Skill transfer - Word to LaTeX

Prior to my generation, I was told people would hold seminars and organize courses on text editing. Its difficulty is evading my sympathies, as I can not determine if it was worth it. I suppose getting a diploma in the area would grant you access to many administrative jobs. I kind of imagine that the goal of these courses was to train the dexterity of the hands, since these jobs demanded rapid document processing.

I grew up with the AZERTY French keyboard layout, I am positive that it has a linear learning curve, still, I learned that the layout is one of the least favourite among many communities online. Transitioning from AZERTY to QWERTY took some extra mental effort. After 4 years of using a German QWERTY layout, I honestly don’t want to go back. I still however fail to comprehend the dislike.

Naturally, It was imperative for students across the globe to write assignments on the computer at some point. The default windows text editors back then were enough for the tasks, but they were limited to editing the texts. Some of these assignments would have the students plug in some decorations to add more flavour to the text in the form of images and word art. Microsoft Word was the go to for these purposes, it was easy to use and offered intuitive functionalities.

I am glad I chose that assignment

Fast forward today, I was exposed to \(\LaTeX\) through an assignment that I had for the university and I was somehow sold the idea that it produces beautiful and professional academic documents. Most mathematicians that I follow online made contributions motivating its usage. Eventually, I started somehow to love the beauty of \(\LaTeX\) works, every time I saw scientific works done in \(\LaTeX\), I would feel a stronger desire to typeset something similar…Until I learned about its learning curve..

For the price of having high quality documents, I would have to create a .tex document, which isn’t a plug-and-play situation here much like with MS Word. On the surface, the structure and the coding part may look scary and intimidating, especially when making mistakes, some of which are forgivable, while others are quite punishing. Here, you would have to account for the many small details like the dimensions of the document, or you would risk having a teleporting tables or an entire section being deleted.

Having a template to work with allowed me to quickly grasp what’s going on without having to manually look up tutorials, since I would just have to create sections, cite references, and write some text. After playing around with \(\LaTeX\), I realized that it was made with some “automation” in mind, where for the most part, you would be working on setting up a workflow that reduces the amount of repetitive work, which may also increase your productivity as you produce long articles.

Learning \(\LaTeX\) took lots of patience, and honestly, it really paid off, because I could then transfer my skills to, funnily enough, HTML. And later, I was passively taught the idea that with such environments, everything is just a syntax play. I gained more confidence to typeset in \(\LaTeX\) the more I wrote.

Later I learned that you may use \(\LaTeX\) for purposes that are beyond writing articles, I used it to write my resume and even create some presentations. If done properly, both of which look very clean and organized.

If you wish to learn \(\LaTeX\), honestly just pick any template and start with it. Keep doing mistakes, and search how to fix them. It is frustrating, it requires lots of attention and patience, but it really pays off at the end of the day. There are resources everywhere and they are all well documented. One package that might require more courage is TikZ which might cause some headaches. I believe rolling in the mud and fighting through syntax hell contributes a lot to the learning effect.

Questioning its worth

Is it worth it ? It all depends on what you want to achieve. \(\LaTeX\) is slowly diverging towards more accessibility, still, I believe with the right setup, you can ensure similar results just by using MS Word as well. If you google “reasons to typeset in \(\LaTeX\)”, the average response juggles around: beauty and handling mathematic symbols, both of which can be maintained by using MS Word. After all, what matters is to meet the expectations of your assignments, I believe the medium should not matter, heck you can even deliver your assignments on written papers and no one would complain, as long as it’s readable of course.

As of the writing of this article, overleaf (One of the most recommended platforms) is becoming more aggressive with their premium marketing, limiting many of the basic functions that already were available to anyone. I recommend typesetting locally within your favourite code editor. This process is faster, presumebly because your local resources would be faster than relying on a server to compile your documents. Happy typesetting!