LaTeX had many advantages in the past, but not anymore. Why do physicists still stick to it?

If you aren’t a physicist or a mathematician, chances are that you never heard of Latex in your life. You didn’t miss much though.

LaTeX is a markup language used to write complex texts in plain-text editors. For example, you open your notepad, write:

\documentclass[a4paper]{article}
\usepackage[english]{babel}
\title{A \LaTeX{} Example}
\date{}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
\section{A beautiful equation}
\LaTeX{} is great at typesetting mathematics. The time dependent Schr{\"o}dinger equation, for instance, is simply written as
$$i\hbar \frac{\partial}{\partial t}\Psi \left(\mathbf{r},t\right)=
\hat{H}\Psi\left(\mathbf{r},t\right).$$
\end{document}

And this code can be rendered to:

Physicists love LaTeX. It’s difficult to explain why. I guess it’s a mixing of diverse psychological traits. A bit of sense of superiority: physicists don’t see the universe, they see its source code with laws of physics and LaTeX cryptic scripting. Or maybe it’s some ascetic Protestantism subtly infiltrating the scientific spirit, whispering that the truth can only be achieved through suffering.

Either invoking Freud or Weber, physicists’ adherence to a markup language so far away from any reasonable writing experience with comfortable WYSWYG text editors is laughable.

I remember I had a colleague in the college, who used to write simple notes with TeX. Ready for lunch, he wanted to stick a note at his door: “\textbf{I will be back at 13:00}.” Render, re-render, and we standing there starving but immensely proud of his bravery.

I’m a physicist and as such I was trained to use LaTeX. I wrote my first papers and my PhD thesis using it. But then I converted to Microsoft Word over a decade ago and I didn’t see myself using LaTeX again, except on few occasions when a co-worker intransigently demanded my soul devotion to the manuscript.

Over the years, I learned that all the proclaimed advantages of LaTeX are solidly fossilized in the 1990’s conjuncture.

Let me make my case.

Computer power

It’s true, there was once a time when writing a long or complex text with WYSWYG editors was utterly painful. I did use Word for my Master dissertation and I still remember how Carla’s PC 486 struggled, and trembled, and rattled under the burden of each new page I added.

Back then, in the late 1990s, if you had to edit a long document full of equations, LaTeX really was the only reasonable option. But those times are far gone. Today, I could use Word or Pages on any ordinary computer to  write the same dissertation without any trouble.

Efficiency

LaTeX users also claim that this keyboard-based language makes easier to write complex math, than with mouse-based visual equation editors. It’s true, If you are trapped to mouse edition, it may take forever to write a complex formula. But keyboard math edition isn’t exclusivity of LaTeX anymore. I work with MathType plugged to Word and the equation edition is as straightforward as with LaTeX.

Indeed, MathType even allows me to write in LaTeX if I wish, but it isn’t worth doing it.

I did a short experiment. I wrote the time-dependent Schrödinger equation with both, LaTeX and MathType. In both cases I only used the keyboard, no mouse. For MathType, I worked with factory-settings and standard keyboard shortcuts, without any command redefinition. Here are the results:

Then, I counted how many keys I stroke to type the equation on each editor.

Using MathType, it costed me 64 keystrokes. With LaTeX, 141.

To be sincere, I’m even a bit surprised with such a difference. Based only on the number of keystrokes, to write the equation with MathType in Word was more than twice as fast as to write it with LaTeX.

Tweet: To write an equation with Word is more than twice as fast as to do it with LaTeX. http://ctt.ec/Dh7z4+

In fact, a recent paper in Plos One showed that, when asked to rewrite a three pages manuscript, “LaTeX users were slower than Word users, wrote less text in the same amount of time, and produced more typesetting, orthographical, grammatical, and formatting errors. On most measures, expert LaTeX users performed even worse than novice Word users.”

Transferability

Another supposed advantage of LaTeX is transferability. There also was a time when to open a Word document in another platform than Windows was an adventure in hell. Your document would pop up on the screen full of ♠strange characters and formatting errors.

With LaTeX, if you shared the same packages, you could render your final document in any platform. This certainly was an exclusive virtue of LaTeX, but, again, not anymore. I don’t remember the last time I had transfer problems with Word. Because this editor is a major player in the market, any other editor and operational system are adapted to deal with its format. (Well, to be sincere, there’s still plenty of room for improvement under Android.)

Structure

There is a myth gossiped in the corridors of physics departments that you can’t get hierarchic text (sections, subsection) and automatically ordered elements (figures, tables, references) with Word. These are essential features for an academic text and LaTeX was designed to handle them very well.

As any myth, this one is also just bullshit. If someone can’t have properly structured text with Word, it just means they don’t know how to use it.

Aesthetics

Finally, LaTeX users use to claim that LaTeX texts look better than those with Word. Well, here the argument descends into subjectivity’s mist. Just check again the Schrödinger equation typed within both editors; can anyone really tell that one looks better than the other?

But even if LaTeX looked better, so what? Manuscripts are not final products. They are processed by a publisher and the paper’s final appearance is completely independent of the text editor we’ve used.

A personal choice

When I write, I really love to see the text taking shape as I craft it. I don’t want to have to compile my markup code to see the result of my intervention.

Moreover, I do a lot of collaborative work. Anyone can read and edit my Word manuscripts, even LaTeX enthusiasts. But I may really have a communication problem if I send a LaTeX manuscript to a colleague not used to it.

And about students? If there is no real advantage of LaTeX over good WYSWYG editors, why should they waste their time learning it?

But these are just my personal impressions. I’m not one of those fanatics ridiculously rooting for a product.

I’m sure that we can write excellent papers with LaTeX, Pages, Word, or whatever high-level editor we chose. In the same way, we can do amazing science, no matter whether our laptops breath Windows, Mac, or Linux. We can efficiently program with either Fortran or C++, as well as we can efficiently procrastinate with either Netflix or Amazon Prime.

It’s all a question of choosing our tools. And whatever we choose, the only thing that matters is: we must truly master them.

MB

Answer: The left equation was written with LaTeX; the right one, with MathType.