The LaTeX fetish (2016)
I&#x27;ll bite as a LaTeX <i>and</i> Google Docs fetishist. Don&#x27;t worry, I&#x27;m not taking this argument too seriously but if you happen to find some good arguments in there, please do tell!<p>&gt; Seriously, anyone who believes that making people type this…<p>Just an introductory argument against it, not going into that. I&#x27;m looking for meat. Hmm... meat :)<p>&gt;  I know a number of academic authors who seem to spend considerable amounts of time doing that. I shan’t say that this is worse, but is it really better?<p>I did that too, but just because I wanted to be geeky. Was it useful? No. Would I have done this in a word processor? No. But the fact that I get to enjoy LaTeX by being geeky gives me a good feeling to return to it and write in it. Sounds like I have a fetish? I do! And not only one ;-)<p>&gt; When it comes to stopping people from creating documents in purple 28pt Comic Sans, teaching them all to use LaTeX is a lot less efficient than stating that you will refuse to read anything that doesn’t match the style guide.<p>But LaTeX does have better alignment and justification algorithms. You won&#x27;t see the difference, unless you&#x27;re starting to compare it with a word processor [1].<p>&gt; LaTeX does less to prevent authors from getting on with writing documents than TeX does. But if neither of the two existed, and you had to come up with something, right now, in 2016 – would it really be a markup language?<p>It depends, I see that people use Markdown for these reasons. And for my resume writing this is definitely true. The template also looks quite nice and I wouldn&#x27;t know how to design a beautiful resume.<p>&gt; we have LaTeX evangelism and the false implication that word processors don’t facilitate structured writing at all.<p>I wrote big documents in Word, Google Docs and LaTeX. I prefer LaTeX (my Gdocs fetish is with short documents or any psychology paper I&#x27;d need to write collaboratively).<p>&gt; In sum, the case for writing in LaTeX is more than a little weak.<p>My reasons:<p>1. Automatic reference list generation (never saw psych. students use it in Word). I still don&#x27;t know APA but I never got minus points for my bibliography.<p>2. The ability to comment. This has been huge for me (as in 10% to 20% better grades in writing huge) Yes, you can do this in Word and yes it also distracts me, when I do this on Overleaf it doesn&#x27;t distract me. If I want to read, I read the PDF, if I want to write or edit and get meta information, I type.<p>3. Super quick restructuring thanks to include. There have been many times where I needed to quickly move +30 pages to a completely different location. It just takes one line.<p>4. Crash resistant: one time there was this psychology student who had her Word document crashed and unsaved. I had to use the command line to copy some temporary saved file that Word didn&#x27;t recognize (apparently...) and tweak it in order to restore it. It took me an hour. LaTeX is a text file.<p>5. Tikz: I needed to create a graph and wanted to do it programmatically. Tikz is love, Tikz is life.<p>6. Knitr: I wanted to be ultra precise and focus on purely reproducable research, with Knitr you can put R formulas into LaTeX and calculate stuff. I handed in my source and PDF, my psychology teacher thought I was a wizard.<p>7. Different thinking cycle: by hitting compile and waiting for a bit you get some idle time to mind wander. For me it takes the pressure off and sometimes makes me anxious to see the result.<p>8. Fetish effect: you start to care about typography and the like (see [1]). Sometimes it isn&#x27;t the programming language itself but the community behind it that makes it so powerful (Hello JavaScript! NodeOS is wonderfully hilarious! ;-) ).<p>9. Wizard effect: psychology students would leave me alone because they had no clue what I was doing. It also made me look smart :P Is this an argument? Hmm... I have a fetish, you pick out the good ones ;-)<p>10. Placing images neatly immediately: oh wait, nope this is a downside. Unless you just put them all in the back which is what I do. It is also kind of neat because I tell people to print 3 bundles: (1) the text, (2) the images and (3) the bibliography and put them side by side so they can cross-reference things a lot faster. And with LaTeX include statements it&#x27;s easy to create 3 different PDFs as well.<p>11. Writing prose: whenever I want the feeling of &quot;ohhh I&#x27;m a writer now&quot; I open up LaTeX get a default template and start writing immediately. It beats Calibri by a landslide.<p>12. Just knowing that I have a programming language on hands. Whenever I have a programmatic problem, I can immediately use LaTeX. This is especially handy for: (1) bibliography references (a .bib file is secretly a database in disguise!) and (2) for making API calls to public data sets (have never done this but I could see the need to do it).<p>13. Oh yea, it&#x27;s free. Students have no money, err... I meant they are in debt. So free is nice. It&#x27;d be better if they give students money but that&#x27;s a utopia for another day.<p>Let&#x27;s leave it on 13, consider it my lucky number ;-)<p>[1]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;nitens.org&#x2F;taraborelli&#x2F;latex" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;nitens.org&#x2F;taraborelli&#x2F;latex</a>