word vs latex for thesis

Why Should I Use LaTeX over Word for Writing My Research? | Orvium

Researchers have long been split on whether to use Word or LaTex for their academic papers. The fact is, you can achieve results with both, and considering the latter is more complex, most don’t understand why LaTeX is so good.

Today, let’s look at the differences between the two and present LaTeX in an objective view, taking into account the benefits it presents as well as the things that aren't so great - such as the big issue with learning LaTeX.

What Is LaTeX?

LaTeX (/ˈlɑːtɛx/, often pronounced lay-tech) is a writing software centered around document creation, allowing users to input commands and add unformatted text. The UI is split between an Edit window, where users can write text and code, and a Typeset Window, which appears after the first save, allowing users to see the results of their work and how the document will look in real-time.

Compared to Word or Word-like document processors, LaTeX is fairly complex. The coding element can be a big hurdle for most researchers or students who are used to the simplicity of opening a document and simply starting to write. However, this issue can be easily overcome through an instructional video:

Benefits of LaTeX over Word for Research

1. Professional typesetting

LaTeX is specifically designed to produce high-quality typesetting, which makes your documents look professional and polished. This is especially important for academic writing, where the appearance of your document can affect how seriously your work is taken.

LaTeX is great because it’s not simply a word processor but rather a typesetting application designed for ultimate freedom when creating documents.

In academic writing, the aspect of your final document matters a lot. And since you’re essentially writing code, you can meticulously fine-tune your document to look exactly the way you want it or in accordance with the highly specific requirements some journals have.

Example: LaTeX automatically generates consistent and visually pleasing formatting for sections, equations, figures, and citations.

2. Efficient handling of large documents

Unlike Word and Google Docs, which lags up when editing large documents, LaTeX is optimized for minimal resource utilization. This allows researchers to work more efficiently on large documents with many equations, figures, images, and cross-references (think dissertations, books, or studies).

LaTeX also generates a table of contents, a list of figures, and a complete list of references which you can manually edit in code. I’m sure you know trying to edit and correct your references in Word is a buggy nightmare, and just the thought of it is enough to raise your levels of anxiety.

Another cool feature for large documents is the autosave option. That way, there is close to 0 risk of losing your work due to crashes or faulty equipment. Once you save your initial file, TeXShop, one of the tools in the LaTeX suite, automatically saves your work regularly.

Example: In LaTeX, the \input and \include commands allow you to split up sources in a controlled way, effectively making large documents into smaller files that can be managed separately.

3. Easy version control

Since LaTeX operates with plain text files, the level of control you have as a user is beyond what traditional word processors can offer. This can prove very handy when collaborating with multiple authors on a big project, as it allows you to use tools like Git or SVN to implement version control and track changes.

4. Wide range of packages and templates

LaTeX comes pre-equipped with multiple packages and templates that allow researchers to work on different types of projects, such as multiple kinds of math papers, articles, letters, memoirs, and more.

Furthermore, you can use online repositories such as the Comprehensive TeX Archive to find more packages and templates specifically made for diagrams, coding, tables, and more.

Example: The "tikz" package in LaTeX allows you to create professional-looking diagrams and illustrations.

5. Portable and platform-independent

Don’t you hate it when there's an issue with old versions of word documents? Or when you’re trying to edit a Word doc on a Mac and it doesn’t initially work? LaTeX removes all those headaches with compatibility.

The plain text docs you work on in LaTeX are portable and platform-independent. This makes sharing documents a breeze, regardless of the operating system or software setup. And it’s especially useful if you need to collaborate with colleagues or co-authors who use different systems.

Comparison Table: LaTeX vs Word

Who benefits most from using latex.

To sum up, LaTeX is better than Word for:

• Scientific researchers - from math to physics to chemistry and beyond. Anything that prominently features equations, tables, figures, or other designs is best completed via LaTeX.
• Academic dissertations and doctoral theses - from the reference system to the automatic and efficient table of contents, LaTeX makes working on gigantic projects such as these very easy. By comparison, researchers using Word frequently save chapters in separate documents to keep the software from lagging up or crashing and thereby losing their work.
• Textbook writing and editing - if you’re authoring math, physics, or other scientific textbooks, your best chance is with LaTeX, and students will thank you as the equations alone will look miles ahead of what Word can accomplish.
• Any other book authors and editors - for general authors, LaTeX might be a bit complex but worth the learning curve. Editors, however, tend to need a more professional tool to polish the final document for printing, so LaTeX is the better, more logical choice.
• Journalistic investigations - once again, the reference system in LaTeX can easily help journalists keep track of their sources, but it might be too complex on the go.

Overall, LaTeX frequently has a steeper learning curve compared to Word - which is also its biggest disadvantage. However, it offers many benefits that can make research writing more efficient, professional-looking, collaborative, and highly scalable due to its many templates.

If you’re looking to publish your research via Orvium, you should know that our platform is compatible with the LaTeX documents thanks to our integration with Overleaf. But if you want to suggest even more features we should implement in the future, don’t hesitate to reach out.

Learn more about our initiatives and stay up-to-date with the latest news and product features by following us on Twitter , Facebook , Linkedin , or Instagram .

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Antonio Romero

Led several big-data and ML projects for the R&D between CERN and multiple ICT market-leaders. His work accelerating predictive-maintenance and machine-learning solutions at CERN

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Word or LaTeX typesetting: which one is more productive? Finally, scientifically assessed

One of the main goals for anyone in the Academia, for any research group, is to publish the results of their research . Therefore, enormous amounts of time and effort are devoted to producing manuscripts which will be evaluated for publication in scientific journals or international conferences. Being this goal so central to the career of many people, it is more than reasonable trying to employ the right tools to achieve the best results in writing, measured in terms on quality vs. time devoted to writing.

We can take for granted that the reader knows Microsoft Word, but perhaps some of you are not familiar with that LaTeX thing . LaTeX (yes, it is always capitalized like that) is a sort of “programming language”, a markup language actually, pretty much like HTML. So, if one want to write a bold sentence, instead of selecting with the mouse and clicking, one must type a specific command around the sentence. The same applies to any other document element: images, tables, section headers, etc. there are commands that must be memorized for every element. It may seem cumbersome . Indeed, it is. It is really cumbersome, at the beginning. I stillr remember how much I protested when a Professor forced me to elaborate an assignment in LaTeX during the PhD courses. But once one overcomes the (steep) learning curve of LaTeX , the realization of its advantages means that there is no turning back:

Mathematical equations of unbeatable quality.

Easy generation of all kind of indices, bibliography, cross references, etc.

It allows you to focus on the text content, instead of its appearance. In theory, a text prepared according to the guidelines of a specific journal may be made to fit another’s style by just using one external style file. In practice, sometimes one finds some incompatibilities, but in all cases it is orders of magnitude faster, cleaner and easier than manually changing all the formatting details in Word.

At least, these are the advantages that we, part of the researchers, see in LaTeX: the call to pick among Word or LaTeX has become one of those endless, “religious” discussions. One support one or the other just like people support different football teams .

But finally here comes a space for objectivity in this debate. A group of researchers on Experimental Psychology from the University of Giessen (Germany) has addressed the problem by measuring the pros and cons of each typesetting system 1 . Next we summarize the experimental setup and their findings.

The experiment consisted in asking a group of volunteers to typeset a number of texts using either Word or LaTeX, provided they had 30 minutes to end the task. In order to characterize the performance for all kinds of texts, the researchers proposed three different texts: (1) a long, continuous text, (2) a text with some tables and (3) one plenty of equations (as one typically found in Mathematics, Physics, Engineering…).

Regarding the volunteers, they were 40 users selected such that there were 10 experts and 10 novices in each typesetting system (Word and LaTeX). The intention was determining whether the efficiency improved or not as users gain experience in each system.

Afterward, the researchers measured the amount of typeset text and the number of mistakes. Text length was such that only about 90% of experts could type it entirely. Ah! The motivation of volunteers was boosted by means of prizes of up to 150€ for the best one in each category.

The results

We start with the manuscripts comprising just long blocks of continuous text, in which is clear that Word is unbeatable : even the (relatively) novice Word users perform really far better than LaTeX users in both, the quantity and the quality of the typeset text. Regarding the existence of orthographic errors, we must highlight that LaTeX users were allowed to use their favorite IDE with any desired plugin or additional tool, thus their errors cannot be attributed to the intentional privation of any of those helps.

Regarding table editing, Word wins again… and this is not big news to anyone who ever tried to enter a table in a LaTeX document. How can something so easy in a WYSIWYG editor and so incredibly complex in LaTex? How many visits to TeX – LaTeX Stack Exchange does it take to create a decent LaTeX table?

As can be seen in Figure 3, the study found that it is not only less efficient to typeset tables in LaTeX, but that the number of mistakes skyrocketed as well. However, the large standard deviation in LaTeX mistakes reveals that it is possible to make it right… but there are so few people capable of such an achievement!

And finally we get to LaTeX comfort zone: texts with plenty of equations. In this last experiment, it is demonstrated that even untrained LaTeX users make fewer mistakes and are more productive than expert Word users.

Apart of measuring the efficiency of typesetting in such an objective way, the researchers also asked the volunteers to fulfil a usability questionnaire (results shown in Figure 5), from which we must highlight the emotional aspect : LaTeX users claim to enjoy much more than Word users while writing (5.2±1.4 vs 3.6±1.7), while also reporting feeling less frustration and tiredness.

These findings are coherent with the well-known popularity of LaTeX among researchers of the more technical areas, where writing equations is typically a significant effort if attempted to do in Word. I would like to remark (making clear that this is a subjective opinion) that aesthetics is another important factor : Word equations are far less “elegant” than those obtained from LaTeX, which “look” totally professional.

Quantitatively, we can point out another work 2 which asked the Editors of several Scientific Journals for the prevalence of each format in received manuscripts . They found that LaTeX rules in the areas of Mathematics (97%), Statistics (89%) and Physics (74%) , then followed by the group of Computer Science (46%) and Astronomy-Astrophysics (35%), with the rest of areas totally dominated by Microsoft Word.

• Knauff, M., & Nejasmic, J. (2014) . An Efficiency Comparison of Document Preparation Systems Used in Academic Research and Development. PloS one , 9 (12), e115069. ↩
• Brischoux, F., & Legagneux, P. (2009). Don’t Format Manuscripts. The Scientist, 23(7), 24. ↩

35 comments

[…] (Artículo traducido de una colaboración con MappingIgnorance.org […]

I really think that both programs are to different. As it is stated in the post, for writing long texts Word is unbeatable, but for equations it is the other way around. The discussion comes when you have a long text, few equations, and a lot os references and figures. In this case Latex is better, because it manages the bibliography in a better way, but the time needed to learn how to use Latex is also much longer and it is not clear to me if it is worthy.

What is absolutely true is this sentence: “the call to pick among Word or LaTeX has become one of those endless, “religious” discussions. One support one or the other just like people support different football teams.”

The same happens with Linux VS Mac VS Windows…

[…] edonork egiten dio galdera hori bere buruari. José Luis Blancok agian argibideren bat ematen digu Word or LaTeX typesetting: which one is more productive? Finally, scientifically assessed […]

This is an interesting study but I think the Word/LaTeX dilemma will soon be overcome in many fields. For example, for data analyses made in the free R environment one should seriously consider using knitr and R Markdown. It has both the benefits of dynamic reports (if you change a single data point all tables and figures are authomatically updated for you) and easiness of use. No need to know LaTeX to get comparable results. And of course it’s infinitely many times better than using Word, which is a text editor and nothing more.

[…] ¿Merece la pena el esfuerzo de aprender LaTeX o con lo que sé de Word me apaño para lo que tengo que hacer? Esta es la pregunta que se hace cualquiera que necesite escribir documentos y dotarlos de un […]

This study was very effectively rebutted by Daniel Lemire some time ago. It does not test tasks that are representative of what scientists do, and it does not address the difference in output quality of word vs. LaTeX.

[…] https://mappingignorance.org/2015/04/06/word-or-latex-typesetting-which-one-is-more-productive-finall… via #etcPB http://www.etcpb.com/ […]

[…] by omegaender [link] […]

I don’t see how you can test anything of interest in 30 minutes especially for something like LaTeX. In 30 minutes you are not even remotely going to reap benefits from using LaTeX over Word. If I decided to use LaTeX right now I’d probably spend at least 30 minutes just setting up templates, add ons etc.

LaTeX shines when you work on large documents over several days. The ability to split into multiple files and version control it with great version control systems like git is a real benefit. Also as you write more you can benefit from easily copy pasting and modifying styles or things you need.

Also I don’t get how LaTeX user could bomb so badly on tables. If you really need to have control of this you can use a GUI tool which generates the LaTeX for you. Lots of editors has such capabilities. But for a 30 minute assignment most might not consider it worth it to use any special tools to make a table.

[…] https://mappingignorance.org/2015/04/06/word-or-latex-typesetting-which-one-is-more-productive-finall… […]

Well office 2013 and onward comes with a built-in TeX interpreter, previous version has plenty of addins that did that same so it’s not really a question any more.

Word offers the easy high level editorial capabilities and low level TeX syntax editing when you need it.

Typesetting is the final act in publishing. Writing is where the bulk of the effort lies. LaTeX addresses 10% of the effort effectively (typesetting) and is cumbersome and gets in the way for 90% of the effort (writing). This is especially true for editing and collaboration where Word’s track changes is required.

“untrained LaTeX users make less mistakes and are more productive than expert Word users” -> “untrained LaTeX users make fewer mistakes and are more productive than expert Word users”

This study is poorly constructed if it did not use the Microsoft Math Add-in for office. This official add-in makes equations dead simple.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=36777

I wonder what exactly qualifies as a “Word Expert” here? Many people who use Word regularly aren’t typing in a lot of formulae, so are likely to do it in a clumsy way via the mouse and find it unnecessarily difficult. Indeed most of the students I knew who were using Word for documents containing math were surprisingly unaware of Word’s Math Autocorrect feature, which lets you type in a very LaTeX like format. If you use it often, papers containing math are basically on par with type in ordinary text documents.

I didn’t read the paper but it seems to me like there are some obvious methodological flaws. As pointed out later on; to be an expert in LaTeX – one is also likely to be highly trained in Mathematics. Tables are indeed the most annoying thing in LaTeX but it’s just a markup language! The real problem here is that there is no better table handling in some of the popular editors like TexStudio. Also — in case it wasn’t obvious; it does make sense to separate the structure and content of manuscripts from their presentational style in much the same way web authors do with HTML and CSS. Most academics want to get their work published in a context where its formatting will be standardised. LaTeX and git is a really powerful way of collaborating and managing revisions on manuscripts — would you trust Word to do that? I didn’t think so.

It also misses out another important point, vital in maths and computer science, but also increasingly in other fields: how easy is it to use macros and/or construct parts of your document by script? I had lots of tables for my PhD (computer science + linguistics), so I constructed macros to help me write them in a meaningful way. I’ve also used PERL (in the past) and PYTHON (more recently) to transform data straight into LaTeX tables.

I’m a bit surprised, as Word has a formula editor since Office 2007 which is nearly identical to LaTeX, that the latter has such a profound advantage.

When last I visited this comparison, the issue we had with Word had nothing to do with user mistakes or relative ease of use. The core problem we encountered was more sinister and debilitating. As our manuscripts grew, the likelihood increased that Word would drop portions of the text, lose or change formatting, crash, or in some cases refuse to open a working document. As you can imagine, a lost manuscript was a substantial defeat for Word. Some chose to break their manuscripts into chapter documents to reduce their risk of outright loss, but this tended to make the inter-document references more complex. Our conclusion, was that if you wanted to graduate on time, better to depend on LaTeX.

I wrote my MSc and Phd (Physics) in LaTeX (ca. 90′) . Also convinced my girlfriend to do the same.

What did I gain? Peace of mind. I just did not care anymore about formatting, numbering, fonts, etc. because I did not know LaTeX enough to modify them. The numbering was always right, even if inserting a picture was a nightmare.

I now work in a company which uses Word and when thing go well, they go well. When things go wrong, they go terribly wrong. But what the heck, the tracking mode is fantastic. (please do not tell me about diff for LaTeX – I am an uber-geek and administred unix for many years, I would not even remotely approach tracking with LaTeX.

But this is not very much relevant anymore, the future is with Web publishing in a collaborative mode.

I would also suggest to add lyx (www.lyx.org) to this trial… it is more intuitive than latex but still has most of its advantages!

Does Word papers result in overall accuracy?

I have written many ISI papers in MS Word. Yes the writing part and formatting were easy, but during revisions I always came up with hundreds of mistakes and headaches:

– Wrong equation numbering – Missing headers – addition of new sections –> required entire document modification! – addition of new images would deform most pages, –>required entire document modification! – adding footnotes was odd – writing simple inline math required many clicks – adhering to ISI formatting standards was difficult – choosing proper fonts was subjective

Each technology targets specific audiences. Latex targets academic and researchers while Word targets the rest of the society.

If you write a lot, LaTex is definitely worth the effort. Clicking in Word requires to know the menu. Certainly knowing the menu is considerably less effort than knowing the commands in LaTex. Hence, it is clearly a question of proficiency. If you suck in LaTex, LaTex is horrible.

After I reached a certain skill level in LaTex I started to use it for plotting and drawing figures as well. MATLAB and other math plot programs just cant hold up to the standards LaTex produces – Word does play in this league at all.

In fact LaTex is the most complete solution.

[…] Word or LaTeX typesetting: which one is more productive? Finally, scientifically assessed […]

[…] Luis Blanco discusses a scientific experiment determining which typesetting tool is more productive. Turns out that Word is unbeatable – when it comes to long blocks of continuous text and […]

SIMPLY: Word rules

LaTex produces good looking quality documents especially with Math. However, in the real world you do not work alone—You work with almost ~90% MS Word user! You need to collaborate, share comments with people who do not use LaTex and this quickly becomes a problem. You cant force people to start using LaTex…In the end it’s useless to use LaTex when in the end someone else (e.g. colleague) will need an editable Word document not PDF to work with.

Most people dont know Word!

Just let me repeat; most people have no idea how MS Word works.

There is no great tutorial for learning Word as an expert while for Latex there are numerous books and most users are forced to learn Latex.

What are Word options rarely people use? How can we make Word act logically?

1- You can easily typeset Latex-style mathematical equations in Word. Just enter your equation like Latex and press space. There it is! (You can also use Asana Math font in Word)

2- Use styles. Styles make everything coherent and easyto manage.

3- Use citations and cross-references. They are dynamically updated and easy to manage in Word.

4- Use Bilbliography. It is so easy to manage citations and Bibliography in word. You can apply numerous styles to them easily.

5- Use Headings for sectioning. Table of contents are easily generated based on the headings.

**6- Use page breaks and section breaks to avoid formatting an entire document because you have inserted a new content somewhere in Word.

**7- Use “keep text together” as a style in paragraph to keep all paragraph text, image captions and heading together and not distributed across two pages.

Tell me how many of people know the mentioned options in Word and then lament Word for what it can’t do.

Hamzed, your comment is absolutely perfect. The comments above lamenting Word are from people who seem to have no idea about styles, headings, references, breaks, the Math functionality, fields, etc.

I’m an attorney spending most of my time in Word and Adobe. Sure, I don’t write equations. But I can instantly transform a several-hundred page contract using styles correctly. I can update my table of contents easily. Headers and footers, sections, images, these are a breeze. It took some learning, but reading a couple of blog posts about the nuances of Word is far less of a headache then learning a new markup language.

OK ! it’s right for a simple document. But try this for a thesis or even for a paper. Don’t need to speak about changing the format from a journal to another. I’m a word user for more than 20 years and I actually still using it but only for docs no more than 3 to 5 pages. I happely discovered LaTeX and I’m using it for about 10 years. My feeling is that Word can beat you at any moment, I d’ont trust it at all. Just make attention for long documents

I have tried both of them, basically most of the LaTeX function are available in MS Word but people don’t know how to use it. Basically it has every shortcut right from heading, numbering figure or table or equation, referring them in text (cross references), citation, automatic list of table , figure and table of content, bibliography, typing equation like LaTeX. If you are interested you should look a video See this youtube video and you will never use LaTeX instead of word

I used LaTex to write my Mathematics PhD thesis and a few papers, and the beauty of equations and the automation of references etc is clearly very very impressive. But the steep learning curve (which, on a light note almost got vertical with tables) almost made me late to complete. With time, and with the recent versions of Word upping their game, I have found no real incentive to constrain myself to the lonely world of LaTex. I am lately using Word, so easily available and effortless to use, much more often. Latex is great. So is a beautiful wife (gender protocols observed!). But is the beauty the only criterion for a lifelong union? Just a metaphor. On a second thought, the very idea that any program can be compared with Latex at all is enough proof that the gap is closing and the technical demarcations are getting blurred. Very soon, Word will be able to do all (or most) of what LaTex can do.

If you write math professionally, or want to use it professionally, there are two requirements for your software that most people are not aware, and that were not tested in this ‘experiment’.

1. Inline math. You need to be able to use little chunks of math in your normal text. Word does not do this well – for one, math is treated like an image, and it’s baseline is treated like an image, and is often not the same as the normal text, in particular when you use certain fonts. It often looks ugly, misaligned etc.

2. Number and cross-reference equations. LaTeX just does it. It’s in its DNA. No fuss, no hang-ups. Word… not so much. Try it. I’ll wait. It’s an experiment in frustration. Alone formatting the equation number correctly can be difficult, and if the index for the numbers fails (and it does if you actually work with your document), you need to do what LaTeX does, and what you chose Word for because you do not wanna do it: Re-Compile! And if you start twitching at that step, you should. Frequently, Word does … weird … things when you need to do that that can result in complete formatting change of your document. Not to mention the needlessly complex workflow to pick cryptic labels from a pop-up/down list etc. Did I say LaTeX just does it with no fuss whatsoever?

It’s not enough to be able to typeset formulae if you want to use math and not come off as a buffoon.

This study was a fundamental mistake and fluffy. The author might have never worked on a project that requires to produce dozen of reports which could be over 100 pages and a lot of repetition. MS word is suck when coming to this point. Users of MS Words have to manually edit table, figure, and format whenever there is smt changed in hundred of pages. With Latex, you dont even need to care about it. It saves incredible amount of time to prepare reports for both academia and business. This is regardless of whether the content is heavily math or just plain word. Latex is always far more better and productive.

I find all your comments highly entertaining. In the real world (outside academia and writing fancy lab reports) no-one uses Latex, except for gloves and condoms. MS Word is the standard. It can do everything your Latex language can do, and more, with a few quick mouse clicks. Plus change tracking and collaboration.

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Should scientific papers be written using Word or LaTeX?

Most papers are written using Microsoft Word or the LaTeX document preparation system. Is one better than the other?

Virtually all researchers use Microsoft Word or LaTeX to write their papers, and so do students who are taught how to… well, write. Most computer science and software engineering graduates prefer the latter ( and so do I ), but is LaTeX really the best tool for the job? Let’s find out!

Word and LaTeX, for laymen

Microsoft Word is a graphical word processor that’s based on the “What you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) paradigm, which means that users see their document on the screen as it will appear on printed pages. This makes Word relatively easy to learn.

LaTeX (side note: Pronounced “lay-tech” or “lah-tech” ) is based on a very different paradigm that’s called “What you get is what you mean” (WYGIWYM). In other words, the final result isn’t visible until the user compiles their document. Documents are written in a special programming language (side note: It’s kind of like HTML, CSS and JavaScript, but combined into one single language. ) that has a fairly steep learning curve. In return it gives users virtually limitless control over the output.

Word is popular among many disciplines, including medicine, law, business, and life sciences, while researchers in STEM fields, like mathematics, physics, computer science, and engineering tend to prefer LaTeX.

There are practical reasons why Word and LaTeX are the two most popular tools. Word likely owes part of its popularity to its use at schools and companies, while LaTeX (or rather its underlying engine, TeX) is very good at rendering mathematical equations. Moreover, many publishers require that papers are submitted in one of these two formats, which further limits the options that researchers can choose from.

Another reason why this duopoly exists is that researchers keep convincing students and junior researchers that their tool of choice is “better”, “more elegant”, “simpler” or “more flexible” than the other, based largely on limited personal experiences, preconceived opinions, biases, and traditions.

What if someone would conduct an empirical study that shows which system is actually more efficient?

Let’s battle it out

The authors of this paper conducted an experiment with 40 participants, in which they compared the usability of Word and LaTeX under realistic working conditions. Most participants were tested in their personal office setting and were free to use their own computers, along with any other editors and plug-ins they’d normally use to prepare documents.

Each participant was assigned to one of four groups (Word novice, Word expert, LaTeX novice, or LaTeX expert) and asked to reproduce three types of text within 30 minutes:

a simple continuous text;

text with tables; and

mathematical text with several equations.

The researchers measured the performance of each participant using three variables:

the number of orthographic and grammatical mistakes;

the number of formatting errors and typos; and

the amount of written text.

Afterwards, each participant completed a standardised usability questionnaire about their tool of choice.

Do we have a winner?

Word users managed to create the best reproductions for the continuous text:

Word users (both novices and experts) made fewer formatting mistakes and wrote more text. Interestingly, Word novices also made fewer formatting mistakes than LaTeX experts.

The number of orthographical and grammatical errors did not differ significantly between Word and LaTeX users.

Word users also did a better job on text with tables:

Word users (both novices and experts) made fewer formatting mistakes and again wrote more text.

Word novices made fewer formatting mistakes and also produced more text than LaTeX experts.

Conversely, LaTeX users were slightly better at reproducing the mathematical text:

LaTeX users (both novices and experts) made fewer formatting mistakes and wrote more text than Word users.

LaTeX users made significantly more orthographic and grammatical errors than Word users.

LaTeX novices did a better job than Word novices, but the difference in performance between Word experts and LaTeX experts was negligible.

The usability questionnaire showed that Word users were less positive about the efficiency of their tool of choice than LaTeX users, but more positive about learnability. Surprisingly, LaTeX users found their work to be less tiresome and less frustrating, and enjoyed using their software more often than Word users!

Overall, this study shows that there is no “best” tool, although in most cases Word is a better choice than LaTeX: there are basically no good reasons to use LaTeX for documents that do not contain complex mathematical formula.

Okay, but what about…

Typesetting quality.

LaTeX users often argue that LaTeX can produce higher-quality text than Word. Although this may be true, it’s also a strange argument to make: the quality of a paper is determined by its contents, not by its appearance.

Moreover, perceivable difference in typesetting quality between the two tools is small. In my personal experience it’s incredibly easy to fool LaTeX users into thinking that a Word document was typeset using LaTeX: all you need to do is swap out Calibri for (La)TeX’s Computer Modern font!

This brings us to another commonly heard argument…

How good it feels

LaTeX users are highly satisfied despite reduced usability and productivity. A possible explanation for this finding is that humans try to avoid cognitive dissonance, which is when their beliefs don’t line up with their behaviour. It’s usually easier to change one’s belief (“no other tool can be as good as LaTeX”) than to change one’s behaviour (making the switch from LaTeX to Word).

Word is more efficient than LaTeX for pretty much any text that does not contain complex mathematical formula

LaTeX users tend to be more content with their tool than Word users (albeit unjustified)

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How to get started writing your thesis in LaTeX

Writing a thesis or dissertation in LaTeX can be challenging, but the end result is well worth it—nothing looks as good as a LaTeX-produced PDF, and for large documents it's a lot easier than fighting with formatting and cross-referencing in MS Word. Here we provide a guide to getting started on writing your thesis in LaTeX, using a standard template which is pre-loaded into Overleaf.

We have a large number of thesis templates in our online library , and you can upload your own if your university provides a set of LaTeX template files.

We'll assume you've used LaTeX before and so are familiar with the standard commands (see our other tutorial videos if not), and focus on how to work with a large project split over multiple files.

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Writing a thesis in latex.

Writing a thesis is a time-intensive endeavor. Fortunately, using LaTeX, you can focus on the content rather than the formatting of your thesis. The following article summarizes the most important aspects of writing a thesis in LaTeX, providing you with a document skeleton (at the end) and lots of additional tips and tricks.

Document class

The first choice in most cases will be the report document class:

See here for a complete list of options. Personally, I use draft a lot. It replaces figures with a box of the size of the figure. It saves you time generating the document. Furthermore, it will highlight justification and hyphenation errors ( Overfull \hbox ).

Check with your college or university. They may have an official or unofficial template/class-file to be used for writing a thesis.

Again, follow the instructions of your institution if there are any. Otherwise, LaTeX provides a few basic command for the creation of a title page.

Use \today as \date argument to automatically generate the current date. Leave it empty in case you don’t want the date to be printed. As shown in the example, the author command can be extended to print several lines.

For a more sophisticated title page, the titlespages package has a nice collection of pre-formatted front pages. For different affiliations use the authblk package, see here for some examples.

Contents (toc/lof/lot)

Nothing special here.

The tocloft package offers great flexibility in formatting contents. See here for a selection of possibilities.

Often, the page numbers are changed to roman for this introductory part of the document and only later, for the actual content, arabic page numbering is used. This can be done by placing the following commands before and after the contents commands respectively.

LaTeX provides the abstract environment which will print “Abstract” centered as a title.

The actual content

The most important and extensive part is the content. I strongly suggest to split up every chapter into an individual file and load them in the main tex-file.

In thesis.tex:

In chapter1.tex:

This way, you can typeset single chapters or parts of the whole thesis only, by commenting out what you want to exclude. Remember, the document can only be generated from the main file (thesis.tex), since the individual chapters are missing a proper LaTeX document structure.

See here for a discussion on whether to use \input or \include .

Bibliography

The most convenient way is to use a bib-tex file that contains all your references. You can download bibtex items for articles, books, etc. from Google scholar or often directly from the journal websites.

Two packages are commonly used to personalize bibliographies, the newer biblatex and the natbib package, which has been around for many years. These packages offer great flexibility in customizing the look of a bibliography, depending on the preference in the field or the author.

Other commonly used packages

• graphicx : Indispensable when working with figures/graphs.
• subfig : Controlling arrangement of several figures (e.g. 2×2 matrix)
• minitoc : Adds mini table of contents to every chapter
• nomencl : Generate and format a nomenclature
• listings : Source code printer for LaTeX
• babel : Multilingual package for standard document classes
• fancyhdr : Controlling header and footer
• hyperref : Hypertext links for LaTeX
• And many more

Minimal example code

I’m aware that this short post on writing a thesis only covers the very basics of a vast topic. However, it will help you getting started and focussing on the content of your thesis rather than the formatting of the document.

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16 comments.

8. June 2012 at 7:09

I would rather recommend a documentclass like memoir or scrreprt (from KOMA-Script), since they are much more flexible than report.

8. June 2012 at 8:12

I agree, my experience with them is limited though. Thanks for the addendum. Here is the documentation: memoir , scrreprt (KOMA script)

8. June 2012 at 8:02

Nice post Tom. I’m actually writing a two-part (or three) on Writing the PhD thesis: the tools . Feel free to comment, I hope to update it as I write my thesis, so any suggestions are welcome.

8. June 2012 at 8:05

Thanks for the link. I just saw your post and thought I should really check out git sometimes :-). Best, Tom.

8. June 2012 at 8:10

Yes, git is awesome. It can be a bit overwhelming with all the options and commands, but if you’re just working alone, and probably on several machines, then you can do everything effortlessly with few commands.

11. June 2012 at 2:15

That’s what has kept me so far. But I’ll definitely give it a try. Thanks!

8. June 2012 at 8:08

What a great overview. Thank you, this will come handy… when I finally get myself to start writing that thesis 🙂

8. June 2012 at 14:12

Thanks and good luck with your thesis! Tom.

9. June 2012 at 4:08

Hi, I can recommend two important packages: lineno.sty to insert linenumbers (really helpful in the debugging phase) and todonotes (allows you to insert todo-notes for things you still have to do.)

11. June 2012 at 0:48

Thanks Uwe! I wrote an article on both, lineno and todonotes . Here is the documentation: lineno and todonotes for more details.

12. June 2012 at 15:51

Thanks for the post, i’m currently writing my master thesis 🙂

A small note: it seems that subfig is deprecated for the subcaption package: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Floats,_Figures_and_Captions#Subfloats

12. June 2012 at 16:05

Hey, thanks for the tip. Too bad they don’t say anything in the documentation apart from the fact that the packages are not compatible.

1. August 2012 at 21:11

good thesis template can be also found here (free): http://enjobs.org/index.php/downloads2

including living headers, empty pages, two-sided with front and main matter as well as a complete structure

2. August 2012 at 11:03

Thanks for the link to the thesis template!

15. November 2012 at 22:21

Hi Tom, I’m writing a report on spanish in LaTex, using emacs, auctex, aspell (~170pags. ~70 files included by now) and this blog is my savior every time because I’m quite new with all these.

The question: Is there anyway (other than \- in every occurrence) to define the correct hyphenation for accented words (non english characters like é)? I have three o four accented words, about the subject of my report, that occur near 100 times each, across several files, and the \hyphenation{} command can’t handle these.

20. November 2012 at 3:47

I was wondering what packages you load in your preamble. For a better hyphenation (and easier typing), you should use these packages:

See here for more details.

If this doesn’t help, please provide a minimal working example to illustrate the problem.

Thanks, Tom.

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Word vs. LaTeX

Writing longer scientific documents requires more from the text processing software than common writing tasks. For us scientists its worth thinking about which piece of software will give us the best results in the least amount of time. Speed usually comes with routine, in most cases that would be Microsoft Word . But in some cases it might actually save us time and produce better text documents if we use LaTeX , even if you still have to learn. The table below may help you to make a decision which piece of software is most appropriate for your task at hand.

Comparison of Word and Latex

Conclusions.

Bottom line : If you need to write a short letter, a cover page, or a report to the administration, who thinks LaTeX is something kinky, you are best of writing in Word . For simple documents, you don't need fancy layout. So, you can save time by writing with a WYSIWYG editor like Word.

If you are writing a long document like a master/PhD thesis, an article, or a review, you are better of with LaTeX . If you have never used it before, you will have to invest some time before you can get cracking on the actual task. But with Word the you will probably need a similar amount of time at the end to get the formatting right, move figures, and iron out layout glitches. So, LaTeX on big documents will be slower at the start and faster at the end, probably overtaking Word during the last rounds since the automatic figure positioning routines, automated numbering, indexing, TOC generation will save you plenty of work. Here, it's advisable to use a template and adapt it.

on OpenWetWare:

• LaTeX OWW wiki extension
• LaTeX template for PhD thesis

in Wikipedia:

• Comparison of word processors

other comparisons:

• layout differences
• 4 page review by Andy Roberts
• intro to LaTeX by Scott McPeak from UCB
• comparison of LaTeX text processing, Uni Cambridge

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Guide to Writing Your Thesis in LaTeX

Step 1: install latex and a latex aware editor.

LaTeX is not a word processor, it is a document preparation system for high-quality typesetting. It is most often used for medium-to-large technical or scientific documents, but it can be used for almost any form of publishing. LaTeX encourages authors not to worry too much about the appearance of their documents but to concentrate on getting the content right.

Because LaTeX source files are just ordinary text files, any text editor can be used to edit them, but it is important to have a LaTeX aware editor. A LaTeX aware editor can do things like syntax highlighting, spell checking, and automatic formatting. It can also run LaTeX on the source files, update the bibliography, then update the document in a viewer all at the click of a button.

Below are links to what you need to get started on various operating systems. Check out the LaTeX Project website for more information.

Your system distribution or vendor has probably provided a LaTeX system. If not, check your usual software source for the texlive package, or otherwise install texlive directly. All of the Linux systems in the ELE Department already have a complete LaTeX system installed.

Two good editors for Linux are Texmaker and TeXstudio .

MacTeX is a full LaTeX system for MacOS which includes an editor.

The editors Texmaker and TeXstudio can also be used.

Microsoft Windows

proTeXt is a full LaTeX system for Windows, which includes MikTeX and an editor. You can also install MikTeX directly with the editor of your choice.

There are numerous good editors for Windows, some of which are TeXnicCenter , Texmaker and TeXstudio .

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Amanda Hoover

Students Are Likely Writing Millions of Papers With AI

Students have submitted more than 22 million papers that may have used generative AI in the past year, new data released by plagiarism detection company Turnitin shows.

A year ago, Turnitin rolled out an AI writing detection tool that was trained on its trove of papers written by students as well as other AI-generated texts. Since then, more than 200 million papers have been reviewed by the detector, predominantly written by high school and college students. Turnitin found that 11 percent may contain AI-written language in 20 percent of its content, with 3 percent of the total papers reviewed getting flagged for having 80 percent or more AI writing. (Turnitin is owned by Advance, which also owns Condé Nast, publisher of WIRED.) Turnitin says its detector has a false positive rate of less than 1 percent when analyzing full documents.

ChatGPT’s launch was met with knee-jerk fears that the English class essay would die . The chatbot can synthesize information and distill it near-instantly—but that doesn’t mean it always gets it right. Generative AI has been known to hallucinate , creating its own facts and citing academic references that don’t actually exist. Generative AI chatbots have also been caught spitting out biased text on gender and race . Despite those flaws, students have used chatbots for research, organizing ideas, and as a ghostwriter . Traces of chatbots have even been found in peer-reviewed, published academic writing .

Teachers understandably want to hold students accountable for using generative AI without permission or disclosure. But that requires a reliable way to prove AI was used in a given assignment. Instructors have tried at times to find their own solutions to detecting AI in writing, using messy, untested methods to enforce rules , and distressing students. Further complicating the issue, some teachers are even using generative AI in their grading processes.

Detecting the use of gen AI is tricky. It’s not as easy as flagging plagiarism, because generated text is still original text. Plus, there’s nuance to how students use gen AI; some may ask chatbots to write their papers for them in large chunks or in full, while others may use the tools as an aid or a brainstorm partner.

Students also aren't tempted by only ChatGPT and similar large language models. So-called word spinners are another type of AI software that rewrites text, and may make it less obvious to a teacher that work was plagiarized or generated by AI. Turnitin’s AI detector has also been updated to detect word spinners, says Annie Chechitelli, the company’s chief product officer. It can also flag work that was rewritten by services like spell checker Grammarly, which now has its own generative AI tool . As familiar software increasingly adds generative AI components, what students can and can’t use becomes more muddled.

Detection tools themselves have a risk of bias. English language learners may be more likely to set them off; a 2023 study found a 61.3 percent false positive rate when evaluating Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) exams with seven different AI detectors. The study did not examine Turnitin’s version. The company says it has trained its detector on writing from English language learners as well as native English speakers. A study published in October found that Turnitin was among the most accurate of 16 AI language detectors in a test that had the tool examine undergraduate papers and AI-generated papers.

Andy Greenberg

Matt Burgess

Caroline Haskins

Jessica Rawnsley

Schools that use Turnitin had access to the AI detection software for a free pilot period, which ended at the start of this year. Chechitelli says a majority of the service’s clients have opted to purchase the AI detection. But the risks of false positives and bias against English learners have led some universities to ditch the tools for now. Montclair State University in New Jersey announced in November that it would pause use of Turnitin’s AI detector. Vanderbilt University and Northwestern University did the same last summer.

“This is hard. I understand why people want a tool,” says Emily Isaacs, executive director of the Office of Faculty Excellence at Montclair State. But Isaacs says the university is concerned about potentially biased results from AI detectors, as well as the fact that the tools can’t provide confirmation the way they can with plagiarism. Plus, Montclair State doesn’t want to put a blanket ban on AI, which will have some place in academia. With time and more trust in the tools, the policies could change. “It’s not a forever decision, it’s a now decision,” Isaacs says.

Chechitelli says the Turnitin tool shouldn’t be the only consideration in passing or failing a student. Instead, it’s a chance for teachers to start conversations with students that touch on all of the nuance in using generative AI. “People don’t really know where that line should be,” she says.

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