

What led you to TeX and LaTeX - idle
http://tex.stackexchange.com/q/2110/213

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StavrosK
I started using LaTeX because it just looked great for writing papers, but my
"latex is awesome" story is different:

A few months ago I needed a letterhead for my company. I designed one in
InDesign which looked nice, but it weighed just over 5 MB, and I wasn't
prepared to store and sync 5 MB of the same file just to change 1 KB of text
each time.

So, after one or two days of frustration, I managed to convert it to LaTeX. It
looked the same, pixel-for-pixel (except I made some small changes
afterwards), and it was _much_ easier to write:

<http://media.korokithakis.net/files/sample-letterhead.pdf>

Basically, the above is just a few \sections and a \tabularx environment. The
minimal document is:

    
    
        \documentclass{stochastic}
    
        \title{Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet}
    
        \begin{document}
        \maketitle
    
        \section{Lorem ipsum dolor}
        \subsection{Dolor sit amet}
    
         Vivamus consectetur enim a leo luctus vitae
        aliquam nisi volutpat. Proin nec mauris tellus, ac venenatis purus. 
    
        \makelightcover
        \end{document}
    

I'm very proud of that letterhead.

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program
I started using LaTeX after I adopted Emacs as my default text editor. This
was my research path: info -> Texinfo -> LaTeX -> XeLaTeX.

Now I use the swiss-knife Memoir class for nearly everything and I have
understood the importance of beautiful typesetting.

Worth reading:

<http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/info/memdesign> (the memoir manual of style)

The Elements of Typographic Style, Robert Bringhurst (the bible)

~~~
StavrosK
I use XeLaTeX also, it just seems better than the others and the system font
support is not too shabby either.

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drblast
I was the sole user of LaTeX in my class of M.S.E.E. students in grad school.

It was like a well-kept secret; someone years ago had written the thesis
template for an older version of LaTeX. Because my thesis included a number of
mathematical formulas and equations and I _hated_ the MS Word formula editor,
and because my thesis advisor used LaTeX to write exams and had a few books on
it, I chose to do my thesis in LaTeX instead of Word.

This meant updating the old template to work with a modern version of LaTeX,
which took me about a week. After that it was pretty smooth sailing, and when
I found I could include encapsulated Postscript output directly from GnuPlot
for graphs, I was very happy. The output looked much better than anything Word
would have produced.

So my thesis advisor has a copy of the source code to my thesis for the next
person who comes along and wants to use LaTeX. I wonder how long that will
be...

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coliveira
I use LaTeX since I started grad school, so writing papers was the main
motivation. I wonder how some people still write anything with equations using
Word. I would use LaTeX exclusively, if wasn't for job requirements.

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Jach
I started using LaTeX heavily because of the advantages--why else would I use
it? My experience is much like "Bran the Blessed" on the posting--I love using
vim, git, not dealing with the quirks of GUI editors like anytime I have to
make a list--only I started in high school but didn't really pick it up until
I had to write weekly papers for a college course a year ago.

And interestingly the more I use it, the more I use it. That is, now that I
have a base of essays, math homeworks, and research papers, I can usually just
copy from one of those as a template for whatever I'm doing and don't have to
look up how to do things over and over.

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erez
I came to LaTeX from LyX, years of frustration with the office metaphor
evaporated in seconds. I have more fun writing a presentation in beamer
([http://ftp.snt.utwente.nl/pub/software/tex/help/Catalogue/en...](http://ftp.snt.utwente.nl/pub/software/tex/help/Catalogue/entries/beamer.html))
than I could've ever imagined possible in the various presentation tools

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mark_l_watson
I haven't used a word processor in 2+ years (last time, APress wanted Word
compatible files so I used Pages, which was sort of OK). I have switched to
the super lightweight TextEdit (styled text mode) for short design notes, etc.
I use Google Documents a lot (and about once a week automatically export
everything to my laptop). LaTex is my preferred system for writing books and
long project documents.

I started to pay attention to how much time I spent futzing around with
formatting, etc. using Word, Pages, and OpenOffice and decided a long time ago
to really learn to use Latex. BTW, although I do like TeXShop (for OS X) for
editing, I like to set up plain old Makefiles to generate multiple formats,
run scripts to annotate output HTML with advertisements, etc. Another setup I
used for my last Java book was to edit Latex from inside Eclipse with a
project for the book's Java examples; combined with Mylin that was a nice
setup for that specific project.

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wladimir
I used LaTeX when writing papers for my PHD thesis. After that, I haven't
really touched it. It is great for scientific books and papers (especially the
$math$ is superb), but it is just too complicated for the usually simple
documents I write. These days I prefer RestructuredText, Markdown.

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ja27
LaTeX was part of a class I had to take in my freshman year of college.

This makes me feel even older than usual. See, it was a little different back
then. You didn't run LaTeX and immediately look at the output in Ghostview or
some other tool to see how it looked. I had to submit a batch job then wait up
to 15 minutes for an operator to pull my print job off the big Xerox laser
printer so I could see what it looked like.

I didn't have a lot of options to compare it to at the time. MacWrite and
Microsoft Word for the Mac were the only WYSIWYG word processors available to
me and those took fighting for time on a rare Mac in a campus lab.

I'm glad things changed by the time I got to grad school.

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HedgeMage
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.

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MatthewPhillips
I attempted to use LaTeX when I was in college but the school required Word
documents so they could load them into software that detects cheating. Now I'm
a coder so I rarely write except for documentation. I'd love to use LaTeX
again but don't have a reason, really. I could for a resume but Google Docs is
too convenient.

~~~
colincsl
LaTeX Labs allows you to write LaTex and is hosted through Google Docs.

<http://docs.latexlab.org/docs>

~~~
MatthewPhillips
This is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

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pasbesoin
The school ponied up for some DEC laser printers to supplement, eventually
replace, the daisy wheel printers, and the output both looked great (despite
the DEC output being relatively "fuzzy" [1]) and allowed for foreign
characters.

Knuth's book on TeX was a very enjoyable read.

[1] IIRC, the Math Dept. eventually acquired an Apple LaserWriter or two, and
if you pushed the output there, the lines looked significantly cleaner.

