2 What is LaTeX?

LaTeX (pronounced lah-teck, or lay-teck) is a document preparation system, commonly used to prepare scientific publications, reports, presentations and many other types of documents. It can be seen as an alternative for other systems such as Microsoft’s Word and PowerPoint or Apple’s Pages and Keynote. As opposed to them, however, when preparing a document in LaTeX the user can only see the plain text they are writing, surrounded by markup tags – a fancy term for ‘commands’ telling LaTeX how it should format the document, similar to how HTML tags structure websites. Don’t be scared by those terms! It doesn’t have to do much with ‘real’ computer programming, all it takes to write in LaTeX is remembering few terms and the occasional use of Google search – after preparing the first few documents you can usually just use them as templates for new ones, limiting your memory load and effort to minimum.

2.1 Why should I choose LaTeX over my current document system?

There are several reasons to choose LaTeX over the document preparation system you are using right now. Firstly, LaTeX allows you to structure your document neatly, polish every detail to perfection, and re-use these settings for every document you prepare. Especially when it comes to creating tables, LaTeX performs much better in comparison with the ‘traditional’ document preparation systems. It is also great for referencing – when you include several tables and figures in your document and refer to them multiple times in different parts of the text, LaTeX will ensure that the order of their numbering is always correct and that you are always referring to the correct number. Moreover, it allows you to print a list of figures and tables in your document with just one line. LaTeX also comes with built-in bibliography capabilities, making citation and listing the resources you have used easier and more consistent than in the traditional document preparation systems. 

While content is obviously much more important than appearance when it comes to academic writing, the clean look of a document written in LaTeX simply gives it a more professional feel. If you are a student, you can literally make your essay look like a top journal article, which can impress the person marking it, possibly improving his or her appreciation of your work. Speaking of articles, writing, LaTeX is gradually becoming a standard in the majority of scientific journals, so if you are planning to publish anything, it will come in very handy.

While there is a considerable learning curve when you start using LaTeX, investing some of your time into learning the basics will most certainly pay-off in your academic future. Hopefully, this module will help to make your first dive into the world of LaTeX as gentle as possible.