What is LaTeX and Why You Should Care

Introduction

Every time there is a link to a resource even remotely related to academia, it's available only in a weird format that looks like it was invented by Martians three thousand years ago while they were stuck on a strange planet light-years away from home. It's never something you can easily open - it's not HTML, not a Word document, not a text file. You're lucky if it's PDF. Most of the time it's PostScript or a mysterious DVI format that nobody outside of a select group of High Priests of Martianic Church knows how to open.

Reading the article ends up being a scavenger hunt for utilities found on obscure FTP mirrors of some .edu domains that end up having a user interface from Stone Age. While you search for these utilities you will undoubtedly see a few references to LaTeX which at first glance appears to be some document format invented by the aforementioned group of homesick Martians and requires ten pages just to explain what exactly it is it does. When you finally manage to open the file you're greeted by a word "abstract" instead of a word "summary" and as you try to scroll through the article you find that the scroll wheel abruptly stops at the end of the first page. You glance at the toolbar to find a "next page" button and see a row of various arrows with no immediately decipherable meaning. This is the final straw. You curse the ivory towers inhabitants in all known tongues for wasting ten minutes of your life, close the document without ever actually really looking at it, and go on with your life trying to block this painful encounter forever.

That's a pity. A little bit more persistence and you would have discovered a document processing nirvana.

PostScript

The first thing critical reading courses teach is that analyzing a piece of text involves analyzing its author's intent. Who is the author? What is the target audience? Why is the author writing to the target audience in the first place? If you're trying to understand a piece of writing, answering these questions is half the battle. For example, the target audience for a blogger is anyone who will listen. Bloggers tend to write to drive traffic as high as they can either to make money off advertising and affiliate programs, or to become famous, or, as yours truly, as part of a treacherous secret plot to take over the world.

Of course academic writers aren't bloggers. They couldn't care less about traffic or adsense. Most of the time they have too much on their minds to think about becoming famous. They're not even trying to take over the world. The only thing they dream about in the showers and in their sleep and on their way to work is getting published.

Whenever someone tries to go anywhere in academia beyond the undergraduate degree, they hear this phrase far more than they can handle without going insane. "I need to get published." "Are you published?" "Where is he published?" Published, published, published. The Holy Grail for anyone in academia is getting published in a prestigious journal in their field. If you're a graduate student, that's what you need to get a PhD someone except your mother will care about. If you already have a PhD, that's what you need to get a job as a professor in a good university. If you're already a professor, that's what you need to get and keep government grants for research. Even if you're an undergraduate, publishing an article nobody will ever read in a journal nobody has ever heard of can help you get into a good graduate program.

So, if you're an academic writer, you aren't going to write your article for the general public. You aren't even going to write it for fellow scientists. You're going to write it for people who hold your academic future in their hands - the journal editors. And journal editors are a very particular bunch that likes to receive submissions that adhere to strict guidelines.

I am not familiar with the dark underworld of journal publishing so I won't get into details, but the idea is simple. The work of the editors eventually ends up on the table of folks called the publishers. These are the people that take a piece of text, feed it into printing machines, get thousands of copies, and distribute them to subscribed recipients. The publishers couldn't care less about what they're printing - they just want to get it in a format that their printing machines understand. And this format isn't a Word document. Because publishers deal with huge volumes and very different types of documents, they want to receive them in a very specific format. A format that tells them exactly how and where to print every dot. They don't want to hear anything about paragraphs of text or tables of numeric values. They want to know how many inches from the left margin should the printer put the first dot and at what offset to put the next.

Now, back to the journal editors. Every day their mailbox contains dozens of submissions from every poor shmuck that wants the honor of being published in their periodical. They have to read through the submissions and only pick the best work to make sure they don't print something that doesn't make sense and make their journal look stupid¹. The last thing they want to deal with is converting the submissions from whatever exotic format the authors decided to write them in to whatever peculiar format the published requires. So the journals set strict guidelines - you can only send submissions in PostScript or DVI (which incidentally turn out to be the formats their publishers accept).

Of course if you're Albert Einstein you can engrave your submission on a piece of rock, ship it to the journals via FedEx, and make them pay the bill. They'll be head over heels to accept it and do the format conversion work. But if you're Joe Mediocre, Ph.D., submitting your tenth paper in ten years on individual differences versus social dynamics in the formation of aquarium fish dominance hierarchies² to account for how you spent public funds granted to you by the NSF, you better submit your paper in PostScript. You know what'll happen if you don't. You won't get published this year, the NSF will take your grants away, you'll get kicked out of the faculty without tenure (why keep you around if you don't bring in any research money?), and you won't be able to unconditionally get university pay for the rest of your life without ever actually producing useful work.

LaTeX

These days there are add-ons for Microsoft Word that allow you to save your documents in PostScript. In the old days, when Word wasn't available, people used a format called LaTeX. It was a structured human readable format not unlike XML. People wrote their documents in text editors using LaTeX tags to specify sections, subsections, paragraphs, etc. After they were done with their document they ran it through a program that used stylesheets (conceptually not very different from CSS) to render a LaTeX document into another format (more often than not the end result was PostScript but it could just as easily have been HTML, PDF, DVI, etc.) Back then if you didn't like LaTeX you were forced to use it for a number of reasons. There were no other alternatives to generate PostScript files. Even if you could create one directly, different journals expected different formatting to fit their overall style. The only way to accommodate this requirement was to use LaTeX along with the stylesheets the journals provided³.

Now that the old days are long gone and word processors come preinstalled with every machine, why should we care about this remnant of history? The answer is that remarkably LaTeX is much better suited for composing and distributing most types of documents than any other modern word processor on the market that I am aware of. Just like programming languages tend to converge towards Lisp because it got things right the first time around, so do the Word Processors tend to converge towards LaTeX.

Separation Of Markup And Presentation

When I started writing articles for defmacro, I did it in Microsoft Word. This was the word processor I've used since high school, throughout college, and at work. I saw no reason not to use it for writing articles for this website. I soon discovered that I'm not being very productive. It turned out that when writing documents that have valuable content - documents that cannot be written in a single evening and that people might want to read (unlike my college papers), Microsoft Word hindered me more often than it managed to provide assistance. Amazingly, I was far more productive writing articles directly in XHTML using Emacs (the best editor I've ever used⁴).

Aside from the obvious requirement to be able to efficiently edit text I needed my word processor to help me do two things: specify the structure of my document as I write it and let me style it later. Surprisingly Microsoft Word isn't very good for creating documents in this manner. While it supports styling and structural markup, it doesn't in any way encourage it. By default it's much easier to mark a selection as bold than to emphasize it using markup. XHTML, on the other hand, is different. I can only specify structure. If I try to use old HTML styling tags, it doesn't validate. This way I can focus on the content of my document and its structure. I can style it with CSS later. I can even provide different styles for my site, for printing, and for other sites that might want to publish my articles.

It is common wisdom among programmers that information and the way it's presented should be separated. A well defined boundary between markup and styling allows to easily add other ways to present information. Additionally, it greatly enhances the ability to change information independently from its presentation. These are both very desirable properties and they are not limited to web pages. None of the mainstream word processors that I am aware of promote this paradigm. If I want to write documents this way I'm left with relatively few alternatives. XHTML and CSS are one, but they're relatively new technologies designed specifically for document distribution over HTTP. There is no easy way to convert my XHTML document along with appropriate CSS stylesheets to a single file I could send someone over e-mail. LaTeX does better. Once I create a LaTeX document I can easily convert it to any format I am interested in, including XHTML and Microsoft Word Document. I can compose documents the way I like and distribute them to the world in any format that happens to be fashionable at the time. As a bonus LaTeX has tags for almost everything I may want to specify in my documents. And if it doesn't, I can extend it with my own.

Modern office suites are already moving towards markup and styling. It will take them many years to embrace this paradigm completely and shed the legacy of styling interleaved with the document - a very poor design for obvious reasons. On the other hand, LaTeX is here today and there is no reason for us to to wait for word processors to catch up.

Open Document Format

For the past couple of years there has been a big debate sparked by the OpenDocument Format Alliance. Companies and governments decided they no longer want to be restricted to using Microsoft Word to edit and distribute their documents and came up with a radical idea that their information should be stored in an open format in order to allow competing word processors to have a real chance to win market share. Of course OpenDocument isn't here yet. Nobody can agree on the tags and Microsoft doesn't want to let go of market domination it has achieved by locking people into their format.

There is no reason for OpenDocument Format Alliance to reinvent the wheel and there is no reason for us to wait until they're done. LaTeX is already here. When you create your next document, let it rise to the occasion. The format is open and has a wide variety of standard tags. It is human readable and can be modified in a multitude of editors from Notepad, to Emacs, to visual editors like Lyx. Additionally, LaTeX has a wide pool of available importers and exporters - you can import pretty much any document into LaTeX, modify it, and export it back into any format you like (from Word to HTML to PDF). LaTeX has everything an open, portable, extensible format should have. The only thing missing is the hype.

What's next?

Word Processors are the least useful components of modern office suits. An argument about Microsoft Word vs. Word Perfect is a false dilemma as there are better alternatives. Don't let LaTeX intimidate you. Once you play around with it and take some time to understand it, it becomes obvious that it's a very natural design - another proof that most great software was designed early in computer history. It may seem alien and dated but behind the cover there is a very powerful way to compose and distribute documents. Do a google search on LaTeX and you'll find plenty of tools equipped to edit LaTeX documents (this is somewhat like a multitude of HTML editors out there). Alternatively, if you don't feel like learning LaTeX tags, download Lyx - a visual document processor that takes care of the details behind the scenes.

Comments?

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