marcos?
What LateX is better at, though, is being version controlled in Git et al.
@@Elite7555 as i explained... I am guessing you never had to work on a 600+ page word document in a team and make it look professionally written ... Ensure everyone uses the whitespace the same way, formats the images the same way, etc... I have never done such thing in Latex, but i am pretty sure it would have just worked...
@@Gunnl Few weeks ago had to update a lab manual and was written in Word. Spent three hours trying to "convince" Word of the correct sectioning and it almost won. Thanks but no thanks! If you give me choice I will always chose LaTex over Word for any relatively complex document. Compared to older versions Word has degraded overtime, I never had such issues when using Word in university and I got pretty good at it because I had to write some many reports back then. When they brought in the "new look" they not only removed some features (like different fill patterns I used a lot for graphics) but also made it harder to use some features (had to click several stuff to get to the point). I only use Word now when I cannot do otherwise or if I'm writing a very simple doc. Even letters I do on LaTex, word sucks but LaTex is not for everyone.
Latex is so good. I learned latex to write screenplays. It's not as fast as markdown (at least once I made my own custom CSS) but it works surprisingly well.
I’ve been using LaTeX on sites like Piazza for writing math equations for over two years now but never really knew what TeX or LaTeX actually was (whether a language, an application, etc), or the history behind any of it. Thank you so much for this amazing video.
I hate sites like youtube think that latex formulae as spam. Please RUclips if you reading this please change this behaviour.
Bach is not pronounced "Bak" 🙂But I got the point, X in TeX is pronounced as same as "ch" in Bach 🙂
Yep, am thinking more loch (with a proper Scottish accent)
@@alanjrobertson Hehe, Scottish "ch" sounds like moving cooking pan through the gravel 😀But surely it's closer than "k" 🙂I've noticed reversed problems; people in my country badly pronounce for example "technology" with that "ch", same all other words with "ch" in English. 🙂
The thing is the sounds in loch and bach are different, although they might sound similar to people who don't have much experience with them (like English speakers). Loch is (supposed to be) pronounced /lɒx/, with the unvoiced velar fricative /x/, while Bach is /baχ/, with the unvoiced uvular fricative /χ/. With /x/ the tongue (almost) touches the velum (soft palate) - the same place as for /k/. To pronounce it, put the tongue in the position you'd use to pronounce a "k", and let out air, keeping it in the same position. On the other hand, /χ/ is pronounced with the back of the tongue (almost) touching the uvula - the little thing that hangs at the back of the mouth. It is the same place that French "r" or Arabic "q" are pronounced. According to Wikipedia, TeX is pronounced /tɛx/, using the /x/ from "loch".
Bakh
@@mimikal7548 Yes (y)
I'm happy you use Bach as an example for pronounciation even though nobody in Bach's lifetime ever pronounced his name like that.
While I've known about LaTeX for a while now, it was only in the last couple of months that I actually seriously started using it. Services like Overleaf greatly simplify some of the tasks and allow you to use templates that are reasonably straightforward to figure out and modify for your own purposes. It also allowed me to actually understand what was going on, making the very steep learning curve significantly shallower.
I also found it significantly lessened the amount of time I was wasting getting formatting correct for figures and references. I just didn't have to worry about the numbering at all, where as with Word, you've almost got to leave that for last in order to avoid having to do it over and over again, at which point it just gets tedious.
Giving LaTeX more reach is always a good thing, though creating a grocery list with it is a bit OCD...
I used LaTeX for my minithesis and because of the country and the rules of the school, I had to include a ton of packages just to make it look less professional by making it look like somebody had used *specifically* Microsoft Word. No other text editor, but Microsoft's. I loved it just because of how flexible it proved to be
On that front, a single-column sans-serif document goes a long way in looking conventional while still benefitting from especially nice typography -- this has become my default for non-scientific documents, as I don't want to spook teachers by coming across as pretentious.
@@GoldenBeholden Oh yeah, but they were so ridiculous with their demands that let's just say I required this header just to import all required packages (and mind you, this is for the core of the minithesis, because the front cover and back cover had their own special rules and so I used other 2 LaTeX documents for them and merged the PDFs together):
\documentclass[a4paper,12pt]{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{lmodern}
\usepackage[spanish]{babel}
\usepackage[super,comma,sort&compress]{natbib}
\usepackage{url}
\usepackage{textcomp}
\usepackage[version=4]{mhchem}
\usepackage{tabu}
\usepackage{pdfpages}
\usepackage{booktabs}
\usepackage{pbox}
\usepackage{microtype}
\usepackage{parskip}
\usepackage{natbib}
\usepackage[hidelinks]{hyperref}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{filecontents}
\usepackage{mathptmx}
\usepackage[left=3cm,top=2.5cm,right=3cm,bottom=2.5cm,bindingoffset=0.5cm]{geometry}
\usepackage{longtable}
\usepackage{listings}
\usepackage[pagestyles,extramarks]{titlesec}
\usepackage{enumitem}
\usepackage{fancybox}
\usepackage{amsmath}
\usepackage{color}
\usepackage{tabu}
\usepackage{framed}
\usepackage{afterpage}
Odd, you didn't put in your chief reasons why I would use LaTeX.
The thing with WYSIWYM and LaTeX is kinda like installing Linux. It's unfamiliar at first, and it invites you to do a lot of initial effort, and it can get confusing when you're particular about getting something done, and it's not worth all that effort for just one document,
but once you get over that hump, you now have a format template you can use to produce a ton of documents from. Reproducible format that in an economy of scale sense, beats the pants off WYSIWYG editing on MS/LibreOffice or G!Docs. Once you have it the way you want, from then on all you do is the plain text typing, until you need to extend functionality again. And in general, it's harder to break the formatting of a good LaTeX template than the tiniest thing that can infamously ruin a Word template. (Bad hbox on misbehaving format text aside... which still isn't as bad as an entire page moving.)
What I like most about LaTeX' WYSIWYM approach is exactly that you have much finer grained control over your formatting, and theoretical perfect reproducibility no matter the content that uses that formatting. And the more you use it, the better it gets.
Another thing that I missed is the simple act of compiling gives so much more security. If my LaTeX file compiles without warnings, I know it's structured exactly how I want it to. If it throws a BibTeX error partway through, I know my reference list got messed up somewhere.
Word's in-text referencing (sources or figures) has gotten a lot better, but it will still sometimes magically lose a source and then the final product will just read [???]. In LaTeX this will never happen without an error (or a warning) alerting you to this.
I learnt LaTeX during 2020. And for almost past two years I use it for everything. Even writing a letter, for presentation, Dissertation and so on... You will get addicted to it.
This presentation was complete in every sense. Thank you for the video!
Error handling and reporting is a weak feature and that needs attention.
What you don't mention is that Knuth worked with Hermann Zapf to design Computer Modern. Zapf was one of the giants of 20th century type design. His designs include Palatino, Aldus, Zapf Chancery, Melior, Optima, Zapf Dingbats to name a few. And of course the incomparable Zapfino.
It is helpful to also learn PlainTeX and its basic concepts like glue, badness, boxes, output routines, etc., because then you can tweak little things. (Like, for example, if you do
ightskip=0pt plus 2em your text will be ragged, but only slightly so it won't be distracting. Try that in Microsoft Word!) If you learn PlainTeX, you'll be able to make your own mini-LaTeX macro package with which you'll be able to write documents. It's actually really interesting to learn.
Wrote my humanities dissertation in some version of $\TeX$ back in the 90s, and I've used some variation for anything that might be heading toward being printed every since.
Guessing that YT comments will not render the above snippet?
I may have missed it, but I didn't see any comments that brought up the fact that since you use a plain text document for the content it is now possible to programmatically generate documents.
Also, if for no other reason than that I finally found out how to pronounce LaTeX this was a terrific video. :-)
It's amazing to me how many people use and even love LaTeX but don't know anything about its history and development. It is a fascinating rabbit hole to go down. I first learned of LaTeX in the early 2000s at university. I learned it and started submitting math and geophysics assignments using it. If I'd been in the physics department it would have been a requirement. I'm disappointed that the math department did not require it. Sadly, the geoscience department had already moved to using Word for thesis preparation. Ugh.
I used it quite a bit in the 80's. I used SAS to program LaTex for form letters and summaries. It was a pretty slick system at the time for what I was using it for.
Excellent video. After using LaTeX for many years, I never thought about investigating its history (shame on me), but turns out it is extremely interesting! I'm curious about the mathematics of font design behind metafont and Computer Modern in particular.
Chemical and biochemical structures and reactions and mechanisms are things that are real tough to do in word or libreoffice. They are much more complex and messy compared to simple text or an occasional equation.
I started out with LaTeX around 1990 (back then on an Amiga 2000) when I commenced studying math, and handed in most of my homework in print.
A fellow student happened to be one of the big dogs of DANTE, the German TeX user association, so I had a great expert to exchange experience with.
After my master’s thesis in 1996 I’ve only used it sparingly though.
When I was writing a book once I asked the publisher if LaTeX would be ok and they told me yes, and in fact they would anyway convert everything to LaTeX first as part of their workflow; so if they get a, say, MS Word document, that would first converted before they further process it.
Proper layout, footnotes, pagination, index etc. just is spot on and works well -- needed for a publisher.
The algorithm has chosen you. Good luck.
I’ve heard of latex and knew about how it is used but this small introduction thought me the basics I wondered about
In my last year of university we had to use LaTeX to format our papers and I HATED IT. Seriously, getting it to put things where you need them and not do weird, random page breaks and unusual spacing, or graphics in the wrong place was an absolute nightmare. And that's not even getting to the wait time getting it to compile. I always had to go through a dance of build+clean+build+build+clean+build+build before it would produce an accurate pdf.
Thank god I don't deal with that any more.
I live it, all of my research and papers are written using LaTex. Some of my draft papers are hundreds of pages long of mathematics (my wife says that they are impossible to read, she hates math!) and just works of art, the beauty of the math is stunning, and even the LaTex drawing capability is just amazing. I have tried to duplicate such works in Word. One should not have to work that hard to only approximate what LaText does with simplicity.
I first got used to WYSIWYM with Markdown and from there, it was only a small step to LaTeX. I still write most of my college notes, and presentations with Markdown, but for any essay or currently my bachelor thesis, LaTeX is the way to go
Nice presentation. I had to use plain TeX for typesetting (around 1982-1984) my almost 300 page PhD Thesis, with my own custom macros as LaTeX only supported 10-point fonts at our installation. Basically had my own VT100 terminal hooked up to a DEC-10 (36-bit PDP-10) using TECO (as my favourite editor) and sent dvi files via some command (or PostScript directly) to get typeset output from the PostScript printer at the Royal Military College Computer Centre - some graphics were done using custom plain-TeX (migrated to TeX82 from TeX78) macros and some were inserted scans from a Zeta Plotter ... lots of history ... I was so much more productive on a VT100 than the rather distracting GUI oriented OSes ... heading back to optimising my own environment now I have a bit more time for myself. (from memory).
Thank you for the video and the interesting history. I like LaTeX for its robustness in combining large files into one, and I do not like to use Windows. But I disagree with the equations writing experience. For me it is more like:
- Word: As if I use my pen, without lifting my fingers off the keyboard, what I want to write appears instantly, including matrices, divisions, Greek letters, integral signs... I do not need to compare what I want to what I intent in the code.
- LaTeX: I have to think a lot about how to organise curly brackets and use correct environments and calls for different equations etc, often requiring me to actually write the formula on a paper first and go about trying to put elements into pages-long LaTeX code, scrolling up and down, diagnosing more than reviewing I do in Word.
One last comment: Default LaTeX-generated documents are beautiful out-of-the-box, but it is not a result of coding it as a plain text, it is rather a default style choise (fonts, spacing etc) LaTeX makes over Word or LibreOffice.
I'm an experienced LaTeX user, but use both Word and Markdown (both with equations) when appropriate. It's so strange to think back to when I was first introduced to LaTeX near the end of high school; my brain just could not grasp the concept of non-WYSIWYG text editors. Funny how times change, because nowadays, people come to me for LaTeX recommendations.
It seems to me that WordPerfect (at least back in the late '80s when I used it as my primary word processor on the family Amiga) was a bridge program between WYSIWYM like LaTeX and WYSIWYG like current "modern" word processors (like Word, Google Docs, Star Office and all it's branches). It was mainly WYSIWIG, but there was a show codes window that you could pull up to see the formatting commands. Man, I miss the show codes window on "modern" word processors.
I like the pronouncing part, which is basically "to spell TEX correct, spell Bach incorrect" :D
My main reason to use LaTeX is "if it's in LaTeX so must be true". And the combo neovim + texlab + luasnip makes me write papers at lightspeed (in comparison to MS Word and others)
Nice, nice video about something I've loved for a long time. Thank you!
"the set of macros Lamport defined finally made easy to produce high quality publications" For a VERY broad definition of easy...
I really really honestly cannot understant all thtose people who claim that they feel so good for using latex in their text typing. Especially those who still insist on the fact that it makes them focus on their "work" rather than "formatting"... First of all I have to admit of course that, without a single doubt, latex (or tex) produces, excellent looking, professional, beautifully formatted outputs, 100% committed to its very purpose of existence in the first place... Point clear, file closed.
Now, however, what's the justification for the claim that it makes you focus on your "ideas" ? Considering the fact that anything written in latex looks more like *MACHINE CODE* (both in terms of page formatting and in terms of mathematical equations), than anything else, how can we claim that *writing & reading* machine code would ever improve a programmer's productivity? In fact, didn't we have all invented a number of *high level* and visual (WYSWYG) languages, in which a programmer doesn't have to deal with low-level stuff in favor of focusing on his ideas, and to just releive the pain and inefficiency that would happen from using low level machine code to produce the same program ?
Therefore, if latex is a text production language, then it's at the machine code level, and using such a tool could hardly improve your mental productivity. I would only suggest using latex at the very end stage of a production though... [NOTE: using a mouse to click there and there for every equation element is of course not any more efficient though...]
I have never used Latex. As a professional typesetter i use Adobe Indesign. Back in the 1990s i have seen guys working on Agfa Compugrafix and Linotype systems. The bromide outputs those machine gave us were incomparably perfect. I don't think even Latex can beat it. Miss those Agfa beauties.
I published a 274-page PhD dissertation in MS Word 2000 + Mathtype 6.0 in 2000 in differential algebra
and 8 peer reviewed math papers across 4 different journals in MS Word 2000 and Mathtype.
I love MS Word because it frees me up to do mathematics. I literally do algebra and math within MS Word by cutting and pasting formula. I love that I just point and click and drag. There is none of this INSANITY of memorizing massive amounts of obscure code and then running it through some processor in the hopes of producing some document you can read.
You literally see exactly what you will get.
The ONLY negative you CAN say about it is that it's not open-source and is not saved as a small .txt file.
Now, in WHICH UNIVERSE is it YOU are living in where you are NOT freed up from worrying about formatting to work on math instead if you use MS Word?
If you spend a little time working with LaTeX it will be better in everything. It's faster and the result looks better. Might take a week or so but the result is worth it.
TeX and LaTeX didn't exactly revolutionize mathematical typesetting, they just recaptured what was once possible with movable type, in computer-generated type. There were contemporary systems like troff (Bell Labs) which were a little less flexible and with much more unintuitive macros that could also be used, and which worked correctly in fewer situations. I have written papers with troff, latex, ms-word 3.0 - 8.0, and Xerox STAR 8010 editor, MacWrite, and google docs.
There are 2 levels of editors : Basic and advanced. Basic editors are MacWrite, Star 8010, Google Docs. They can render characters side by side across the page, with subscript, superscript, font changes, styles, etc. Then there are advanced editors like troff and latex that can render and edit things like integrals, summations, huge quotients, diagrams (graph theory), and much-more nonlinear typesetting with some symbols (sum, integral, parenthesis, quotient) taking on an almost unlimited number of sizes.
Also there were other text processing things around such as TROFF and so on, but maths needed a second pass with a greek character set. Latex resolved this.
My Ph.D. thesis was typed on a DEC-10 terminal and processed on troff and output on an IBM selectric and digrams and greek letters were inserted by hand or cut-and-paste. I know the value of cut-and-paste.
Great video! I new to latex, now I understand a lot more why to use it. Thank you, greets from Chile
Great video! I didn't know about METAFONT. That's pretty cool! I find myself writing in Markdown, translating to LaTeX with Pandoc, or just Markdown to Pandoc to PDF using LaTeX as the engine. I need to redo my Resume in LaTeX so that it's easier to understand.
Another tool that I find nifty, but also equally confusing for noobs is Groff/Troff/Nroff/Roff.
Hello from New York City! Can LaTeX be is used to create documents from Templates that have slight variations like resume and cover letters? Thank you for your informative video.
Yes, it has been done. 😷
We'll this sure popped off. Well done Eitan.
3:10 Some people pronounce LaTeX as la-teh (with "h" at the end, not "k"). Because that sound at the end of Bach and Loch is also similar to "h" (in German and Scottish respectively).
The few of us who use Latex outside academia pronounce it like the liquid rubber is made from. ;) I love it not so much for the results but for the fact I can do nice typesetting in an ordinary text editor and my documents remain portable and easy to store in version control.
I just loved this presentation!
Underrated video omg, thanks youtube for recommending me this vid, i love it
I started using LaTeX as the first thing when entering Uni. Even just a month into it when we were at a status seminar with the other groups I was already repulsed by their formatting in word.
Thanks for this. You've settled the pronunciation debate!
ive been prnouncing it as latex HAHAH
Lay tech
K-nuth
@@dafphtthedislikeupdater7836 Ditto!
I clicked expecting this to be on a different kind of latex, but I'm not at all disappointed
3:09 I want to mention that Loch Ness Monster and Johann Bach are german names and therefore should be pronounced differently if you want to have the right german pronunciation.
So if you speak them with the right german pronunciation it's ch (like a cat getting angry [I don't know any other analogy 😅]), rather than k.
Otherwise, great video 👍🏼
isnt “loch” a Scottish/Gaelic word?
@@jackjenny8111 Yes, I think xX12... was mistaken there. But Bach is a german name (and word, meaning creek or small stream) and not pronounced like "bak" or "tex". The english Wikipedia-article about him has a little icon near his name in the title that you can click to get a sense for how it sounds. It's not a sound you find in english, so I can't give you a word you might be familiar with and say: "like that".
@@LandoLi sorry, yeah. I was thinking "Johann Bach" -> german, "Loch Ness Monster" -> Monster, is german and it is next to a german Name (Bach) -> also german. I just missed that Monster is the same in german as it is in english😂.
Superb video. Thanks for creating and sharing it.
Thanks for watching!
I hear the arguement that it allows you to focus on content more and I don't know if I completely agree. I think it depends on what you need at that moment. Sadly in exerpinces where you are trying to transfer information and recreate it in the form of LaTEX, I am gonna have to say that if anything you end up having to focus much more on having fifty tabs open to remember how to do a certain organization thing in LatEX while with more advanced papers where you are more starting fresh it may legitimately allow you to focus on content more. I also am mixed that I feel it does indirectly encourage a bit of elitism around what papers are accepted and ironically one that is more usable by those who are scammers and thus know latex while blocking out those who may have a more novel idea but don't know anything about latex or similar codes. There can also be difficulties with say when there is an expectation for a change of format such as when you need rows to be inlined directly in the middle because that is how the papers themselves are supposed to be arranged. Not impossible but latex own features work against it. Also I admit a lot of the palete looks washed out to me which is something I always didn't like about papers lol but I know you can change that but still
I'm an IT guy in his 50s and only recently started using LaTeX as I had to write a lot of mathematics. I quickly gave up trying to use WYSIWIG equation editors, they are so difficult to use.
At two universities I attended we had certain rules how our thesis had to look and it was HEAVILY recommended to use latex, it was almost mandatory.
Lotus Word Pro uses Latex for its equations and now the latest version of Word does too. So using latex is within most peoples easy reach!
I love LaTeX. It makes my shitty writing look like a very serious and professional text.
This was an excellent video, very high quality. Thanks.
I would love to see a video reviewing GNU TEXmacs as well.
Very nice video! What I would have included is a comparison of the art of typesetting between Word and LaTeX. I have the feeling being able to read LaTeX twice as fast. And Word typesetting is so ugly, no fine adjustments of the spacings within a word or on a line or within a paragraph.
Another nice add on is BibTeX. You create one database and all your citations are so easy. You can define styles for each journal to fulfil its requirements and just by exchanging one word in the documentstyle brackets you can switch between different journals.
Great Video!! So can you use this with print on demand publishers like Kindle Direct Publishing, Lulu and Ingram Sparks, for instance if one wanted to self publish a math workbook, cookbook or novel? (using Print On Demand)
Yes, I published many novels typeset in LaTex on KDE. It produces ordinary PDF files, so it makes no difference for them.
@@hape3862 I've tried to make my Kindle display math formulas with some PDFs I've created but failed
would you mind to share how you did it?
Nice video! Thanks for your introduction to LaTex!
Many thanks for letting me know LaTeX is still alive and well.
lol, i remember using LaTeX on a DEC PDB-10 mainframe in the late-80s! 🤦♂️
@Bill Woods So never being able to use something because the learning curve is so steep is a good thing?
So choosing user unfriendly tools over user friendly tools is a good thing? So tools are supposed to be unfriendly and useless rather than easy to use and useful?
Heavy investment, worth it if you make big use of editing and publishing scientific content... it can even be pleasurable to use !
It is also easy to give full proofs in tex, since term rewriting can be done with copy and paste. So after a while I even started to do my math in tex because copy and paste of complex formulas and adding the change in one step is much faster in tex then in hand writing. So, if a lot of math is to be done and definition shortcuts introduced tex becomes an quite efficient tool. It is the fastest tool to do complex and/or lengthy math with I am aware of. However, it is not universally accepted in academia. For not math related fields it does not offer a working speed advantage. For math related fields the rejection of tex is usually a way to avoid the hard stuff. There the rejection of tex is an indicator of theoretical incompetence. If you have a professor bad-mouthing tex he is likely not a good theorist, and tries others to stay away from better work then his - which likely is written in tex. If you math is on the level, that the Microsoft Word math capabilities do not inhibit you, you have not come very far with respect to mathematical maturity.
Thanks alot for the documentary.
As a Master's graduate myself who has published some papers using LaTex, what I learnt was how to pronounce LaTex
“Bach” is not pronounced like that.
Loch Ness Monster isn't ether. That are german names, so if you speak them with the right german pronunciation it's ch (like a cat getting angry [I don't know any other analogy 😅]), rather than k.
@@xX12VincEXx You're right about Bach, but Loch Ness isn't german, it's in Scotland.
but nobody has any problems with latex being pronounced latek even though its more like latesh
@@dnuma5852wouldnt it be more like x in texas though
@@danilotsarThe X in LaTeX is actually meant to be the greek letter chi (with a hard k sound). So the correct pronunciation would be either Leitekh, or Latekh (it’s generally fine whichever one you use)
Damn. Ehere have you been when i was writing my phd dissertation!?
Great video, thanks!
Can you share some Latex presentation formats that can be used in academia such as a project presentation or a Ms/PhD thesis defense?
If there is a repository of such examples that would be very helpful.
I helped develop Latex --
When I worked for Vandelay industries.
Started using Overleaf last year 2022 because I find it easier to make multiple choice Mathematics exams in LATEX. Tried doing exams in Word and it automatically adjusts the indentions, which i find annoying.
Overwhelmingly the Graphic Arts sector use WYSIWYG and except for reasons of computer/software history and development a leading program is Adobe InDesign, InCopy can be use if one wishes to separate the writing from the design. Extensions are available for mathematical and scientific equations and formulas. It is of course software that must be "rented". With the final output generally required by printers as a PDF which they can run through professional PDF check software before committing to press. Having produced a number of academic books, InDesign is the go to publishing software.
Side note: I've done some resume's with latex that turned out great.