![]() ![]() doc submission format. For a lot of journals, this is no longer the case and they might even provide their own Latex template (a. The journal you’re submitting to only accepts.Unfortunately, the time to learn Latex is not during a group project, especially when you’re the only one who knows it and will be the only insisting on using it. You are collaborating with people who don’t know how to use Latex.It’s all about just getting my ideas on paper and making sure the content is good. For that, whatever formatting I do while writing won’t matter as soon as I copy and paste, so doing the work in Latex would be a waste of time and effort. They will be posted as a blog in SITN’s own wordpress account. You just want to write something down and don’t care about format. For example, I write short articles for Science in the News, and those are roughly 250 words.For example, you should never use Word to create a resume/cv, in my opinion.īut here’s the breakdown. But there are also situations in which Latex is far superior than Word. Now that you know what Latex is, why would you ever use it instead of Word? Both have their strengths and weaknesses, and I can’t truthfully say that you should use Latex all the time and for everything you do. Start simply, start with an easy document, and you will pick up almost everything you’ll need to know in a day or two. There is a lot of stuff for you to learn if you want to be an expert in stats, but truth-be-told, most of what you need to learn to get by doing day-to-day stats can be learned quickly and painlessly, without proofs or in-depth theoretical jargon. And for anything complicated, there is a whole host of resources online.īut learning Latex can look intimidating, the same way learning stats is intimidating. You can learn almost everything you need to put together a research article in one afternoon. In my experience, it’s a short and shallow learning curve. Similarly, instead of clicking a command button to create a bold phrase in your sentence, instead you will use \textbf and you’re done.Īnd this gets to the heart of the issue with Latex, and why it’s not as mainstream as it should be, I think: you need to know the syntax in order to format your document the way you want. Now, Latex is a mark-up language, like HTML (where you might put to signify the start of a new paragraph). It looks nothing alike, and this is the difference between WYSIWYG and a typesetter like Latex. ![]() On the right, is what the document looks like. Unlike in Word, you have complete and utter control over all the formatting decisions. Latex, simply put, is a system that allows you to create a document from the ground up. You just type what you want and use the ribbon commands to format it how you want, and then you’re done. There is no conversion process, no ducking behind the GUI to modify formatting. When you type something in Word, what you see in the software resembles closely the final product. It is often called a ‘What You See is What You Get’ (WYSIWYG) service. Word (and LibreOffice’s Writer) is a text processor. ![]() Well, the place to start, I think, is what is Word? (Also, I’m going to just type Latex going forward because proper capitalization is too much work.) I have talked about LaTeX in a previous post, and now I’m going to recapitulate and expand upon what I wrote there. What works, what doesn’t what I use, or don’t use and compare and contrast the different options available to you.Īnd today, I’m starting with LaTeX: what it is, why you would consider using it, and if you’re going to use it, how to get started. In this series of posts, I’d like to talk about the various tools of grad school. Or, which reference organizer (Endnote/JabRef/Mendeley) should you use? Aren’t they all pretty much the same? The plug-ins you choose to include on your computer can help save you from distractions, or create them. For example, based on the type of data you’re dealing with and how you need to modify it after/during collection, you might want to use one coding language over another. One of the things I’ve noticed so far is that the tools and softwares and programs you use can drastically affect how you work. ![]()
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