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Such software bundles open the door to authoring entire PDF documents in LaTeX. Word costs from US$8.25 a month per user as part of the broader Office software suite, although a Microsoft spokesperson says that the company does offer free access to the online version of Word for researchers based at some institutions.
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All are free to download and use, and include tools for compiling LaTeX ‘source code’ into a PDF.
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Users hoping to dive into LaTeX can install a LaTeX software bundle, such as MiKTeX for Windows, MacTeX for Mac OS, or TeX Live for Linux.
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Similarly, users of LibreOffice, a free alternative to Word, can code equations with an extension called TeXMaths, which converts LaTeX syntax into a PNG or SVG image. The downside, she says, is that the software inserts the equation into the document as an image, “which is fine for peer review, but unpopular for typesetters”.
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Katie Lotterhos, a marine and environmental scientist at Northeastern University in Boston, says this combination of tools works particularly well for her, because most of her collaborators do not know how to use the typesetting language. Microsoft says that “most” LaTeX expressions are supported, although its website lists 20 keywords that are not (such as \degree, the degree symbol).įor Google Docs users, the Auto-LaTeX add-on can turn LaTeX equations into embedded images. Word users can also write directly in LaTeX syntax, and then click to convert it into a formatted equation. He inserts a few lines of LaTeX code into a web form - no installation is required - and MathJax renders equations in a web page.
For example, Allington uses the online tool MathJax.
When it came to text and tables, Word proved faster and users were less prone to making errors, although LaTeX users “more often report enjoying using their respective software”, the authors noted.Įven LaTeX critics such as Daniel Allington, a computational social scientist at King’s College London who has inveighed on his blog against what he calls ‘LaTeX fetish’, acknowledges that it handles equations better than alternatives.īut, Allington points out, scientists today can use LaTeX’s equation syntax without abandoning what-you-see-is-what-you-get editors. Indeed, equations were the only feature in which LaTeX outperformed Word in the 2014 study that compared the two tools. The browser-based editor Overleaf provides an overview of LaTeX equation formatting at go./2eh1daz. Plain text is wrapped inside commands that describe its formatting (for example, for italics, \textitx dx. Unlike ‘what you see is what you get’ text editors such as Word, LibreOffice and OpenOffice, writing in LaTeX is like programming.
“Word is when ‘good enough’ is OK and/or I’m working with folks who need to use it.” Coding equations “For me, LaTeX is the tool when I want to get the typesetting just so,” says Casey Greene, a bioinformatician at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Other text editors also support elements of LaTeX, allowing newcomers to use as much or as little of the language as they like. In 2017, Microsoft made it possible to use LaTeX’s equation-writing syntax directly in Word, and last year it scrapped Word’s own equation editor. Over the past few years however, the line between the tools has blurred. The article has been viewed more than 240,000 times so far. Nejasmic PLoS ONE 9, e115069 2014) that asked scientists from different fields to put both Microsoft Word and LaTeX to the test ended up being one of the ten most discussed papers online the following year, according to data-science company Altmetric (Altmetric is owned by Digital Science, a firm operated by the Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, which has a share in Nature’s publisher, Springer Nature). Others regard the software as too complicated for all but the most demanding of tasks. Proponents embrace LaTeX because of the total control it offers for document layout, or because it represents a blow to commercial software developers, particularly Microsoft. Since its development in 1985, LaTeX has become popular in disciplines such as mathematics, physics and computer science. The open-source software system - used to create and precisely format scientific manuscripts - is more akin to coding than writing. But for scientists in other fields the merits of LaTeX have largely gone unnoticed. LaTeX or Word? For physicists and mathematicians, the choice is obvious.