Writing software options - Word vs LaTeX. Which is right for you?

In this video I go over the pros and cons of two main software options for writing papers: Word and LaTeX. I try to answer the question `Why would you want to use LaTeX instead of Word?'
Personally I do nearly all of my writing in LaTeX so I am a big fan. Let me know in the comments if you've tried it and what you think of it.
Timestamps
Intro 00:00
What is Word? 0:45
Word pros 1:24
Word cons 1:57
What is LaTeX? 3:31
Latex pros 4:47
Latex cons 5:52
Why choose LaTeX over Word? 6:50
Outro 7:49
Music, from streambeats.com
Call me daddy
Digital Threat
Samurai's call
Puzzled

[@oes2546]

I was in a group work recently, and I could see its no wonder people need LaTeX. When we wrote a co-op report in Word in the group project, everyone used different fonts, and increased the text size and made it bold when making a heading.... Basicly using it as if it was "Wordpad". And this was 4th year university students. None of the group members used Word's inbuilt functionality for headings and sections, refences, figure numbering etc. LaTeX on the other hand forces your document to look good. You need to make an effort and learn it from scratch and do it properly. I agree that LaTeX is superior for thesis or long document writing, and I understand people can prefer its document styles. But maybe people wouldn't frown upon using Word so much if they actually knew how to use it properly.

[@egomozg]

One thing I love about learning LaTeX and nobody mentions it, that learning LaTeX actually makes you learning a lot of functionality of Word too. Everyone just opens It and starts typing as they would writing on paper, but LaTeX forces you to think like “hmm, maybe I can do the same in Word?” and it turns out you actually can. Not all the features, of course, but most core latex functions like sectioning, numbering and etc.

[@DmdMixZ]

I agree with this so much. For me, it was only by accident that I stumbled across some word-sections in a office365 masterclass that I thought looked interesting, because otherwise I would have just skipped it altogether. 4 hours of training later and word is basically THE tool for me. You can set up templates to look good no matter what, automatic formatting, automatic bibliography, self updating table of contents by headline hierarchy, you name it. Word is AWESOME, but most people never get past the basic middleschool stuff, because they already assume they "know" word.

[@nishadkadam8533]

As a phD student, why I can't live without LaTex: 1. It nails referencing. Create a bib file from medley and you are done. Want to change the citation style? change just one command 2. Just write your paper. Don't worry about the formatting. Call that tex file from the journal template, and you are done. Use it for n number of journals. 3. Stop worrying about whether your figure will fit or not. LaTeX will do it for you. 4. Stop worrying about list of figures, list of tables, contents. It is automated. 5. Of coarse, it is free. And most importantly, it runs anywhere, linux, windows, mac, and raspberry pi as well.

[@harig00]

Good list! Thanks for sharing.

[@nishadkadam8533]

@@harig00 Welcome

[@mynameisthis1580]

I use Zotero with word, and references are pretty easy. I didn't find any issues in terms of formatting with word either; and I make figures in PowerPoint, and those go into word seamlessly. I've also had no issues with submissions to journals using word. I was thinking of giving LaTeX a try, but it seems like time investment without giving anything that word can't.

[@arifmemovic3383]

I had an actual nightmare take place in Microsoft Word after wasting hours trying to fit images of tables and figures into my first paper. I look forward to writing my first paper in LateX!

[@nishadkadam8533]

@@arifmemovic3383 Definitely try it. It might seem difficult in the beginning, but once you learn, life will be a lot less painful

[@haraldurkarlsson1147]

I used word for years - starting in the 80's with Word 1. I was introduced to LaTeX much later and right away said "Where have you been all my live?". I now do much of my writing in LaTeX. The IDEs for running LaTeX (e.g. TeXShop for Mac and TeXMaker for Mac and PC) have gotten much better and make it a snap to write LaTeX commands. Recently, I have become interesting in some of the plot programs - i.e., PGF and TikZ and I am simply blown away be the quality and beauty of the graphs they can produce seamlessly right inside your LaTeX document. If you are beginner, however, don't start there - the manual for PGF and TikZ is over a 1000 pages! P. S. Nice discussion of Word vs. LaTeX but might I add that LaTeX is free and the is a large community willing to help with pretty much any problem you might encounter.

[@leslumieres9540]

Started using LaTeX during my PhD back in 2006 and never looked back. Fast forward to 2022 I almost never use MS Word, write all personal and professional documents, however simple, in LaTeX and now prepare all my courses in beamer. I enjoy the whole document creation process and checking the output immediately. As the video said, the learning curve, especially initially, can be steep but once one gets the basics, it's really not that challenging to "upgrade" the document consulting the net as the need arises. Highly recommended.

[@Mnaughten601]

I have been using latex for almost 2 years as an undergrad to do upper division math Homework. Most of it fits into less than 10 pages, but if I were to write it out, it would be illegible and I would have probably gone through reams of paper. Plus it makes referencing past homework easy since I can combine the different documents into one pdf and let my computer search.

[@slipknot7830]

Also a pro of latex is being able to source other files, making it really easy to organize a big pdf

[@c3rb3ru55]

I use it at work for malware research reports. Fully integrated into CI/CD with templates for everything I do. Multilingual support with babel is also way ahead of Word. Overleaf for collaboration with git integration and collaboration is amazing. So much time saved, initial investment is high but ROI is huge. Many other researchers use markdown but it does not produce a professional final product. The major use case for latex for the people who use word is I can create templates that when I change one thing, it changes for all the hundreds of my reports automatically. I would love to see Word accomplish that. Also been doing it 3 years now, have not looked back. If you are a professional laboratory, this is the tool of the trade.

[@hartmutholzgraefe]

Back in the mid to late 1990s I wrote two diploma theses, first one (electric engineering degree) using MS Word for Windows 2.0a, second one (computer science degree) using LaTeX. Experience from back then: Word for Windows: * could start typing right away * spent way too much time on ad-hoc formatting with Word * the two formulas I had in the word document were a PITA to typeset and properly align with the Word formula editor * next version of Word (Word for Windows 6.0) could not properly import the document * generating a PostScript file required printing to a fake PostScript "to File" printer driver * generating a HTML version -> forget it! LaTeX: * spent two weeks on learning how to use it (basically by converting my 1st thesis from Word to LaTeX as proof of concept) * spent way less time fiddling with formatting after that * embedding and referencing formulas and graphics was much faster and more reliable * could generate both PostScript (and later: PDF) and HTML (via the latex2html script) rather easily * if I had not lost the LaTeX sources for both over the decades due to sloppy backup regimes I'm sure I could still process the documents with todays LaTeX just fine Sure, Word has come a long way since then, and you *can* write using logical instead of physical markup by now, but it requires a lot of discipline to do so, and the learning curve for that is probably comparable to that of LaTeX, but less rewarding IMHO Extra advantages of LaTeX: * as the actual processing is purely done using command line tools you can fully automate it. There are lots of tool chains that actually use TeX or LaTeX in the background with you not even noticing it. E.g. I myself have created several IT solutions that produce official PDF documents, like yearly donation receipts for an NGO, by retrieving data from a database and inserting it into LaTeX templates * D. Knuth had good typesetting in mind from the very beginning, while with Word it only came as an afterthought. And this still shows. When being shown a document with justified paragraphs, and no further formatting, the line breaking and word/letter spacing along gives away which of the two were used to generate it. Even some of the high end Adobe tools are said to use some of the typographic algorithms originally found in TeX code ...

[@hartmutholzgraefe]

PS: one thing I have to confess though is that LaTeX syntax is weird at times, and reading a raw document source is not always a pleausre. So when I have to write stuff these days I mostly use AsciiDoc instead. It does not have the full expressive power of LaTeX, but it "looks cleaner", to the point where simpler documents can even be shared in unprocessed form and are still readable to an unprepared audience. (LaTeX comes in as part of some of the processing toolchains though). Why AsciiDoc and not MarkDown? While Markdown has more output formats supported, including Word documents, it is less powerful (and less standardized), and it shows that it comes from a "we want to write better formatted blog posts" background, while AsciiDoc rather came from a "we want to write large documents with less pain than with LaTeX or DocBook" angle. So AsciiDoc has all the basic things you need for a book sized document (like cross references) which MarkDown dialects usually miss. Only use case where I still use more-or-less raw LaTeX: I still write my presentation slides using LaTeX Beamer :)

[@wumbo5]

version control in Git for me is huge since docx is binary (zipped xml) it's not compatible 'track changes' does not at all compare in terms of functionality the downside of this is your collaborators need to know both Git and LaTeX

[@robertmaxey5406]

At work, there were many versions of Word, font embedding not possible and formatting and setting issues between versions is why I turned to LaTeX and/or turn the. doc to a PDF

[@branpod]

I just like the consistency of LaTeX. Definitely a bit of a learning curve (took me some time to get it to work with MLA formatting), but I know my template will now ALWAYS follow those rules. I find it too easy to accidentally mess something up in Word

[@zackinator1439]

Ok, so fun fact. Apparently, Word has had cross-references for what seems like possibly the whole time. What started in 2007 was they added a tab for it, where as in earlier versions it was under "Insert". (Probably because no one knew it was there so they moved it to somewhere more prominent) I never even knew any version of Word had them until this video, and seeing how many people say you should use LaTeX because of the references suggests a lot of other people didn't either.

[@alexeypopov314]

Dude, RTFM. Anyhow, why you read convoluted TFM for TeX and skip simple and straightforward one it for Word? You aren't alone though. I never could grasp it.

[@oes2546]

It's sometimes funny how 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, and saying it's impossible to write equations with it. (You can even use LaTeX typesetting for equations in Word these days...) Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware LaTeX is superior in many ways, but you can get an okay result in Word as well if you actually know how to use its features.

[@mrchops]

Hey thanks for the quick video, great insight for my Bachelor thesis!

[@harig00]

Glad it was helpful!

[@aregayohannes9973]

Thanks!

[@haraldurkarlsson1147]

Chris, The point that you make about long vs. short documents is valid. Why would you spend 30 minutes learn syntax for a document that takes 5 minutes to produce? The cost-benefit analysis would favor Word or Word-like programs in this case. But...I have found myself even using LaTeX for short stuff also. The simple reason is that LaTeX (like Word) has templates for pretty much anything I would like to do. So if I am writing a letter I simply load in the (documentclass) letter. All the formatting is there (with comments on what each thing does or is for) I am off.

[@luqmanhamdan9285]

What do you think about R Markdown? I recently try to write my final year project report using R Markdown and it's working great, but in order to change to the document formatting to what I want I need to use LaTeX extensively which is really cumbersome.

[@gunthermaier54]

They go in the same direction. Markdown offers a very limited set of commands and produces output that looks like "draft" or "technical report". LaTeX is MUCH more flexible (not always an advantage) and produces professionally looking output.

[@haraldurkarlsson1147]

You might try Quarto. It is a cross between RMarkdown and LaTeX.

[@MH-mi6mk]

As far as I know, cross-referencing was available in Word at least from 1997 on. However, it could crash completely when adding figure no 57 … or the same using it with literature citations. There, Endnote made an early mark…

[@anupkumardas6431]

Thanks a lot. Could you please provide some information on how to call a.tex file from the journal template? @Chris Harig

[@alexeypopov314]

Word cross references existed at least in DOS version 5.5.

[@bahathir_]

\LaTeX produces very beautiful documents. I can edit and compile on my smartphones. Thank you.

[@lhurgoyfwitcher7553]

thx good video. most others just hate against word.

[@harig00]

Thanks! Learning and using LaTeX takes a decent investment of time. While I do think it is better, you have to be in a use case where you can actually get the return.

[@robertmaxey5406]

I have always thought how amazing it is you an create a LaTeX document with notepad and turn out documents more lovely than Word and all the rest.

[@1UniverseGames]

As a beginner is it possible to make a video about using LatEx,, specially to write some complex equation, figures, table...and some customization... Another things, is there any site where can find some good templates to look for and use accordingly mine...if possible.. Finally, thanks for the video...

[@natureonwheel7]

Thanks I want to to make a video on possible free or cheap software to create schematic diagrams for scientific process. Please!

[@cafematicaoficial]

I'm a fan of LaTeX :D

[@harig00]

There are literally dozens of us!

[@TheLomsor]

I often reach the limits of a tool quickly. With Word it took a few years but I know its capabilities now and, like in the top comment, it's painful to see others not using a tool correctly. At the other hand I gave TeX/LaTeX a try now for my own startup, specifically for creating Physical Documents and the learning curve isn't just steep, it's almost vertical, especially if you want it to be neatly integrated or need something very specific. It's much better then Office Macros of course! Still. My biggest issue is: Can I justify using it professionally when even small task or edits require extensive knowledge and small errors don't just make the end product look ugly but worse, won't even compile. Really, what's needed is something even more modern. The last generation of tools was all about putting GUI tools onto the web, there's even a LaTeX "clone" web editor that allows for collaboration. Currently the trend for new tools is simple markdown ... Lacking almost all page formatting. With print being almost dead ... maybe I should give up my hunt and journey and accept suboptimal 'paper' documents until they can be completely eliminated from most of company task ... and outsource the rest.

[@nickgood3998]

Ok thanks again for this i need to know so again thanks again ok goodbye🥰

[@michelle778]

You should switch to typst instead of LaTex.

[@your-mom-irl]

Use groff!

[@dgamer2185]

If find the sentence: "LaTex excels..." really funny and ironic 🤣

[@pieterrossouw8596]

The thing that kills Word for me is simply it's unfathomable ability to lose cross references at the last minute. Everything looks good in your WYSIWYG editor and then at print you get big bold "Error! Reference Source Not Found". Go back to that section, right click on that cross-reference and update it. Now suddenly it knows exactly. It's the stuff that'll make you smash your screen... or switch to LaTeX. I wish there was a better way to make complex tables though.

[@zigzagging256]

There is an option in Word that allows to automatically update all such things before printing. Maybe you should try enabling it.

[@gunthermaier54]

An important pro for LaTeX is that it produces output that adheres to professional typesetting standards. Or, said differently, LaTeX output looks much better than that of Word

[@Mandragara]

Word has all of the features you mention. Sections, references, TeX style equation input etc. It's easy to change document styles if you tag your headings in Word also. I think the difference is that LaTeX users haven't used Word in over a decade and the WYSIWYG interface means that TeX people don't dedicate anywhere near as much time to learning how to do something properly in Word as they do in TeX.

[@windows99]

The problem is skill issue. People just don't know how to use Word and are making excuses and rationalizations.

[@updatedotexe]

Latex: Shit Word: Good enough That answers the video.

[@bastianurbach]

Claiming that LaTeX is better for equations is just ridiculous nowadays. First of all, you can literally use LaTeX equation syntax in Word. I don't understand the appeal, but it's there. The visual editor actually works fine for me (the trick is to start with just the structure and then filling in the text) but easily the fastest way is the handwritten equation thingy.

[@alexeypopov314]

Dude, I see. You just don't know Word.

[@hartmutklotz2874]

... or you just dont know LaTeX

[@alexeypopov314]

@@hartmutklotz2874 I don't need to. Do you?

[@andradeneto64]

This is not an option. It's mandatory

[@Croesquared]

A lot of LaTeX’s features for internal cross-referencing are also really useful if you’re working on a document collaboratively through Overleaf. Docs is way less powerful than word still, and even though Word has collaboration features they’re too unreliable. My group ended up writing all the material for our senior project in LaTeX just because there’s really no better way to prepare professional-looking documents with a team.