Jesus Christ I fell for the LaTex meme. I fell for it hard.
Why the FUCK would you want to program when you just want to write a fucking document? What does it do that MS Word 2016 doesn't? The math shit works just as good.
This is beyond fucking stupid.
Do NOT fall for it guys.
too late
You must suck dick at programming if latex is giving you trouble.
Use LyX instead of raw LaTeX. It looks identical but is much faster, easier, and more efficient to use. It will also end up showing you more of what LaTeX can do as a byproduct.
Anyway, most self-respecting math majors and CS academics use some form of LaTeX-based typesetting. It definitely does look better than e.g. Word as far as the end result is concerned.
LaTeX is piss easy to learn, in only one day you can already write beautiful documents. Also, it eliminates every compatibility problem while sharing documents.
there's no going back now. Next, compile some linux components.
why would anyone pay money for MS word when libre office writer exists?
seriously what the fug can MS word do that writer can't do?
look stylish
word is better but it's not really worth the price if you have to pay it yourself and don't do much editing...
Not fuck up formatting of .doc and .docx documents.
>inb4 microsoft fault
When you are not the standard product, you have to either be better than it or to adequate to it.
I prefer Google Documents.
The real-time collaboration functionality is love.
i use latex for everything and i agree that the learning curve is somewhat steep. don't be a dick to people just because they're less familiar with shit than you are.
as for OP, latex is really nice for a few reasons:
1) citation management - citations in bibtex are plaintext, so there's no chance of some company going under or being a true nigger and charging you for continued/premium access to your own references list. bibtex is also *really* robust. i've never heard of someone needing to conform to an established citation format and not having a good bibtex option.
2) once you have the boilerplate/template shit out of the way, the writing is actually quite simple. or rather, replicating symbols and stuff is relatively straightforward. you can copy someone's writing and paste it someplace and get precisely the same thing they've got.
3) version management is better (if you're using git/svn or something). word has incorporated version management in the last few years, but it's pretty painful.
i'm a phd student but in my field every venue makes a word template and a latex template available. making the word template conform to the original constraints (margins, figure placement, citations, balancing, etc...) is weirdly more difficult than with latex, for which you just need to dump shit into the right place in the middle. see pic related (hopefully. assuming i don't forget)
Wow, this shit just looks unnecessary. What's the point of it, other than to look down on normies who use regular text editors and word processors?
>use latex on Linux
>want to build my bibliography
>breaks because biber isn't the right version even though I downloaded it together with the full TeX package
Why are you doing this to me? Everything else is cool except for this shit.
>tfw writing my phd thesis in latex
feels patrician as fuck
>what's the point of it
i honestly can't think how to answer this question except by asking you to look at the text of the post where i list 3 of the big reasons that people like latex. those are areas where latex particularly shines, and word particularly struggles.
It makes beautiful documents and makes formatting math a breeze when you need to enter it as text. Word can't even into \frac{x}{y}.
>Wow, this shit just looks unnecessary
MS Word has all of this and more; it's just inaccessible to the user, so you have to click and drag shit like the ruler to set margins, click around to change the page orientation, etc...
If you want to be able to look at how someone made a symbol or made a slideshow (rather than a sheet of paper), you can look at the .tex file. No amount of scrutiny will allow you to replicate the look of something in a Word document unless you already know the things you need to do (e.g. You need to know where to go to find the figure placement options, which are buried somewhere in an ever-changing graphical user interface).
honestly i couldn't imagine writing a thesis in anything but latex. even if i was incredibly tech unsavvy, the absolute worst case for me would be that i would just write up the prose and then pay someone to copy/paste it into latex and then sort out the citations somehow.
citations for a thesis should number into the hundreds, at least (i'm in CS and one of my conference submissions recently had ~70 references, and that's about 10 pages of content). you could argue that citations will be heavily focused in the lit review section of a thesis, but what if you changed your citation format for some reason, or added another reference or something?
and this is to say nothing of compiling a section on its own rather than dealing with like 150 additional pages of cruft.
i don't know if you've dealt with word with large numbers of pages. it doesn't handle it nearly as well as it handles
>why would anybody use Latex?
>uh... except for the reasons people use it!
Kys dumbass shill