LaTeX: overhyped or still a gem

Published in

SIGMA XI VIT

5 min readOct 13, 2020

“LaTeX vs. Word?”
“Is LaTeX any good?”
“Should I use Word or LaTeX?”

These are indicative of the most common questions I found while trawling the net for more resources on TeX recently. On further diving, I found there’s a whole Word vs TeX debate raging on out there. Pretty unusual right? A debate on the net which is not controversial or scandalous in any sense, it’s refreshing at the very least. But I digress. The thing is, even more unusually, both sides of the debate have a pretty sound logic to back their arguments. Now as for me, I stand on the middle ground, because I find this debate, like all the other ones out there, ridiculous. In my opinion, people are missing the very point of the debate. Let’s take a look at why shall we?

“And their origins dictated what they came to be….”

Word is a generic editor. It was meant to be a user friendly, made-for-the-masses software which even a hillbilly could use through sheer intuition. TeX on the other hand, was made with a singular objective at mind, with a focus on maximum efficiency no holds barred. This very core distinction makes it so that these were targeted towards unique markets which couldn’t be further different form each other.

TeX came into its own as a research-oriented editor in the early 90s. We have to keep in mind that though word was released in 83, it became a viable alternative with a host of related features only in the last decade or so. This meant that the entire current generation of research scholars grew up around TeX as their only option by a huge margin. Plus, when it was released, advanced user-friendly GUIs were yet to make an appearance. Command Line and DOS were still king and the consumer base (though limited in itself) was in sync with advanced computer usage. So, people had no qualms against TeX which feels remarkably similar to a computer language (it is a mark-up language after all). Given this, the inherent bias in favor of TeX in the research community is more than natural.

“Who are we, and what is thy purpose…”

At the end of day, it’s a matter of comfort. The amount of time spent with one environment is a decisive factor in judging a person’s efficiency with that environment. Completely switching environments at a stage of advanced usage can often be hugely counter-productive. So now let’s come to the millennials of research, university undergrads. Being one myself, I grew up around word and saw it being polished into a real gem of an editor.

Now, when it actually comes to writing a paper, TeX is better hands down. It is faster and cleaner at what it does especially if the user is comfortable with programming in general. But with its steep learning curve, will it make sense for people like me to invest a good amount of time in this stuff when my writing of a paper will probably be a one-off? We must keep in mind that Word can make a decent paper with a slight bit of effort, especially with some new plugins. Even journals from the likes of IEEE have started accepting papers in the .docx format. Most people I know who want to write a paper will end up in a corporate IT environment where TeX has an extremely limited or even absolute zero scope.

So, the question at hand isn’t which is better out of the two. The questions which should be rather asked are primarily:

“Which offers more value for the total time invested?”
“How much time are you willing to invest?”

“The Trade-offs are always Bitter…”

Complexity vs. Effort for Word and LaTeX — Clemens @ LODE publishing

effort needed for customization, word vs latex — TeX @ Stack Exchange

These two graphs are pretty illuminative when it comes to the points I’m trying to convey. Its all a matter of efficiency. Certain documents are easier to prepare under certain environments. When choosing LaTeX, you will be usually giving up ease of use in favor of a better formatted more professional feel. Should you rather choose Word on the other, you will be gaining simplicity but losing out on a lot of format control.

Its not exactly the devil’s alternative here, but then you can never have the best of two worlds now can you…..

“The Climax…..or rather the Anti-Climax”

At the end of all this, the point I’m trying to put across is that the TeX vs Word debate is hugely inconsequential. Your favoring of one of them will depend on who you are, what you do and what you want to do. Each of them has its own strengths and even comparing them directly is pretty futile.

Now, I’m assuming most of you reading this will be pretty comfortable with Word. Given that, I would like you to read this really well explained post by Marko Kovic on LaTeX and form your own thoughts on this matter

https://medium.com/@marko_kovic/why-i-write-with-latex-and-why-you-should-too-ba6a764fadf9