Why I really love LaTeX (and you should too)

It may be an understatement to characterize my affection for LaTeX¹ as fanatical. I may have gone as far as to say that I would never consider working for a company that didn’t let me use it exclusively.² Behold this fine example of LaTeX typography:

It’s right about now that many people reading this blog (hi friends and family) think I’m talking about a synthetic material. I’m not. I’m talking about the greatest document typesetting application in the world:

These days, LaTeX is experiencing renewed interest due to a clever mash-up with the simple markup language MultiMarkdown.³ I’m excited at the possibility of more widespread adoption as people realize the ultimate control that LaTeX allows over the documents they produce everyday.

For those that don’t know, TeX is a typesetting program originally developed by Donald Knuth back in the day to reduce friction when producing technical documents with mathematics. The simplest way I know to summarize TeX is this: you program your document in plain text using the TeX markup language and compile directly into pdf.

Why would you want to do that? The goal here is clear: focus on writing (not formatting) when you are writing. LaTeX allows for beautiful typography⁴ and affords precise control over every aspect of the presentation of the content. It effortlessly manages all of the overhead inherent in generating citations, cross-references, numbering, table of contents, etc. You won’t believe the gains in productivity from this level of automation.

If you are heavily entrenched in a Microsoft Word⁵ culture, it may be hard for you to understand the power of LaTeX. But what I can say is that after using LaTeX for years, you become accustomed to a level of quality and refinement which makes MS Word feel impossibly obtuse. You develop the ability to immediately notice whether a document was created in Word vs TeX. Sometimes the differences are subtle, but these cues are like the secret handshake of the typographic elite.

I now use LaTeX for almost everything: my thesis, reports, presentations, articles, CV, letters, be-right-back door signs, exams, technical notes–essentially any document conforming to the paper metaphor. I even installed the Computer Modern font family on all my computers for those unfortunate circumstance when I do have to open MS Word–it helps it feel a bit less alien.

Anyway, all this recent publicity got me thinking about how I originally learned LaTeX. I think I’ll share the process I went through in the next post for anyone interested.