LaTex vs. Word vs. etc [closed]
Closed by System on Feb 10, 2012 at 16:44
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I'm a student and I write many labs, reports, letters, and fun little things. I use Latex for school because I don't have to worry about formatting, i.e, its like "programming" my paper and can scale to any type of print media (ex. books, newsletters, mailings, thesis papers).
If I were to take my writing to the next level and continue to improve my writing, would investing in Latex path be worth the time, or should I just stick with Word or some other platform?
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Any text-based "markup" format -- LaTeX, HTML, various XML schemas like DocBook, etc -- will serve you better than binary formats like Word, Pages, FrameMaker, etc. (I am aware that some of these tools export XML or SGML.) The reasons include:
Decoupling from editors. You can use your favorite tool to edit any of these, which gives you more flexibility.
Conversion to other formats is probably easier and at least no worse. If you want to take your Word document and convert it to HTML for your blog, probably you're going to end up cutting and pasting and re-adding the format directives. Converting from LaTeX to HTML, on the other hand, can probably be largely scripted (hedge because I'm very rusty with LaTeX). If your document is 5 pages long maybe you don't care much; if it's 500 pages, or you're going to be doing this a lot, you do.
It's a better foundation for producing output for multiple platforms. Depending on what you're doing you might only need to change a style sheet to go from book-style output to newsletter-style output, for instance.
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Depending on what you do with your writing, you may end up having to produce a Word document. For example, many academic journals take only Word format (even, in one case I am aware of, when they simply turn around and use a commercial Word-to-LaTeX converter as the first step in their page-layout process!).
If you are likely to be in a situation in the near future where Word documents will be required, you should stay familiar with it, and you may find expertise with LaTeX specifically to be less applicable than you hoped in those situations where it would be nicest to have it. Otherwise, LaTeX or another markup format will give you more flexibility (and cost less and look better).
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/5004. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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