LaTeX for Scientists Introduction: LaTeX vs. Word

LaTeX is (probably) the most prevalent programming language in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) subjects because it's brilliant. Maybe you've heard of it and wondered whether you should learn it?
TL:DR version - yes, you should!
In this very short introductory video, I hope to convince you LaTeX is not only infinitely better than Word (or lol, Google docs), but it's also not as hard to learn as you think! Especially if you join me on this detour into the free, open-source world of beautiful PDFs and Overleaf.
I've been teaching LaTeX to beginners, both undergraduate and postgraduate students alike, for several years now, and I will show you that you don't need any prior coding knowledge to achieve success with LaTeX. In this Skills for Scientists tutorial series we'll start with the basics, but build your proficiency quickly so that you can focus on the important bit of your degree: the science (or math). After all, we're all busy people, right? We want to get to where we're going as fast as possible.
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CREDIT
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#LaTeXTutorials #STEMskills #PhDMadeEasy

[@soswriting]

I'm so sorry about the ads on this video. KZbin has placed them without my consent so they can farm revenue from my un-monetised content. If you like my videos, please consider subscribing and getting your friends to subscribe as well. If I can get to 1k subs and into their partnership program I can at least turn the ads off. Thanks a bunch for your support

[@manvendra_singh]

Thank you! As an undergraduate making my resume this is helping me!

[@soswriting]

Best of luck in your applications! The library of resumes on Overleaf is definitely very helpful as well, should save you a LOT of time :D

[@Vicarra]

Oh god yes formatting!! Having journal style files makes life way easier if your paper get rejected and u have to submit somewhere else.

[@soswriting]

Great point, and actually I will be doing an episode on using journal style files later in the series! If you have any other topics you'd like to see, please do let me know :)

[@jafrad.thomas8399]

Thank you very much!

[@scholar-educatordr.jafrath2562]

Thank you!

[@oes2546]

Sometimes LaTeX fans often hate on Word without knowing many of even its most basic or its advanced features. I've seen fourth year university students hate on Word, only to proceed to use it as if it was "WordPad", not even using styles for their headings, generally being unaware of its features and saying it's unusable to write equations with. (You even have the option to use LaTeX formatting for writing equations in Word these days...) Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware LaTeX is superior in many ways and I'll definitely be using it for my master thesis. But there's no need for fellow students or even professors to frown upon students using Word, if they are able to use it properly and get a decent result with it. But yeah, as you say, one will want to know LaTeX at some point, so why not start early right :)

[@soswriting]

For short documents (assignments of ~ a few pages), I definitely think you should use what you're most comfortable with! Especially when you're under a lot of time pressure, as STEM students often are, it doesn't make sense to be wrestling something new when you have multiple imminent deadlines or exams coming up. Hating on Word is still fun, though ;) In my opinion, LaTeX only becomes the obvious (i.e., the most efficient) choice when you have to produce long documents like a dissertation or thesis. I've seen people try to create their thesis in Word because their PI requested it, and ...it's painful to watch. It's slow once you get past a few chapters, it can't handle the typical number of images without lagging like crazy, and you better hope you like the formatting you picked when you started writing it! This is where the time investment in setting up a LaTeX document starts to pay off, but I agree it's not appropriate for *every* task.

[@shafayadtazim9446]

@@soswriting no no, if u properly learn to use the formatting in word (use styles) then u can change all of them very easily. Changing the style format changes every paragraph that reference that style. Also, styles can be for paragraph or characters.

[@soswriting]

In a short document, I agree with you - but if you have to write a thesis in Word, you very often have to write each chapter in a separate file and only integrate them at the end to avoid lagging. This is why the formatting is such a bugbear, because you have to change the styles in each of your chapter files separately.

[@jamesedwards6173]

@@soswriting Ironically, I was going to mention LaTeX's seamless integration of exactly that: when I wrote my thesis, I had a single "master file" that was fairly small and basically just defined the overall document parameters, custom commands, etc., and within that overarching structural definition was included references to each chapter's file in the order I wanted them. The chapters themselves were written in their own independent files (absent any of the document definitions since those were already defined in the master file). I found this to be preferable to writing the thesis in one ginormous monolithic file as it made everything much more organized and relevancy-focused in a self-contained way, and a lot easier to manage the scale of the writing. I treated the whole thing as a hierarchical project, with all the images and specialized files and figures and whatnot stored in their logical locations---and chapter files, too. And then "integrating" them all together? I didn't need to do anything new at all; because it was already being done for me; and it was super easy to just temporarily comment-out (literally one line each in the master file) any completed chapters while focusing on writing a new one and generating intermediate chapter results for review.

[@jamesedwards6173]

Ha! I see you mention exactly these sorts of things in the follow-on video! :)

[@legojenn]

Thanks for the advocacy. It looks like with the right templates, those of us in the social sciences can take advantage of Latex, I did see a Chicago, APA and MLA styles. The challenges of being in an interdisciplinary programme is that we have to juggle different style guides depending on professor's discipline. Since I'm doing the coursework stream, there's no thesis, but a lot of coursesand long papers. I also see opportunities in my day job where we disseminate research products. Combined with R or Python, a lot of documentation based on reporting quantitative data could be automated.

[@soswriting]

Absolutely - I had scripts to automate compiling/building my thesis. My tables were all done automatically in Python and fed directly into my pipeline. All my data production was automated as well - multiple styles, to account for the variety of documents I was writing. I guess if I could be bothered, I could have also produced a UI to go with it and present it all on a dashboard, but astronomers are lazy! The nice thing about LaTeX is that it's very easily customisable. Bibliographies are probably the trickiest part, but it does make it very easy to switch citation styles. Any good journal should provide their own template with all of that already set up, otherwise you have to spend weeks going back and forth with their editors - if there isn't a template on their website (usually under submission guidelines), you can always contact them to ask. If it's all internal stuff for your University, they should also have templates available...somewhere! It's worth it (imo) to find one. Best of luck with your research! :)

[@reedrichards6723]

Great points!

[@soswriting]

:D

[@stefanocarini8117]

awesome explanation!

[@soswriting]

Thank you! I hope you'll be tempted to try LaTeX if you haven't already :D

[@stefanocarini8117]

@@soswriting Yes, I started using it last year, when, in my first year of Physics undergrad, I wrote my first lab report with LaTeX on Overleaf. Since then, I just couldn't do without this precious instrument and, just by experimenting, I have learned a lot in just a year. In my last two lab reports i also started playing around with Tikz and the results that LaTeX can carry are just superb! I am very glad that someone like you is making courses, to explain with passion what this underrated medium is capable of!

[@soswriting]

@@stefanocarini8117 Overleaf has honestly been a revelation, and I recommend it to literally everyone lol. I'm sure people are bored of hearing about it, but I just love it so much. It's made learning LaTeX sooo much easier than it was 10 years ago when I first started with it. Now you can focus on the important parts of learning LaTeX instead of endlessly battling with the compiler - you're proof of that! :D Tikz is very complicated and a lot of LaTeX users are afraid to try it, so kudos to you for making it work, and congratulations on your progress! I wish you all the best for the remainder of your course :D

[@fractalnomics]

If you have (I have) done your work in Word, can you easily convert it to Latex? Thanks

[@soswriting]

I'm not sure about "easily" - there are some online tools, software plugins, and command line utilities that will help you do it, but often they don't get it right first time so you will probably have a bit of hand-editing to do afterwards. Pandoc is probably the most popular option (johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc), but you'll definitely want to double-check your results after to make sure it's all gone how you expected it to.

[@oliverwan1520]

Mmm I'm not convinced. Word can do all the stuff you mentioned, you just need to know how to use it. Heading styles saves time with headings Cross references provide updated figure captions The inbuilt bibliography tool is awesome - keeps all citations ordered and formatted as required The equations are so much faster to type in word. For example: the fraction A/B is simply typed as "A/B [space bar]" (3 button presses) in word, whereas in latex, it's "frac{A}{B}" (10 button presses) in latex. Perhaps there are other things latex can do that word can't! Probably wouldn't hurt to try and find out 🙂

[@soswriting]

Like I said in the video, Word has done a lot in very recent years to catch up to LaTeX (because they lagged behind for quite a long time - when I learned LaTeX back in ~2015, Word was just horrible in comparison) and has integrated a lot of great features that it really needed. So for shorter documents like journal articles, or in less technical fields, it's not as awful as it used to be, and people should obviously use whatever tool they want to. When it comes to longer/more complicated documents (dissertation/thesis, docs with a lot of images, or those with a LOT of complicated math/derivations) or people who primarily use Linux distributions, LaTeX still wins I'm afraid! There are good reasons it's become so ubiquitous in certain research fields, and not just due to lack of knowledge of Word's more advanced features ;)

[@AndersJackson]

You can do all those things in MS Word, but it hides it. And my experiance is that student write much better reports when they at least have learned to use LaTeX before. Because then they actually understand the use of title and subtitles etc. It is MUCH easier to understand. And mathematics are much easier in LaTeX, and bibliography is also easier in LaTeX.

[@jamesedwards6173]

You CAN do a lot of things in Word now, but it's not uncommonly somewhat complicated/round-about to achieve, and finding people actually doing it within the overall Word user base? Rare. (I still regularly see documents where people have pressed space lots of times to (kind of) align things, rather than setting a tab and using that. 🤦‍♂️) But, no, Word still cannot do many of the extremely powerful things that LaTeX can do, from algorithmically generated precision-drawn figures, to defining custom commands and entirely new environments of open-ended complexity but re-use simplicity, to arbitrary-tweak details, to endless (and free) community-developed packages and capabilities, and tons of other things. Want to automatically format some programming language's raw text inside "code blocks" like what you might see in an IDE---bold, italics, various colors, prominent language keywords, line numbering, etc.? Just define the environment to do it for you, and re-use it as many times as you want forever thereafter... copy-paste the code plain-text in, and bam! gorgeous and consistent results everywhere it's used, and it's trivial to change later, too, if you want. Need a custom-defined character? Just define it, and use it everywhere you need it. Want the spacing or orientation of something to be slightly different than the default behavior yields? You can do that as well. (Good luck forcing Word to fix some formatting you don't like that's built-in behavior.) There is so, so much power and flexibility in LaTeX that it's kind of ridiculous. I'm giving examples of things I've personally leveraged, and I'm only just barely even scratching the surface. (Make text follow an arbitrary, mathematically defined curve? It can do it. Distort text? Yep...) Perhaps the biggest fundamental problem with Word compared to LaTeX---which, as a WYSIWYG GUI, I don't see it ever escaping---is its intermixing of format and content; LaTeX lets you focus on content and takes care of the formatting for you (and nearly always "just gets it right", while still empowering you to change it if need be). I cannot even begin to say how often I've seen people get distracted by endlessly fiddling (or flat-out battling) with Word formatting instead of focusing on getting the _content_ right. Word has improved a lot over the years, and it's perfectly fine for relatively quick and simple tasks, which is probably all that most people need from it, anyway. It can also accommodate certain types of somewhat more complicated documents, albeit still within a limited set of well-defined boundaries and constraints. But for truly complex documents that require format flexibility beyond some "cookie cutter" expectation, it's still no contest: LaTeX remains vastly more capable and superior.

[@AndersJackson]

All that stuff did LaTeX before rewrote its math entering tool the third, second and first time. Yes, I know and used this in Ms Word and Libre Office. Well, it is still simpler in LaTeX. And yes, Libre Office is better then MS Word when it comes to write large documents.

[@StephenBoothUK]

I've playing with LaTeX for sometime. I think the main issue I run into is there's a lot of gotchas for the new user, or even user who needs to use some part of it they haven't used before. For example suppose I want to include the formula for the hyperbolic sine function. Like a fool I type: \begin{equation} sinh x = \frac{e^x - e^-x}{2} \end{equation} The only parts of that which work as expected are the \begin{} and \end{}, and kinda the \frac{}{}. The x on the e^-x isn't superscripted and there's no space between the sinh and the x so it's sinhx which makes it look either I've invented a new trig function or I'm looking for the sine of the product of two variables, h and x. To get it to work I need to use: \begin{equation} sinh\: x = \frac{e^{x} - e^{-x}}{2} \end{equation} One I'm still struggling with is where I want to treat two or more equations as a single block, e.g. I want to where a variable is defined as a certain equation then an operation on that variable gives a certain results but the nearest I can get is: Where\\ \begin{equation*} y = tan\: ax \end{equation*} \begin{equation} \frac{\delta y}{\delta x} = sec^2\: ax \end{equation} Which is inelegant. For clarity and avoidance of doubt, I'm very much pro-LaTeX. That is probably why I find these gotchas so frustrating.

[@soswriting]

I can definitely feel your frustration, and maths is one of those things where there's literally so many different commands it's almost impossible to know them all. Hopefully I can help make it a bit easier though! With regards to the trig functions, you can treat them as commands to get them to display correctly. So for sinh(x) you can just do \sinh{x} and same for \tan{ax}. This list has a bunch (although not all) the mathematical commands available - hope it helps! The trig functions are at the bottom: oeis.org/wiki/List_of_LaTeX_mathematical_symbols

[@atoBeto]

Hi, I refactorized your code: \begin{equation} \sin h~x = {e^x - e^{-x} \over 2} \end{equation} For two or more equations as a single block use eqnarray environment: \begin{eqnarray} y &=& \tan ax\\ {\delta y \over \delta x} &=& \sec^2 ax \end{eqnarray}

[@StephenBoothUK]

@@atoBeto Thank you. I think I may not have defined my usecase for two or more equations in a single block fully enough. What I'm looking for is a single equation with a reference and the others are just definitions of items in that equation. So in my example the equation I'm interested in is the differential of y vs x but first need to define y in terms of x. I might write it as: \begin{equation} \frac{\delta \tan\;ax}{\delta x} = sec^2\: ax \end{equation} which is readable for a simple equation but if y were more complex, like say: \begin{equation*} y = \frac{e^{iax}}{h * \lambda ^2} \end{equation*} (I have no idea if that exists as an equation, I pulled some random stuff out of thin air) then I might end up with something like: \begin{equation} Q = \frac{\delta \frac{e^{iax}}{h * \lambda ^2}}{\delta x} \end{equation} Which is a mess. Possibly a more realistic example would be where I have an equation that uses a number of constants and I want to define those constants before using them in the equation. For context, I'm currently looking to develop my data analysis skills and as part of that am trying to improve my statistics knowledge. I'm taking the approach that the best way to learn something is to try to teach it to someone else so as I learn things I'm writing them up as if I'm writing a text book. That way I might end up with a better understanding and, if it all works out, can put the resulting text book on Kindle Direct Publishing for like $1 or free and hopefully help some other people. I am curious as to why you use the TeX primitive \over rather than LaTeX \frac? Is it just personal preference or is there a specific reason? Overleaf complains mightily about \over.

[@atoBeto]

@@StephenBoothUK Hi, I use \over only because I think that It is more intuitive :)

[@soswriting]

Sorry, I missed that part of your original question. Re: multi-line equations, I would recommend using the align environment (so, \begin{align}). Each line is ended with a double backslash, and you set where you want the equations to align using the ampersand (usually right before the equals, so &= is your marker) - basically the same as an array or table. Any lines where you don't want any numbering to appear (e.g. where you're just defining bits of equations to save the final equation looking a mess), put onumber on that line and it will suppress numbering just on that line. If you want to be able to refer to any of the lines by an equation number in the text (i.e., by giving it a label) you can wrap those individual lines in a subequation environment. There are a whole host of ways to achieve the same outcome, but this particular solution has the greatest utility (imo) for different situations. Hope this helps!

[@waynedick6989]

Word documents enlarge with reflow and equations do as well. Generally speaking LaTex documents wind up in PDF. This does not enlarge with reflow and produce a readable result. Thus if you use LaTex and produce PDF output, you shut out people with low vision from reading your work without painful difficulty. I know this because I earned my PhD in mathematics with central retina damage. I never saw what my professors put on the board. And I had to read with a telescope in my glasses with a magnifying glass. I learned LaTex. It was difficult because none of the documentation was accessible to people with low vision when I learned it. Today Word is just better. It has a great equation editor that accepts a lot of LaTex. It has a "web layout" that permits any enlargement with complete word wrapping. LaTex used to be superior, but not now.

[@soswriting]

Thanks for your comment! Very thought-provoking. I've never needed to use any of the PDF accessibility features, and I've never heard anyone mention them before so I'm definitely going to educate myself on the topic now. I'm very grateful to you for bringing this to my attention! I know that the Adobe PDF format has some accessibility features but I don't know how well they work, or if there's anything LaTeX users need to consider when they're creating their PDFs. If there is something we can do to help make our output PDFs more accessible, it should become best practice. Thanks again!

[@waynedick6989]

@@soswriting I am going to take your course. I think your templates may be flexible enough to provide a good interface. I sincerely hope I can help you with this.

[@lumotroph]

Lovely :)

[@lumotroph]

Perhaps less stock and more examples though!

[@soswriting]

@@lumotroph Thanks for taking the time to leave your feedback, I really appreciate it! I'll definitely take that on board as I'm still learning so much about producing videos and have a long way to go. I can certainly think of more reasons to use LaTeX and not Word, so perhaps I'll do a part 2 in the near future 😁

[@kisho2679]

what are the most appropriate LaTex Editors where you instantaneously see the correct formatted output while you are typing?

[@lucasgabrielmalheiros5589]

I don't think it is possible (or convenient). LaTeX needs to compile the code to generate the output pdf. If you were to autocompile after every word you'd take lots of time and computation

[@daniellet2997]

Overleaf has a recompile button that works quickly

[@kisho2679]

TeXstudio as well (plus you don't need to be online), but it's not instantaneous like Word or LibreOffice

[@soswriting]

Yes, I also use the Overleaf autocompiler. The amount of time it takes to compile depends on how big the file is you're trying to build. I tend to keep all my chapters in separate folders and import them as I'm working on them - in that case, the autocompiler works pretty well, I find! It's not *quite* instantaneous, but it's definitely quick.

[@faithwicca]

If you only want to write math formulas, then Obsidian and plugin "Quick Latex for obsidian" work really well. I use it all the time when doing homework at university when I do not need to have any enumeration, sections, etc. When you type formulas, they are instantaneously rendered so you see both code and output. Obsidian comes with a lot of other useful features.

[@Huios1000]

Can you make a video on latex vs Rmarkdown?

[@haraldurkarlsson1147]

You can insert LaTeX syntax into markdown. If you compare the two then LaTeX is a lot more powerful than RMarkdown when it comes to formatting in general. However, you can run equations inside RMarkdown. Although it can be done in LaTeX it is a lot more difficult.

[@soswriting]

I can definitely look into it! I've not used R Markdown myself, so I'm not very familiar with it at the moment. I am plotting a mini series on documentation, which will use Markdown (probably), so it might be a good idea! I'll see what I can do :)

[@aregayohannes9973]

good job!

[@soswriting]

Thank you very much!

[@yash1152]

how about asciidoc?

[@soswriting]

I've actually never tried it. I think it's used more in publishing, isn't it? I'll have a look into it, though, if you think it's useful for the sciences!

[@yash1152]

@@soswriting umh, i dont have a definitive answer of whether it has auto numbering features. but the benefit over latex seemed that it can be directly rendered without need of compilation. it covers the basics like: embeding other documents. inserting mathematical equation support is ofcourse there.

[@AndersJackson]

Then you could go to Emacs and Org-mode, as it can export proper LaTeX documents from that, from a simpler mark down like languages. And you can also use Org-babel to run code and formatting from Org-mode. And you can render directly from LaTeX to PDF, and have been able for a long time (with pdflatex). You could also use a make file to make all those steps automatically. That isn't that hard to do.

[@blainemooers4409]

I spent a year with asciidoc around 2104. It does the cheap trick of rendering math equations to image files and then importing these. They look grainy as a result. It also did not support the automated assembly of indices and glossaries. This is a strength of LaTex for book writing. Asciidoc is a bridge between markdown and LaTeX. I decide to bite the bullet and learn LaTeX. Once you have your Preamble setup and access to a good snippet library, there is very little code that you have to memorize for daily use.

[@yash1152]

> _Asciidoc is a bridge between markdown and LaTeX._ ​@@blainemooers4409 i agree > _"there is very little code that you have to memorize for daily use."_ yep, for daily _casual_ use; latex might be good. i am using latex for more than a year now, and _every_ time i had to create a new document - even after copy pasting from old directory - some random thing would break... setting up table of content is soo nightmare in latex... i looked at asciidoc _after_ i got fed up with latex. latex was awesome when it came out, not it's just dated with packages. i was thinking about moving over to conTeXt actually - but don't have time atm. summary (latex vs context): latex : base not intended to allow high level formatting, so, use packages for styling - and is now frozen; so, no scope of drastic improvement. context lmtx: provides lots of high level formatting commands, super flexible in input/output format.

[@s.h.i2553]

How long will it take to complete this course because I need it😃

[@soswriting]

Thanks for your comment! I'm aiming for "soon"...The next/first video (being an introduction to how LaTeX works) is going to be a little longer, so it's taking a bit of time to edit. The ones that come after that will be shorter and just dealing with very specific things. So as I get faster at editing I hope the gaps between videos should be shorter as well. If there's anything you are particularly interested in learning how to do in LaTeX, please let me know! I'm happy to arrange the order of videos to best suit what my audience wants/needs :)

[@s.h.i2553]

@@soswriting oww you are so kind😊 , I need to learn how to write maths in latex such as equations, mathematic symbols, drawing curves, functions,.... cz I am doing master in geometry. Thank you for your quick response😍

[@soswriting]

@@s.h.i2553 Maths is one of the topics I planned to cover - not just how to write maths in LaTeX, but how to make it beautiful :) so I'll make that the next one on my list! Drawing graphs and functions is quite advanced, so I plan to make a separate video for that. If you want to get a headstart, you can try the "tikz" package documents - link here: www.ctan.org/pkg/tikz-cd I hope this helps, and best of luck with your Masters project!

[@s.h.i2553]

@@soswriting "how to make it beautiful" exciting!!!😃 Thank you so much I really appreciate your support🥰🥰

[@soswriting]

@@s.h.i2553 No problem, I hope the upcoming videos will be useful for you! :)

[@danielcastillo9186]

I disagree. Generally, journals require you to submit a document in .docx format.

[@soswriting]

The ratio of Word-to-LaTeX seems to vary quite a bit from one field to another, in my experience, and *seems* to depend on how technical the field is. In very technical fields (maths, physics, statistics etc) - LaTeX makes things much faster and the results look cleaner and nicer (imho). The journals I've used (in astronomy) give the option of using a Word template, but express a preference for authors to submit in LaTeX. There are some fields in the middle where it's a bit more 50/50. Unless a journal is "Word-only", they'll usually have templates for both :) If you're in a field where you can create diagrams to represent complicated stuff, you can easily get by with Word (e.g., a lot of my Chemistry friends used the Word templates supplied by the journals and never used LaTeX at all...and then cried when they had to write their thesis in Word because it crashed all the time).

[@agatha_92828]

You're probably not in a stem field buddy. In maths, physics or engineering 99% of journals use LaTeX only for papers.

[@blainemooers4409]

Many journals in the biologoical sciences accept either LaTeX or docx.

[@jupiterapollo4985]

Said a whole lot of stuff without even showing one simple real world exmaple of Latex vs Word comparison. This video was a waste of time.

[@theultimatereductionist7592]

I published a 274-page PhD dissertation in MS Word 2000 + Mathtype 6.0 in 2000 in differential algebra and 8 peer reviewed math papers across 4 different journals in MS Word 2000 and Mathtype. I love MS Word because it frees me up to do mathematics. I literally do algebra and math within MS Word by cutting and pasting formula. I love that I just point and click and drag. There is none of this INSANITY of memorizing massive amounts of obscure code and then running it through some processor in the hopes of producing some document you can read. You literally see exactly what you will get. The ONLY negative you CAN say about it is that it's not open-source and is not saved as a small .txt file. Now, in WHICH UNIVERSE is it YOU are living in where you are NOT freed up from worrying about formatting to work on math instead if you use MS Word?

[@blainemooers4409]

I wrote a 140-page dissertation in MS Word. I could not scroll more than ten pages at a time. This drove me nuts. I can scroll through a 1000-page PDF rendered from LaTeX almost instantly. Overleaf can render a 1000-page document for me in under a minute.

[@biblebot3947]

Libre office