latex-wochenende/slides/why-use-latex.en.md

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@title What is LATEX?

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@title Origin

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  • Donald Knuth, 19771986: typesetting system TeXτεχ → /tɛç, tɛx, tɛk/ for The Art of Computer Programming
  • Leslie Lamport, from 1980s: software package LaTeX made TeX easier to use
Donald Knuth
Leslie Lamport

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@title 5 Reasons for LaTeX

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  1. Besides Word, LaTeX is one of the two dominant typesetting systems in the academic world.
  2. ++ Mathematical formulas feel most at home in LaTeX. This is why the LaTeX formula notation has been integrated into numerous other tools (e.g. OneNote, Word, Wikipedia, …).
  3. ++ There are countless packages for the most diverse areas of application.
  4. ++ LaTeX was developed to produce aesthetically pleasing typesettingand you can see that in the texts it produces.
  5. ++ Complex documents typeset in LaTeX facilitate collaboration enormously (e.g. through versioning, proper document structuring, templates, reliable undo, …).

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@title LaTeX' Shortcomings

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  • Typesetting text can be cumbersome, especially for short documents.
  • Layout adjustments are only possible within certain limits.
The “LaTeX vs. Word” debate is very old. If you are interested in tracing it, we can recommend the following article as a starting point:

Moorhead, A.V. Is LaTeX use correlated with the number of equations in a manuscript?. Scientometrics 126, 82598273 (2021).

(TL;DR: LaTeX users make more errors, they need more time except when it comes to formulas, but they are happier with their tool.)

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@title Procedure of this workshop

@content Goal: you are going to build your own little
LaTeX manual based on our LaTeX script.

  • learning by doing
  • understanding how LaTeX works
  • details can be looked up later
**Outline:**
  1. What is LaTeX?
  2. How does LaTeX work?
  3. Basic structure of a LaTeX document
  4. Project structure
  5. Lots of features
  6. Reference management
  7. Outlook

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