

Introducing non-technical people to LaTeX - gnosis
http://texblog.net/latex-archive/latex-general/people-introducing-latex/

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Wilduck
I've taught around 20 non-technical people LaTeX. I would say that these are
all good tips. But really, the only thing a non-technical person needs to
learn LaTeX is to have someone sit down with them and teach them 1 on 1. I
have a fairly refined lesson at this point, and can successfully teach anyone
LaTeX in 45 minutes to an hour and a half, depending on how quickly they get
it.

I've taught mostly undergraduates (while I was one), studying Biology,
Chemistry, Linguistics, Psychology, Economics, English, Classics, and
Architecture, so I'd like to try to answer the question "Why?"

LaTeX is worth learning if you're regularly writing papers of any length. In
all of the disciplines above there's at least one problem with using word that
makes composing a paper longer than five pages a huge pain. More often than
not LaTeX is able to relieve some of the pain of that process. For example, in
Linguistics, sentence trees are fairly easy to create using LaTeX[1], or for a
classics paper, being able to switch between typing in Greek or English with a
single command is a huge win.[2]

Besides the field specific features, there are a lot of other benefits to
LaTeX. It's true that just about every person that I've taught LaTeX to has
been a little skeptical at first as to what exactly it could provide. The
thing that I tell them is that it is incredibly helpful in structuring their
document. They end up loving being able to do an outline with section headers,
and fill in the body paragraphs. They like having automatic reference and
bibliography insertion, and they love being able to comment out sections of
their document.

I think there's also a reason why it isn't hard to teach a non-technical
person LaTeX. When teaching someone a programming language, the student will
need to learn or already know a fair amount about how a computer works, and
what programming can accomplish. With LaTeX, students generally already know
how to write a paper, and will be able to easily map that process in to their
learning process.

I'm a huge LaTeX evangelist. If you don't already know it, find someone who
does, and have them sit down with you for an hour. Ask them to go through the
steps of creating a document that has: Sections, subsections, tables, lists,
figures, floats, references, and math. By the time you're done, you'll have a
good enough knowledge to google for anything you can't reference in the
document you just produced. You'll be amazed at how easy it was.

[1] <http://www.ling.upenn.edu/advice/latex/qtree/qtreenotes.pdf>

[2] [http://www.tug.org/texlive/Contents/live/texmf-
dist/doc/gene...](http://www.tug.org/texlive/Contents/live/texmf-
dist/doc/generic/babel/greek-usage.pdf)

~~~
Ergomane
> Biology

What would be the problem? I've both written papers in Latex and Word, but
cannot think of a discipline-related advantage.

~~~
Wilduck
The big one, as I understand it, is inserting nice looking tables for ANOVA
results. Both Stata and SAS can output their results tables to LaTeX.

~~~
idm
To add to this, R has fantastic LaTeX interoperability through Sweave, which
makes it pretty simple to write R syntax whose results are directly rendered
in LaTeX. I wrote about 100 pages worth of stats problem sets this way, and it
was a life-saver. Any science that requires stats can benefit from LaTeX.

------
eykanal
My response to this post is, what on earth for? While you can use LaTeX for a
ridiculous number of things [1][2][3], LaTeX is primarily a tool for
typesetting technical documents. Note that word "technical" in there; why
would a non-technical person want that? It's complex; you have to type
ridiculous things like "\textbf" to get bold text, and "\begin{enumerate}" to
make a simple list. It's complicated; you have to look up what header argument
to make to simply change the margins. It's also difficult to debug; try to
explain to a non-technical user what this means:

    
    
      ("C:\Program Files\MiKTeX 2.9\tex\context\base\supp-pdf.mkii"
      [Loading MPS to PDF converter (version 2006.09.02).]
      )
      ! Undefined control sequence.
      l.66 Your text goes here. \agweagsd
                                        

The whole idea doesn't make sense to me. Let them use Word or whatever, it'll
save both you and them a lot of headache in the long run.

[1] Crossword puzzles:
[http://www.tex.ac.uk/CTAN/macros/latex/contrib/gene/crosswor...](http://www.tex.ac.uk/CTAN/macros/latex/contrib/gene/crossword/cwpuzzle.pdf)

[2] Music: <http://www.mab.jpn.org/musictex/mtex_lib_e.html>

[3] Animations: <http://pages.uoregon.edu/noeckel/PDFmovie.html>

~~~
jmmcd
Even for non-technical documents, I would still choose Latex for its
advantages in areas like references and index, amenability to line-oriented
version control, and the quality of the typesetting. I agree that non-
technical users might make a different choice and that Latex error messages
are dreadful.

~~~
rmk2
I wholeheartedly agree with you.

I use LaTeX exclusively (with Emacs as editor) for non-technical documents (I
study languages), and for me, the most relevant advantages are tightly
integrated bibliography and citation management, index and shorthand
capabilities and the chance of "line-oriented version control", i.e. LaTeX in
git.

And the thing for introducing beginners, _help them_ set up a preamble with
the packages they will need. My experience with LaTeX has been that no matter
how long you have been using it, there will _always_ be something you will
have to alter or look up. But a basic setup is not hard to deduct and by
_picking_ the packages relevant to you, you keep your files lean _and_ get to
understand what each part does. If you _then_ have other problems you can dive
into weird code snippets that only make sense since someone published them
saying "Ermh...look...it's complicated...but...works, so copy & paste & be
happy".

Once you've set up a basic preamble, people can actually concentrate on the
content, and if they have problems, let them _write their content_ first, the
beauty of LaTeX is that all formatting woes can be addressed _after_ the
content is done.

------
beck5
I have had multiple people tell me that my site (<https://www.sharelatex.com>)
has helped with this, firstly more advanced people are able to help learners,
also the environment is already set-up.

The LaTeX wikibook is he best place I went to understand the basics of LaTeX
<http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX>

------
akeck
Don't forget Lyx! In fact, I will take this opportunity to give a huge thank
you to the developers and communities of Lyx, BibTex, BibDesk, Tex, Latex,
Open Office, and NeoOffice. With their tools and online documentation, my wife
just self-published a book, including a correctly formatted Kindle edition.
She is generally not technical, but was able to figure out a workflow that
worked for her and produced a really good looking product. I think she dealt
directly with "code" exactly once (separating "front matter" from "main
matter" in Lyx). Thanks!

~~~
akeck
(sorry for the self-reply) For the curious: Lyx working document +
(BibDesk+BibText+LaTex+Tex) -> really nice PDF for printing. Lyx -> ODF ->
NeoOffice -> Amazon Kindle toolset -> Kindle book. For backup/recovery, she
relied on the built-in revision control in Lion (based on Time Machine, I
think).

------
p0ppe
The not so Short Introduction to LaTeX2e
(<http://tobi.oetiker.ch/lshort/lshort.pdf>) has been my go-to source for a
long time. Works both as a manual and for reference.

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impendia
I never "learned" LaTeX, despite being an academic mathematician and using it
all the time. My documents have headers which I don't understand. Indeed,
learning it from scratch seems like a hassle, and it has features far beyond
what I ever use.

I simply obtained a document that was similar to what I was trying to create,
made a copy, and then changed the content.

~~~
ams6110
Sounds a lot like JCL.

------
halo
I've long felt that LaTeX is unnecessarily complex for most users. The output
is undeniably attractive but there's considerable pain involved in getting
there.

It's because LaTeX is old and its ubiquity has caused the field to stagnant
for decades. It's an area ripe for disruption, but it's tricky due to the
amount of complexity involved.

------
ssn
My suggestion: teach people how to use Markdown and then use markdown2pdf
(which first converts to Latex and then to PDF).

~~~
jmmcd
That doesn't work too well when writing for a conference or journal with a
predefined template and style file. The obvious solution -- do all your
writing in Markdown and then integrate at the very end of the workflow --
doesn't work too well because you can't tell how long the document is until
you use the real template.

Same goes for org-mode's Latex export.

~~~
grep2
Actually, it is acceptably straightforward to include a custom header in org-
mode. Basically you can create your own latex class in customize-group org-
export-latex and then add a

#+LATEX-HEADER: \input{stuff.tex}

to your file to include the appropriate header magick. I'm currently using
this approach to prepare my thesis in org-mode.

------
jmmcd
The big thing that is missing from most "here's how easy it is to do Latex"
articles is integrating with pre-existing styles and templates. When learning
Latex I was able to write my own documents with no problems. When I had to
deal with (eg) A0 poster templates or conference-dictated styles I had a lot
more problems.

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mickey7
i sense a disconnect in the premise. do non-technical people really need
latex? - to invest the time to study prettyness of presentation... depends on
definition, scope and degree of technical'ness but generally i'd think they
(should) focus on quality of content in their own field because it's just much
cheaper to outsource the nonessentials (latex being one of them) to more
competent experts who dedicate lifetimes to 'making the presentation pretty'

------
ChristianMarks
I've been using LaTeX for over 20 years and I still do not exactly understand
what I am doing. I use LaTeX for papers in mathematics and computer science
myself. But even at my relatively high-functioning level of misunderstanding,
I have been unable to persuade environmental scientists and chemists to use
LaTeX instead of Word.

~~~
lallysingh
I'd argue that anyone using styles in Word is in the same boat.

