What professions use TeX/LaTeX besides CS?

Question

TeX and LaTeX are widely used in Computer Science. What other academic disciplines or professionals use it?

Answer 1

I am an Earth Science grad student & Chemist. I use it to typeset papers that are single-authored (i.e., by myself) and more than 5 pages. At least one of the Geochemistry Faculty in my department use LaTeX regularly.

Answer 2

I've just started to use LaTeX. After many years of disappointments with word, open office and google docs, I started to use it to write technical manuals for analytical equipment. I found the pgfplots package really amazing and I also love the package chemstyle.

I'm only a bit sad because I've never tried LaTeX before. It would have saved me heaps of time and I would have produced much better looking reports and manuals.

I definitely recommend it for technical manuals!

Answer 3

Bible publishing. I use it to typeset various kinds of Bibles for publishing in various formats. Because of the unique features of Bilingual Bibles one does tend to run into some peculiar limitations once in a while and has to work around them.

Answer 4

Depends on the university I guess. Here in University of Hull only a few engineering and maths professors use LaTeX, there are no LaTeX classes for thesis nor assignments. The LaTeX installation on the machine is from 2004 and hasn't been updated since.

Over the past 4 years I haven't seen a single PhD student use LaTeX. =(

Answer 5

I'm a mechanical engineer working in materials science / materials processing. I had lots of experience (from quite good to extremely bad) with Microsoft Office (versions XP and before, also Office:mac) and consider myself a "power user" (at least concerning the versions until Office XP and 2003. Based on that experience I decided, not to write my diploma (master) thesis with Word, but with LaTeX. And I'm currently writing my PhD thesis with LaTeX also.

Some of my colleagues (mostly engineers and chemists) also use(d) LaTeX for typesetting their thesis, but many that I know use MS Word.

Some "statistical" data of people
- which I know,
- remember their name
- and know how they wrote/write their thesis

LaTeX: 7
Framemaker: 1
MS Word: by far too many (7 + many many more that I know)

Answer 6

TeX is used for serial letters. I am going to create printed letters, including construction drafts with numbers, barcodes, invoices and business letters with TeX for a small company.

Gemanwings, a German low-cost airline (turnover ~700 mio Euro), sends booking confirmation and invoice in PDF-format by e-mail. The PDFs are created by "pdfTeX-1.10b, LaTeX with hyperref" and the fonts are typical TeX-fonts too.

Answer 7

Since learning LaTeX, I've used Word maybe twice. Meeting protocols, motions, seating cards, lab reports, essays, a songbook, some sheet music (Although Lilypad is hard). It shouldn't be a question of which professions can use it, but rather which professions have the privilege of being in contact with someone who can teach them.

Answer 8

I'm a chemist and I use LaTeX. Cgnieder's packages make this a lot easier than previously.

Answer 9

Bioinformatics researchers use it.

Answer 10

We actually have a colloquium course at my college in which one is required to use LaTeX. It has to be taken once for all math minors, twice for all math majors. The entire object of the course is to learn technical, mathematical writing, for which LaTeX is considered required.

Answer 11

I also use LaTeX as a very flexible report-generating tool out of various MySQL databases, with help of a preprocessor, namely pdflatexdb (Hans-Georg Eßer) or nlatexdb (Robin Höns). I tried BIRT or even the Oracle Report tool bundled with OpenOffice.org, but that was a great waste of time, really. Check here : http://hgesser.com/software/latexdb/ and there : http://sourceforge.net/projects/nlatexdb/

Answer 12

I work in IT, and I use TeX to produce professional looking reports. I started with LaTeX in college in a math class, and I've been using it for various things since. I also use it for a few personal projects as well.

Answer 13

At least one parasitologist, some day attracted by the synergy of LaTeX + R, but now using LaTeX for any type of non collaborative documents, even to simulate some horrendous Word's forms when writing directly over the original template with any word processor become a nightmare.

Answer 14

A lot of the answers given are academic disciplines (and most of those are scientists or related).

I personally have used LaTeX to write my CV. But more interesting, was that I was contacted by a doctor colleague of mine, who was having a little trouble with a document he was preparing on NHS computers. He sent me his source file, and it appears that at least his hospital was using LaTeX to prepare documents providing guidance on the use of certain drugs for treatment of HIV. He mentioned that LaTeX are installed on the hospital computers, and he cannot modify the installations in any way, so I would not be at all surprised if it is at least somewhat commonly used in the medical profession.

I also have a friend who works at a hospital lab who prepared another guidance document using LaTe, after I introduced it to him.

Answer 15

Probably an outlier, but as an accountant I use LaTeX to produce some reports and financial statements. I've had a number of people comment favourably on how the pdfs look.

Started using LaTeX originally to write up a thesis.

Answer 16

I know people using it in Life Sciences, Geography, Philosophy, History and Archaeology.

It is mostly used in these disciplines to write big manuscripts, like thesis, books. Rarely it is used for articles as many journals ask for Word documents instead.

Answer 17

Graphic Designers.

I use (La)TeX for any automatable manipulation or examination of .pdfs:

• measure ad sizes and export them to a spreadsheet for verification
• set ads to the correct size
• concatenate .pdfs for printing or distribution
• variable data printing / typesetting
• interactive ad design using LaTeX as the typesetting back-end and a web page tied into a CMS as the front-end

Answer 18

I am a gynecologist and I use LateX for making:

• Ultrasound reports
• Medical reports
• Medical prescriptions

Answer 19

Biologist here. I use LaTeX for pretty much everything. All my research papers, personal and business letters and their envelopes, occasional family newsletters with photos, wedding invitations, my family cookbook. I have used LaTeX to make several tri-fold brochures, slideshow presentations, 3x4 foot posters.

I am too new here to be able to comment yet, so this Answer is a request to the attorneys for class or style files for basic legal documents: affidavits, motions, etc.

Answer 20

I recently posted a similar question on reddit, asking about the "Popularity of Latex wrt other text processors". Here's a summary from 29 replies.

I myself am in the process of discovering Latex for my own business as a freelancer on technical product optimization.

Summary from reddit replies

Incomplete and biased as these replies are, the answers indicate a wide variety of applications.

Kind of documents produced with Latex

research papers, lecture notes, course slides, lots of equations, graphics of all kind.

Books ("Git", "TeX for the impatient", Publisher lehmanns media (Germany) ...); authors (e.g. for a novel). Reminder: many print-houses offer Latex-templates for authors

Field of Latex applications

research, university, science (Latex only tool used?)

Professions using Latex

research, university, IT, MINT-professions (Math-IT-Natural sciences-Technology)

Latex is used at least in ...

USA, Bulgaria, Russia, Germany, Europe

From available fonts worldwide use can be speculated ;-)

People using Latex

professors, doctors, students

Trend of using Latex

CTAN's up- and downloads seem to be an indicator, which increased at least last year.