Writing documents, reports or assignments is a need in our daily life. Whenever any writing issue pops up, we rush to open MS Word. No doubt MSW provides a variety of options to decorate your text. But there is an 'Elite member' in the family of writing editor software. Yes, and that is the LaTeX (pronounced Lay-tech) project!
What makes LaTeX different?
What will you think if someone says that you have to write codes to create a document! Just imagine in the MSW you have to write codes rather than sentences. LaTeX is somewhat like this. It is a document preparation system for high-quality typesetting. It is mostly used for technical or scientific documents. Unlike other editors, LaTeX requires markup tags to to design the document. And this feature makes it different from other software. It doesn't go with the What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) policy.
I hate coding!
Now it may be a passionate practice for the dedicated coders to use LaTeX while majority wants to avoid coding and for a simple document writing, who wants to take the pain of coding. Though coders may get angry as I'm addressing markup tagging as coding (!) but it's undoubtedly troublesome. Let us have a look why we need to prefer LaTeX.
Suppose you are writing a report in MSW. When you have plenty of options, you will surely want to present your document in the best manner. For this you will use different font size, style, color, etc.
This gives you two options;
✎ Your document may have an outstanding look but for this purpose you have wasted plenty of time.
✎ Both your design and time are wasted due to your poor designing sense and the document takes a horrible look!
LaTeX saves you from these problems. Here you need to focus on the content only and the necessary designs are done automatically by the software as it has an integrated designer.
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| LaTeX input & output |
LaTeX provides different additional software for proper functioning. Two fundamental things LaTeX require are,
✎ Converter: The markup tags need to be converted to document. This converted contains the necessary tools to do the job. The preferred one is the MikTeX.
✎ Reference Manager: For research documents and academia papers, attaching references are mandatory. Software like Mendeley, Jabref do the management and citation of the references. But these are also managed in the LaTeX. For that BibTex is integrated. It is a reference management software for formatting lists of references.
The LaTeX Projects provides the features as;
⌀ Typesetting journal articles, technical reports, books & slide presentations.
⌀ Control over large documents containing sectioning, cross-references, tables and figures.
⌀ Typesetting of complex mathematical formulas.
⌀ Advanced mathematical typesetting with AMS-LaTeX.
⌀ Automatic generation of bibliographies and indexes.
⌀ Multi-lingual typesetting.
⌀ Inclusion of artwork and process or spot color.
⌀ Using postscript of meta-font fonts.
Nomenclature!!
You might growing curious thinking what kind of awkward name LaTeX is! What does it mean actually? The temr TeX is derived from the ancient Greek τέχνη meaning skill/art/technique. Indeed it expresses the uniqueness of the software, don't you think so?
Now it's up to you to decide whether you want to carry the pain or achieve the asset! Wait to know about the user interface of LaTeX.
Image source:
* Wikipedia
* Clean PNG
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