The Big Idea

I’m surprised I didn’t do this earlier, but since I was planning to do so anyway, now seems like a good time. To put it simply …

I will not voluntarily use Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Word, or any other word processing or slideshow software (e.g. Google Docs).

Instead, as the title of this blog post indicates, I will be using LaTeX to fulfill all of my needs.

A Brief History

Don Knuth, Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Stanford, created TeX (which would later influence the creation of LaTeX) in the late 1970s in order to easily create publication-quality mathematics papers. LaTeX is basically the same thing as TeX, except it’s easier to use (e.g. fewer esoteric commands required, etc.). The way LaTeX works is that we take a text editor of our choice, write down a bunch of stuff in LaTeX syntax, and then compile the text to form a PDF document as output. My primary LaTeX text editor is TexShop, which you can see in the top image of this post, but I’ve also been using emacs lately.

It’s not “what you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG), which for some people is understandably a major drawback. Nonetheless, LaTeX has become so popular and is standard knowledge among serious mathematicians and scientists, so in hindsight, Knuth’s creation was an enormous success. In fact, WordPress even allows LaTeX directly into its posts, such as the following (random) integral: $\int_0^\infty (x^5 - 3x) dx$, which was generated with the following text: \int_0^\infty (x^5 - 3x) dx, surrounded by appropriate tags, which are usually dollar signs.

Rationale

If you’ve never heard of LaTeX before this post, my proclamation might seem like a pretty big deal. Why avoid using two popular and crucial software in favor of something that seems complicated and only oriented for mathematicians? In my opinion, there are several strong reasons, and I’ll focus first on the use of LaTeX versus Word (or similar word processing software).

The first and most important reason is that in terms of formatting math, LaTeX is far superior to what Word can offer. Sure, one can try to be a master at using Word’s equation editor to circumvent this drawback. (I had a statistics professor who claimed that LaTeX was worthless to him because he could live by using equation editors.) But there are many problems with that stance, and I’ll list some of them.

1. LaTeX — when written correctly — still produces cleaner and crisper math than the equation editor.

2. LaTeX can be formatted in many ways depending on the kind of document (e.g. class notes versus a conference publication).

3. Using an equation editor or other tools often require clicking on a bunch of buttons and pages to search for fraction layouts, Greek symbols, and other non-standard document elements. In LaTeX, we can do all this from our keyboard in an easy and intuitive way. Suppose we want to insert the greek symbol alpha in the document. In Word, I have to look up either the keyboard shortcuts or a large database of symbols. In LaTeX, I simply type in $\alpha$ to get $latex alpha$. (Special names in LaTeX have the reverse backslash \ preceding them.)

In a sense, what I’m really trying to say is that a LaTeX expert can use his or her experience, knowledge, and online documentation to produce quality mathematical expressions quickly.

A second reason to favor LaTeX over Word is that (I believe) LaTeX performs faster. Just today, I opened up a six-page Microsoft Word document and was amazed at how long it took from the moment I pressed the blue “W” on my screen to when I could actually modify the document. There is also a delay between when the document’s contents become visible and when you can actually modify the text without lag. In that same time, I can open up a 50-page LaTeX document and edit it seamlessly, since it’s just plain text. If I want to compile it to view the PDF output, it can take a while during the first compilation (but it’s definitely not unreasonable) and after that, compiling tends to be faster. In addition, a competent LaTeX user shouldn’t be compiling his or her document every ten seconds.

A third reason is that LaTeX can format the endings and beginnings of pages better than the standard “widow and orphan control” of Microsoft Word. If I’m writing a document in Word and I start a new paragraph at the very last line of the page, Word will automatically put that line on the following page once I’ve written enough of that new paragraph. Sometimes I want this, and sometimes this is annoying because I know that I’m wasting space and that the text on different pages might look weird if one page ends on an earlier line than another. LaTeX solves this problem automatically by cleverly “squishing” the text together or forcing it to be on a new page, whichever looks better.

This even works when there are figures involved (e.g. graphs, pictures), which is a huge plus. If there’s not enough space for a figure to appear at the bottom of some page, or if there’s too many to fit on one page, LaTeX will reassign them to some pages accordingly (in the final PDF output) and fill up the remaining spots on the page with text. It’s also possible to “assign” a figure so that it will always be at the top (or bottom) of whatever page it ends up on in the PDF output, a handy feature. Users have the option to resize and center figures, assign captions, and assign labels for referencing in text (e.g. “Figure 3 shows that …”). In fact, we can label anything we want by using the label{} tags. Then, elsewhere in the document, we can use ref{label_name} to refer to something we’ve labeled. The reason why labels are useful is that LaTeX keeps the number consistent no matter how many other figures we add or modify. For instance, if we add in an earlier figure at the start of the document, the “Figure 3 shows that …” text will automatically convert to “Figure 4 shows that …” — reflecting the added image. Needless to say, labels are extremely useful when writing academic papers filled with theorems, lemmas, propositions, etc.

There are other advantages, too, such as that the default settings for LaTeX are superior to those of Microsoft Word (e.g. justified versus non-justified and page numbers on versus off, respectively). Others have discussed these advantages, too; see this post for a start. Also, LaTeX is free. It’s open source, relatively bug-free (after all, it’s been around for decades), and definitely not going away anytime soon.

But what if I need to make slides to give a presentation?

Don’t worry, LaTeX has that covered as well! The key is to use the Beamer class. The following image shows the “cover slide” of a presentation I gave using LaTeX Beamer in my machine learning class last semester, based on this ICML 2012 paper. And yes, that paper, like virtually all computer science papers, was formatted using LaTeX.

With Beamer, we use \begin{frame} and \end{frame} and put text between those two commands to get what we want on one “slide.” The advantage of using Beamer is that it’s a LaTeX class, so we can seamlessly incorporate LaTeX code into our slides. Beamer will also output documents in PDF and can have a nice and clickable “table of contents” settings on the top of each slide, depending on the theme one uses. The PDF output is important, since while PowerPoint is used on many computers throughout the world, PDF viewers are virtually standard in modern computers. There are many more computers with PDF viewers but without PowerPoint than there are computers with PowerPoint but without PDF.

Exceptions

Now, I understand that I will be unable to completely avoid Word and PowerPoint, so I won’t uninstall them from my laptop. Why might I need to use them?

1. The biggest reason is probably if I’m collaborating with a group of non-LaTeX users. No one is going to want to learn LaTeX in one night just to please me, especially if there’s no math involved, so I’ll have to suck it up and go with what they’re using.

2. I also want to keep Word and PowerPoint just in case there are some important documents I need to open from someone (or from a webpage). I don’t want to ask people to send me PDFs as an alternative, and if I’m trying to open up stuff written by someone on his website years ago, I likely won’t even be able to ask in the first place.

Bottom Line

I’m looking forward to life largely bereft of PowerPoint and Word. Admittedly, the benefit of LaTeX decreases when one moves from writing technical documents to writing generic documents, but there are still times when LaTeX’s beauty can make it clearly the superior choice of typesetting software. For instance, LaTeX is great for writing resumes and curriculum vitaes. Needless to say, my current resume/CV was formed using LaTeX, and I recently won second place in a competitive resume contest.