Writing using Latex
Writing is something I always enjoyed, but there were always obstacles that I had to work around. In the past I always had to deliver documents but this became more and more troublesome as there was a difference between Microsoft Word and Word Perfect and these days I sometimes encounter someone who has MS Word 2003, which is really outdated by now.
I have made it a habit to present my documents in PDF format. I have never been a fan of PDF until I noticed that nobody complained about it (which often happened with Doc(x)-files). However word documents are hardly flexible and often enough I’m more busy with formatting than I’m busy writing. Also as a programmer I noticed that I can rarely write comments in the document and when working with others I have to explain the “Keep track of changes” function that is in Word.
For my research paper I started writing in Word but at certain point I got so fed up because I had to print the document, write comments as I read it and then go back to my computer to act on my own remarks. At the same time it was no longer possible to have the document being split in multiple files, something I do when I’m programming. Instead I look through the entire document, finding the correct section and then correct it.
As you can understand this is quite time consuming and I’m quite certain it could be done better. I had heard of LaTeX before but it seems complicated and more for *NIX systems than for windows. But I finally decided to see how it can be done and installed both MikTex and TeXnicCenter, which are awesome pieces of software. While at the same time I started reading up on LaTeX. And after using it for a week I must say I wish I had discovered it earlier.
LaTeX was made for programmers who often need to write documentation. It can be compared to programming and it often feels like that. It was not hard as I thought it would be and by now I prefer it to working in word. I don’t have to worry about formatting, it converts to a PDF, I can split my documents over various source files, write comments and with a little bit of work using the viewers (you can export to DVI or PDF) I can double click on a paragraph I think that needs to be changed and it brings me directly to the source code. The only thing that I really miss is the grammar checking (it does have a spell-checker) but that is not that important for me now.
One really cool thing is that I don’t have to worry about the formatting of images. I just include them like \includegraphics{myImageFile} and when I compile it gives me a warning that the file does not exist. Normally I was always busy creating images while I wanted to be writing and fixing the images until they matched the format of the rest of the document but that all seems to be in the past.
However there are a few things that I wished were different. For one exporting it to a different format is hard, which means that if someone wants to give feedback by highlighting the text and then write some comments they have to extract it since they don’t have access to the source files or have the knowledge to work with it. The exported text however uses hard returns every time it needs to wrap the text. But I think I can fix that by compiling it to html. And of course it takes some time to get used to writing LaTeX. So far I’m quite positive about LaTeX and I hope that it stays that way.