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Introductions

Typesetting as History. TeX & LaTeX

On March, 30th 1977, Professor Donald Knuth, a computer scientist at Stanford University, wrote in his diary after receiving the typeset proofs of his book "The Art of Computer Programming":

“Galley proofs for vol. 2 finally arrive, they look awful... (typographically). I decide I have to solve the problem myself.”

And so it began. During the next years, Professor Knuth and his colleagues developed TeX to solve the hardest problems with typesetting: automatic line breaking, hyphenation and mathematical typesetting. TeX gained traction as it was (and still is):

  • A high-quality typesetting system;
  • Highly flexible and programmable (turing complete: example 1; example 2);
  • Free (as in beer and speech);
  • Portable.

While Professor Knuth still maintains TeX, during the 1980s active development was frozen in favor of feature stability. During the 1990s TeX started showing its age with the rising popularity of new formats such as PDF (replacing PostScript and DVI). The latest bug-fixing version update was published in 2021 bumping TeX to version 3.141592653 as the "The TEX tuneup of 2021". You can read the changelog here.

Quoting Professor Knuth:

As in 2008 and 2014, both TEX and METAFONT have changed slightly and gained new digits in their version numbers. But again there’s good news, because the changes are essentially invisible

In short:

TeX is both a program (which does the typesetting, tex-core)
and format (a set of macros that the engine uses, plain-tex).

On the other hand:

LaTeX is a generalized set of macros to let you do many things (such as sections, title pages, bibliographies) From LaTeX Stack Exchange

What is LaTeX?

LaTeX was invented so that nobody would have to write prose in TeX, which is too hard for ordinary mortals.
Daniel Allington's1

LaTeX is not a stand-alone typesetting program in itself, but document preparation software that runs on top of the TeX typesetting system. TeX distributions usually bundle together all the parts needed for a working TeX system and they generally add to this both configuration and maintenance utilities. Nowadays LaTeX, and many of the packages built on it, form an important component of any major TeX distribution.

LaTeX vs WYSIWYG

Let's go straight into LaTeX's main disadvantage:

Compared with WYSIWYG tools, like Word, the learning curve for LaTeX is remarkably steep.

While tools/services such as Overleaf lower the adoption barrier, you still need to find it, get the hang of the basic commands that are a click away in other text processing applications.

Also, if you understand it and are able to set up your documents correctly (or you are using good quality templates), you can produce decent looking documents in Word.

The evidence for the use of LaTeX is also not very bright. Talking about the efficiency of document preparation systems Knauff M and Nejasmic J, (2014)2 write:

On most measures, expert LaTeX users performed even worse than novice Word users

and even:

even experienced LaTeX users may suffer a loss in productivity when LaTeX is used, relative to other document preparation systems

Another good writeup is Daniel Allington's1 2016 blog post "The Latex Fetish" where he breaks most arguments in favor of using LaTeX for writing, pointing to how LaTeX should instead be used as a typesetting tool (to publish documents) and not as a writing tool.

If and when you are aware of these shortcomings, however, LaTeX is a good tool that:

  1. Enables you to create beautifully typeset documents without great effort
  2. Allows you to separate the content of your writing from the formatting and the typesetting process;
  3. Enables you to use tools such as source code versioning to track changes.

While, overall, this sections does not shine a very positive light on LaTeX, I think this is important for you to understand that there are a lot of drawbacks to it. If it fits in your tool set and on the mental model you apply to how you choose and use your tools it can be an extraordinary powerful one, but it can also indre you and the creative process in general.
Wield it with care.

Files instead of Apps

File over app is a philosophy: if you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools that give you this freedom.

Steph Ango - CEO of Obsidian3

As implied by the quote by Steph Ango, while this falls more on the philosophical perspective of technology use, LaTeX follows the principle of files instead of apps which I tend to drift towards. Files (and text files in particular) are the definition of versatility. They give you the freedom and control to manipulate the content you create in any way you see fit, using any tool that you desire.

As a quick example, I'm right now, writing a simple plain text file:

  • using Markdown4 for markup (LaTeX for the upcoming published);
  • VSCode as the text editor; and
  • MkDocs to generate the static site you're reading.

Three different projects that I can string together in a workflow that works for me and that is all based on manipulating the content, as in the Files, that I'm generating. If my needs (or preferences) change I can easily change any of these tools without much hassle!

  1. Reader in Social Analytics at King’s College London - Institutional homepage ↩↩

  2. Knauff M, Nejasmic J (2014) An Efficiency Comparison of Document Preparation Systems Used in Academic Research and Development. PLoS ONE 9(12): e115069. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0115069 ↩

  3. Steph Ango's blog post "File over app" ↩

  4. Lightweight markup language for formatted text using plain text created by John Gruber. Read more about markdown ↩

Last update: December 5, 2023