Most significant reasons that led us to (La)TeX

Question

Looking back, what really convinced you to begin writing with TeX or LaTeX?

This question is "community wiki", so there's no reputation to lose or to gain.

Please don't write advantages of TeX and LaTeX or any pros and cons.

I hope to read about something like

• a drastic experience that led you to TeX,
• a beautiful book, paper or poster that changed your view dramatically,
• a first big success with a (La)TeX creation,
• a person who inspired you.

Anything in this spirit would be great. Please post just a single reason or event in each answer. If you further shared a similar experience that you read here, voting that up would be fine.

Answer 1

In 1993, I was drafted in the army (at that time, army service was still mandatory in the Netherlands). I was placed at a communications centre that ran 24/7. Being a communications centre, we had access to quite a lot of good PC hardware for that time. Also, typically nothing much happened, and so we installed the then brand-new Slackware Linux distribution on a bunch of them, to toy with and study Unix system administration (as that was a lot safer than experimenting on the actual srv4 minicomputer we ran).

Slackware at the time came on 40 or so floppy disks, and about a quarter of them were marked 'TeX'. I remember thinking: if it is considered that important, it must be good ...

Answer 2

I've written my bachelor thesis in Microsoft Word (version 2003, if memory serves), and that was excruciatingly painful experience. It's not that I was new to Word, or that I can't find my way around a computer program, but it frustrated me to no end.

Word has automatic TOC creation and formatting, but there are occasions that you want to make it just right --- for example, trimming a bit a long section title to fit on one row (which in LaTeX is trivial).

As far as figures went, it worked mostly okay, unless you try to keep a figure on a specific page and manually try to adjust it to fit. Even the slightest change in the text moved all the stuff around, and I had to double check almost all of the figures again and again. Numbering worked okay-ish, though.

References.. Don't even get me started on references --- I had to manually format them all (30+ entries), and that Gargantuan effort took probably a better part of a workday.

Fortunately, I had a good equation editor (not the Microsoft-supplied excuse of a such), and that made writing equations a breeze.

Code formatting and pretty-printing was another thing I struggled with --- I ended up taking screenshots of the Matlab code from the editor, and adding those in the appendix. My nerves were seriously shaken and I didn't want to get through the painful manual formatting again.

So, just a few days before I finished the thesis, I went to complain about my miserable existence to my math go-to guy, and he showed me one of the exams he prepared for his students --- he was doing some black magic in vi in a terminal, and he had some Makefiles for additional stuff like automatic generation of the problems and the solutions, uploading them automatically to the server, and preparing a sheet with names of all students in which the results are to be published later. All this with a click of a button. To my jaw-dropped mug he said "Oh, it's just LaTeX". And then he explained some of the basic stuff, and gave me a book to read. (Knuth's, of course). That's how it started.

As for a personal LaTeX pride --- my master thesis is prepared with LaTeX, and I used quite a lot of functionality outside basic LaTeX --- subfigures, listings, ams packages, page margins, headers and footers, BibTeX, customized hyperref, plus more. I even made a .tex template that resembled the one we had in .doc format for thesis work.

Answer 3

I feel fortunate. The first OS I ever used was unix, my first year of university, and was told immediately to learn emacs and that all lab reports for a class I was in had to be done in LaTeX. It was over 5 years before I ever used any MS software, and I've never used it to any great degree since. And I find Word confusing as hell. It's always doing things that I don't want and then I have to spend time figuring out how to undo it. It's automatic capitalization features drives me nuts.

So I was bred on the beauty of LaTeX and thought that was normal. I was never faced with the decision to choose LaTeX over Word. For me the decision was the reverse: should I go with Word and dump LaTeX? At my first job everyone was using Word so I tried it. I found it too anti-intuitive, too ugly (I hate ragged-right justification for example), dangerous (lost docs on a semi-regular schedule due to Windows semi-regular crashing), and the learning curve was just too high (way higher than LaTeX, imo). I was always asking others how to undo something Word was just sure that I wanted to do but didn't. I gave up on Word and now only use when forced to, which is rare.

I'm still having trouble absorbing that Joseph wrote his thesis in Word.

Word's popularity is explained by my "Doughnut Theory" : If all you've ever eaten are doughnuts, you can tell a good doughnut from a bad doughnut, but you have no idea what good food is.

Answer 4

The same reasons that led Knuth to creating TeX in the first place: to have our math texts look good.

Answer 5

Invisible formatting in MS Word. So many times I had the bullets of a list become italicized or differently sized because somewhere (before?, in the item?, after? - never figured it out) there was or used to be a formatting of that sort.

And then I had to make some last minute changes to a paper written in Word but I was at a machine that only had OpenOffice. It wrecked the formatting. It looked good in OO, but when I opened it in Word the next day, I realized how the paper was submitted (the prof had Word).

That was the last straw.

Answer 6

I was an undergraduate at MIT in the early 1980s and used TeX ('78) for the first time to write my undergraduate thesis in Physics. I had been using something called Scribe in order to write essays and also played around with troff. Both were very limited in their ability to typeset mathematical content -- although I recall writing an essay on group theory using Scribe.

During my time working as an undergraduate research assistant at the Laboratory for Nuclear Science, I saw people producing beautifully typeset preprints with lots of mathematical formulae. I asked around and found out that they had been produced using TeX (which at the time was TeX '78) and which was installed on only a handful of computers at MIT at the time. I was converted immediately and wrote my 1984 undergraduate thesis using TeX. That version does not compile any longer, but at some point I converted it to LaTeX.

In graduate school in Stony Brook, TeX '82 (as the new version was called then) was available and this is what I used to typeset letters, notes, papers, thesis,... I always used TeX (with an increasing collection of macros) instead of LaTeX, until some time in the 1990s when LaTeX2e came out and I was persuaded to change. I liked the way my PhD thesis looked and I especially liked the fact that the macros made the source very readable. Visually it was perhaps not too striking.

In summary, it was an aesthetic choice based on the need to typeset documents with a complicated structure and substantial mathematical content.

Answer 7

In linguistics (my field), LaTeX offers many concrete advantages: automatic numbering/referencing of linguistic examples, automatic aligning of foreign language words/translations, automatic syntactic tree drawing; a full range of logic symbols, easy access to phonetic fonts etc., not to mention other basic academic requirements such as citations and bibliographies. When Mac OSX came out, running LaTeX became quite simple, and I made the switch then.

Answer 8

I recently co-authored a book for a major tech publisher. They formatted it using -- I kid you not -- MS Word.

The late stages of the editing process (where I was working with the publisher's .doc files instead of just sending them text) were so painful that I vowed to learn Tex and/or LaTeX before helping my mother self-publish her upcoming quilting book.

Answer 9

I like emacs and always want it to be able to fulfil my document preparation needs. LaTeX/TeX turns out to be the best solution. I make templates for most of the uninteresting documents and make them accessible through a key shortcut in emacs and thus I can produce documents no slower than people using word or the like.

Emacs extension used in the screenshot:

I have temporarily released minibuffer-choose.el at http://paste.lisp.org/display/113728. Most packages (org-mode included) when present choices to users use a message in the minibuffer (echo area to be precise) or a new buffer. This package actually uses the minibuffer so you get the experience of a real buffer and the convenience of the echo area. You can TAB, Shift-TAB, C-n, C-p, C-s, C-r, M-n, M-p or type directly the highlighted character to choose a choie. Example:

(let ((files (directory-files "/usr/local" t "[a-z]+")))
  (minibuffer-choose "Choose: " files 'file-name-nondirectory nil 'alpha))

Answer 10

Througout high school, I did all my math, physics and chemistry hand-ins in MS Word using Equation Editor, teaching myself the various short cuts, and patiently moving the equations back where they belonged when they for no apparent reason jumped. It was natural to continue this when I started at the university (and I had never heard of TeX/LaTeX). A few weeks later, my TA in linear algebra wrote "Come to the dark side. Learn LaTeX!" on one of my hand-ins. A week later, I was addicted :-)

Answer 11

When I was starting to attend university, I was truly enlightened by LaTeX. This system really absolved me from my previous troubles: When I high school, I used to fiddle with Microsoft Word. All went well, but, naturally, one of my friends did not have the correct version of Microsoft Office to open my file. This was when I started to think that the WYSIWYG approach is doomed.

Nowadays, I do not use Microsoft Word or OpenOffice Writer. Instead, I fire up my favourite text editor (vim *ducks*) and type anything in LaTeX: Memos, letters, documentation, papers, presentations, you name it. Coupled with the version control tool git, I can browse through the history of my works with ease, all the while never having to fear that something is lost.

I am not sure whether any word processor, how advanced it may be, can give me this feeling of bliss when simply concentrating on what I want to write, not how it should look. To quote Allin Cottrell:

One only has to imagine, say, Jane Austen wondering in what font to put the chapter headings of Pride and Prejudice to see how ridiculous the notion is. Jane Austen was a great writer; she was not a typesetter.

Answer 12

I'm a lawyer. I'm earning money by typing or speaking (Dragon became a lot better recently).

Typing into Word under pressure is horrible. It looks awfully. The program tries to outsmart me. It may crash.

LaTeX is much more easy going. Deadlines still are deadlines, but I know, as long as there's electricity, I'm gonna make it. It's reliable, if you know, what I mean. And the output is pretty.

Some years ago I delivered a legal due diligence written with Lyx for a bank in Kuwait and the customer was satisfied. My clients often can not judge whether I'm a good lawyer, but at least the pages look better than they are used to see.

Answer 13

I was in college and my friend told me about this LaTeX thing. I was initially totally dismissive, "Why would anyone want to compile a document?" As a computer science student, I had spent more than enough time waiting for programs to compile and couldn't imagine doing the same for my documents.

I forget the specifics, but I believe we had a (modern) algebra assignment to write up. My friend did his in LaTeX. I wrote mine in some "normal" text editor. After comparing the output and the relative difficulty of producing beautiful mathematics, I was a convert.

Answer 14

I was re-writing the documentation to our software (check out the LaTeX versions here). I like to write using lots of figure examples. I also like to write lots of cross-references. The trouble was, Word was an absolute train wreck. If I modified anything mid-document, all of my figures would end up pilled up at the bottom. My cross-references needed constant and manual updating... it just was not working.

I was in the middle of this nightmare when I was playing poker with some friends. I said something like, "I %^&*in' hate Word for what I'm doing. I wish there was something out there that was made for this."

Two of my poker buddies (both nerds) said, at the same time, "LaTeX!" They described it to me and I could not concentrate from then on. I was absolutely obsessed with finding out more.

I did and the rest, as they say, is history. I wrote my first manual (The Cablecast Guide) and have slowly built up quite a robust set of macros that define the style and common tools for everything from our documentation to our pricing guides.

It's been about 4 years with this work flow and I find myself, very often, looking for something better. LaTeX has its oddities. The drill is, I'll hear about something (Prince, DocBook) and then I think to myself, "This is it! The end of LaTeX! Now I can finally be rid of Longtable!"

This never pans out, however. 30+ years of LaTeX has lead to some pretty fantastic capabilities and indispensable packages (Datatool, TikZ).

Answer 15

It was a bottle of sherry for me!

I don't know quite how I first became aware of the existence of TeX - I installed Linux on my first PC (my first computer was a BBC Micro which didn't, back then, support Linux) because the people with whom I was friends at the time wouldn't have stayed my friends if I hadn't! So TeX came along with it, and I suppose that many of my lecturers used TeX (of some flavour) for typesetting notes and the like so it was "in the air" as it were.

So by the middle of the fourth year of my degree I was sufficiently aware of TeX, and it's importance in mathematics, that when a lecturer set a challenge problem (I think it was that A_5 is simple), I decided to write my solution in LaTeX in order to learn it (I guess I'd already absorbed the lesson that the best way to learn LaTeX is simply to Do It^{TM}). So I wrote up my solution and duly handed it in!

(I got the sherry)

Answer 16

Before using LaTeX, I created documents in OpenOffice.org and made extensive use of its semantic markup to format text (basically, I have never used the B, I and U buttons or the “font” selection in the formatting menu bar – I always created my own styles). Unfortunately, OOo had a few bugs that made this a real pain. Sometimes, changes in formatting were not adopted across the document. Sometimes, changes got mixed up.

Automatic references and figure numbering were also buggy as hell. Oh, and did I mention that I spent hours adjusting the word breaking and orphans to improve the overall look?

At some point I actually unzipped the document files (the .odf files are just renamed .zip containers) and edited the content XML manually to fix some wrongly nested markup.

So you can imagine that once I heard of LaTeX, my conversion was natural and immediate. But I was somewhat disappointed because LaTeX didn’t live up to my expectations of semantic markup: \textit? \textbf? Doesn’t sound very semantic to me. It took me some time to figure out that to work effectively in LaTeX, you need to define your own macros and use those. Once I learned this, I haven’t looked back.

Answer 17

I had to write my Ph.D. thesis and the only thing available was Word 3 on a Mac Plus (many years ago). But in the computer room there was a copy of the TeXbook and one of "The joy of TeX"! I was fascinated and eventually (after the Ph.D. thesis was finished) I managed to get a working implementation of TeX; I was the first in my Math department to use TeX (plain or AMS-TeX).

I switched to LaTeX some years later when some colleagues asked me to help in producing the Proceedings for a conference they had organized. AMS-LaTeX had just been released and typesetting a math book with LaTeX had become possible. It was a pretty big volume: 393+x pages and 41 papers. Many of the papers had been written in ChiWriter (probably very few of you know about it). I'm pretty satisfied of the result, which required to define a personal document class and solving some difficult alignment problems: the conference was about Mathematical Physics, which is not my field, and some of the papers had huge formulas.

Answer 18

Back in 2007, I had to write an article with actual mathematics in it. The text editors had a very poor math support, not the mention the lack of productivity and a ugly and messy document in the end. I use the \vdash symbol a lot in my mathematical stuff and soon I discovered that none of those editors had a symbol for that. I refused to use |- or ├ instead (the second abomination, oops I mean symbol is for drawing ASCII boxes) as a replacement for \vdash.

A friend of mine suggested me to use LaTeX. Needless to say I was very skeptical, but at that point I had nothing to lose. So I embraced the idea. He told me some LaTeX basics (sections, items, inline math, and so forth) and how to produce my very first document. After writing my first lines of mathematics in LaTeX –- which was insanely fast and very intuitive –- I couldn’t believe in my eyes. Everything was correctly in place, beautiful typesetting and with a professional look.

Since then, LaTeX became part of my life. For everything. =)

Answer 19

Powerpoint sucks. I couldn't in the best of my enthusiasm, complete a presentation with 20 sides filled with code and images. More than half the time would be spent in formatting it.

Then I came across beamer and wrote some custom commands in an hour and then created a presentation the way I wanted, with images in a folder, code in a folder and all the content mentioned in a file.

I am proud of very happy with this alternative, and the work I was able to do using it.

Answer 20

Two things put me on the road. The author is perhaps the greatest influence on my programming career--- his article in DDJ alerted me to a problem that I had been wondering about at the time. Later (again a result of the Knuth) I became entranced with the idea of 'Literate Programming'. This approach precisely fit a problem I had; how to preserve code and document it at the same time. As this was a maintenance task, there wasn't a budget for any of the very expensive tools of the time, but LP was for free so I began to get my hands dirty. In that the code involved a chess engine, there were problems that were quite difficult for a beginner to solve, but in general correspondence with the authors of various packages kept me going. Moving forward a great many years I use LaTeX almost without thought for anything I deem needful of typesetting. Wouldn't have it any other way.

Answer 21

Quite recently I decided to undertake a major private project: Taking a large body of RPG-related books (I.C.E.'s classic Rolemaster, 2nd Ed., to be precise), re-editing it (making one concise rule volume instead of a set of base rules and lots of optional add-ons) and translating it (to my native German). The goal was to provide a rule book that my friends and I could use for a RPG campaign.

That's a good dozen books of ~100 pages each, to be compiled into a ~300 page 4-part volume chock full of tables, lists, charts etc., with hundreds of cross-references to chapters and tables, footnotes and graphics.

Another requirement I placed on myself was to make the result look as much as the original as possible - including the two-column layout, typesetting, chapter headings etc.

Previous experience told me that neither MS Word nor OpenOffice Writer would be up to a task of these proportions and still be maintainable.

I've heard about LaTeX before (from co-eds at university), and decided that this was the time to give it a try.

Being a professional software engineer, I like learning new (or, in this case, old) technologies, widening my skill set, and actually prefer doing things "in source" as opposed to "WYSIWYG". (Being able to diff and grep and sed and svn my work sounded like it could come in really handy given the scope of the work, and I was absolutely right).

I downloaded the basic LaTeX package, the Texmaker editor, and a "quick guide", set up a SVN repository for the .tex files, and went ahead. It took me less than a day to realize that LaTeX was the ideal choice for a project like mine. Especially the fine control over tables impressed me, as well as the ability to enter the table data right away and worry about the actual layout at some later point.

I ordered the LaTeX Companion the next day. Took me a couple more days to find your excellent site here, though I ask myself what took me (regular customer at StackOverflow) so long.

I can't say I'd use LaTeX for everything, or even for most things. But for my project right now, I couldn't imagine anything more adequate. Too bad I won't be able to make it available to the public once I'm done. :-\

Answer 22

I have seen the beautiful typography in a computer magazine. I was stunned by its beauty, it just looked like "printed".

Answer 23

I played about with Latex as an undergraduate at the end of the '80s, but didn't "commit" to Tex until I started postgraduate work in 1994 and needed to typeset logic, and found that the advantage in this domain that Latex had, and still has, over any non-Tex-based document preparation system is huge: the support for laying out proof trees alone would have been decisive (I know of four implementations, and I wrote one myself), but additionally the specialist typesetting needs of logicians have received attention in the Tex community and not outside of it.

Answer 24

As an undergrad I often failed to find a free machine in the shared labs on which to run Word or T³, as machines with hard drives were still relatively scarce. In contrast, editing plain text files with vi meant I could use essentially any system with a keyboard (even my ancient home PC), yet TeX produced such good-looking documents. Bibliographies and cross-references that just worked were the icing on the cake.

Answer 25

I wanted something that made my calc and physics homework look pretty. At the time, Word couldn't handle equations gracefully. I looked around for something that could generate equations I could import into Word and found a LaTex equation generator and a WYSIWYG LaTex frontend that, when used in combination, would output pretty pdfs that I could then drag into Word. Eventually, I just shifted over to using the LaTex frontend for everything and tweaking the code as needed. I haven't used LaTex in ages, but I have many fond memories of it.

Answer 26

When I was a first year undergraduate math student, the lectures handed out some notes. Looking back today they were merely standard LaTeX documents. But back to then, they looked so amazing. And I would like my homework to have that look.

With quite a lot of efforts, I did reproduced one or two pages of the notes using Word. That was a painful progress especially the input of math. In addition the adjust of the layout took quite some time. I gave up Word and many other softwares, because I didn't believe that the professors would spent that much time to produce some lecture notes.

So the next step is searching. Well, I always like to solve problems alone. And after hours of googling I found TeX/LaTeX. The rest of the story was what you can guess easily.

Answer 27

About 20 years ago, I had to write a report and a friend of mine had a piece of software called Ventura. This software didn't have a nice user interface, so we studied the Ventura output format and realised it was aplain text format, which we could edit by hand with vi. I don't know the exact details anymore, but there would be command sequences for Greek letters and so on.

Later, when I saw a guy's presentation in our local group at university, it almost looked like Ventura, but better. When I asked him if it was Ventura, he said, `No, this is LaTeX.' The next day I went to the library, got a copy of Lamport's book and read it from cover to cover. Then I started using LaTeX, and I've never looked back.

Answer 28

It is 1982 and I had just been made product manager for our PDP 11 (RSX11M) based SCADA system. I had acquired a spare PDP 11 for a development machine and persuaded the powers that be to let me purchase Unix so we could use it for a central configuration management environment. I also had a budget for a line printer for listings, but I instead purchased the (then) brand new HP Laserjet instead. My chief technical guy used nroff to produce a series of macros to enable us to write documents to a house style on this laserjet. All of a sudden, we had version controlled documents that were by far the most consistent and good looking in the company. The only disadvantage was that we couldn't add diagrams. This system kept us going until we were more or less forced by the take up of Microsoft Word around us (and particularly its ability to include pictures and diagrams) about 5 years later. But I became a fan of WYSIWYM and have been hankering after something like that for a long time. I even blogged about it some ideas 2004 http://www.chandlerfamily.org.uk/2004/11/wysiwyg-v-wysiwym/

Fast forward to today, and I am semi retired, but still writing software and attempting to establish a house style and not enjoying trying to do it in Libre Office. I am also frustrated how these open formats do not play well with my git version control system. Having just found latex and its capabilities I can see that it has all the benefits our original system had plus the advantage of graphics. As a test I wrote a quite complicated entity relationship diagram using the tikz package and once I had worked out how to do it, surprisingly easy to get a very high quality result.

Answer 29

I came to (La)TeX as a graphic designer fed up w/ the limitations of Quark XPress and Aldus PageMaker (I think that should adequately place my experience time-wise) --- I'd just read Bringhurst's Elements of Typographic Style and was enchanted w/ the idea of perfection and hanging punctuation, &c.

At that time, the only graphical design tool which could hang punctuation into the margin nicely was Altsys Virtuoso, which ran on NeXTstep on a NeXT Cube. NeXTstep included TeX, and Tom Rokicki's TeXview.app --- TeX was the first design tool I found which had the same freedom and limitless possibilities as paper (or vellum, or parchment) and ink, where the limiting factor wasn't the featureset some corporation was willing to implement, but my own ingenuity and skill and patience.

Answer 30

I started using TeX because there was no alternative.

Back when I was a student, followed by a couple years as assistent professor, TeX was only available to the computer science folks, and not to us mathematicians. But I had heard about TeX, and figured this had to be the future. So I bought the TeXbook and read most of it, even though I had no TeX system to play with. This was followed by three years in a research institute where I had to use their half-baked system for technical typesetting. Finally, when I got my present university position, I got a PC – but it was still not powerful enough to run TeX! So I managed to get access to the Sun workstations at the computer science department, and started using TeX for real. Rummaging through my old files, the earliest TeX file I can find is from November 1987: A somewhat frivolous note on Rubik's cube. But I soon started using it in earnest.

Since then, things have only improved. Now and then, someone was trying to talk me into trying other software, like MS Word. But it only took a single look at the output to laugh it off as not a serious competitor.