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In this moment i am learning TeX and is grate to create manuals with tables and images.

You should switch to typst instead of LaTex.

Thanks...its coming in few weeks in PhD ...so your help is really appreciated.

Hey Chris, great video. Thank you!

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

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.

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.

Study a year before prelims? We have 3-4 weeks prep time and thats it.

Use groff!

so informative! great video!

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.

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.

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

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

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

I use Zotero with the better bibtex plugin which lets you export your reference database as a .bib file.

Excellent video! Thank you for sharing, Chris.

This is the workflow that I also follow for my scientific papers. Thanks for the video.

Impressive and helpful

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.

Critical FEA applications MUST only be conducted with error correcting memory ECC. Just ONE bit flip error in a simulation that takes hours will invalidate your results. Threadripper does support ECC, this is what use in my own engineering consulting company.

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

Amazing video. Thank you. To the point, clearly explained, no extra fillers and well informed.

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…

Thanks!

great stuff.......just in time

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 ...

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

This is so useful! I am just planning my master thesis

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

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

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.

Great info!

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

thank you so much for sharing the experiences, could you please you written work, then we can see clearly the organization of the work!

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

Word cross references existed at least in DOS version 5.5.

Thanks Dr. Harig for this video!

Hello Prof. Chris, I just found your channel (binge watch your videos) and I must say it’s been a real opener. More grease to your elbows. I personally use Endnote as my reference manager but thinking of switching to zootero. Reason is at times, when I insert a citation, the bibliography changes and then I have to manually edit some of them. Looking forward to more of your videos. Also, already subscribed, cheers!

Regarding the motherboard, that is when you tax Amazon in the reviews, give them a one-star and explain why you gave them that rating.

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.

This is not an option. It's mandatory

Right as I am searching for some good programs. Thanks for the helpful advice!