Yes. You can leave now.

If you are a STEM student, chances are that you might heard of a thing called LaTeX that supposedly you neet to learn to write your thesis or a paper. Then you made some research and said “wait, do I have to code?“. Then wondered why the hell would someone want to use such an archaic tool that is much cumbersome to use than Microsoft Word, what a waste of time.

If that is the case, let me tell you that LaTeX is perhaps one of the most useful tools that you might want to learn in your STEM career.

What is LaTeX?

LaTeX, pronounced as laytek or lahtek, is simply another way of typesetting documents. The most common way of making a document nowadays is by using something similar to Microsoft Word, in the sense that what you see is what you get. In this paradigm, you see and edit the document exactly as it will be seen by others.

On the other hand, when using LaTeX you do not write directly on the document that others will see, but on a separate text file that focuses on the structure and content of your document. Then, this file needs to be compiled into a PDF or DVI by a TeX distribution.

A LaTeX document is separated into two regions

1. A preamble that contains all of the setup of the document such as margins, fontsize, document type, colors to be used etc.
2. The document contents.

By doing separating the setup of the document from the content itself, LaTeX makes it very easy to focus on the content itself rather than on the formatting. The format of the document is declared in the preamble and will never change unless explicitly stated somewhere. Additionally, since all of the formatting is contained in one place, making lots of format changes to the document takes little effort and time.

It is not difficult, just a different approach.

Do I have to program?

No.

LaTeX is NOT programming (for the most part) as it has no logic. Although it might feel like programming, it is not. In LaTeX you write specific instructions on what to put on the final document with no logic whatsoever.

There is some logic involved if you ever make very complicated documents, but it is very simple to just create a document.

Why should I use it instead of Word?

STEM documents are very involved and have lots of details that are very simple to manipulate in LaTeX, the most common is writing equations. Writing equations in general is really cumbersome, but in LaTeX is very manageable.

Other advantages are

1. Automatic figure numbering.
2. Automatic table numbering.
3. Automatic referencing in any format.
4. Figures, tables and equations have labels, so references to them update automatically if the ordering changes.
5. Lightweight. You can run LaTeX in a toaster.
6. Documents look beautiful by default.
7. Most journals will require you at some point to write your paper in LaTeX anyway, so you should better know how to use it.

Where should I start?

Overleaf is an online platform that lets you make LaTeX documents and collaborate with other people. You can follow this guide and watch the video tutorials there to get a good idea.

For a local setup. You need two things

1. A LaTeX distribution like TeX Live or MikTeX
2. A text editor. I typically use Vim, and in the past I used VS Code. But for starters it is better to install a dedicated LaTeX editor like TeXstudio.

Final remarks

LaTeX seems difficult, but it is not, it is simply a different approach to what you are used to and it comes with lots of benefits in the long run. For Academia it is basically a necessity.

At first it will be cumbersome, but after some practice, it will become second nature. You can do it!