: Re: Using LaTex medium to enhance writing I asked my Calculus Professor for a recommendation. He said, "Sure. No problem. But write me an essay about yourself and since you're a computer guy,

@YK4692630

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LaTeX for writing books - especially for writing scientific books, with equations or technical drawings - is what HTML is to writing webpages. It's a metalanguage which will get your formatting right, it allows you to write complex equations fluently, moving sections of text will not make the whole thing collapse terribly, and while for things like an essay it's overkill, once your book on Calculus crosses 70 pages mark in MS Word, you will begin understanding why LaTeX would have been a better choice.

In short, in most WYSIWYG editors, and notoriously MS Word, scalability (in the computational meaning) is a serious problem; once your document is big enough things that should happen "automagically" don't, or happen well past the moment you've taken steps to mitigate their lack (and only got disastrous results) or happen halfway, or appear on screen but not on printout... The bigger and more complex your document, the less reliably the editor behaves.

LaTeX suffers none of these problems. A rendering run may take longer or shorter, but the product won't differ in quality whether it has 10 or 1000 pages and 10 or 1000 equations, pictures, footnotes, margin notes, font changes or nested tables. Sure, instead of seeing the result "immediately" on screen you just type arcane_code{your text} but you may be sure what you see in preview will appear just the same in print. And LaTeX has thousands of "arcane codes", of which quite a few you will need to learn before you get to write your first essay. Still, once you do learn them, this will help you in your career.

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