Word users can also write directly in LaTeX syntax, and then click to convert it into a formatted equation. He inserts a few lines of LaTeX code into a web form - no installation is required - and MathJax renders equations in a web page. For example, Allington uses the online tool MathJax. When it came to text and tables, Word proved faster and users were less prone to making errors, although LaTeX users “more often report enjoying using their respective software”, the authors noted.Įven LaTeX critics such as Daniel Allington, a computational social scientist at King’s College London who has inveighed on his blog against what he calls ‘LaTeX fetish’, acknowledges that it handles equations better than alternatives.īut, Allington points out, scientists today can use LaTeX’s equation syntax without abandoning what-you-see-is-what-you-get editors. Indeed, equations were the only feature in which LaTeX outperformed Word in the 2014 study that compared the two tools. The browser-based editor Overleaf provides an overview of LaTeX equation formatting at go./2eh1daz. Plain text is wrapped inside commands that describe its formatting (for example, for italics, \textitx dx. Unlike ‘what you see is what you get’ text editors such as Word, LibreOffice and OpenOffice, writing in LaTeX is like programming. “Word is when ‘good enough’ is OK and/or I’m working with folks who need to use it.” Coding equations “For me, LaTeX is the tool when I want to get the typesetting just so,” says Casey Greene, a bioinformatician at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Other text editors also support elements of LaTeX, allowing newcomers to use as much or as little of the language as they like. In 2017, Microsoft made it possible to use LaTeX’s equation-writing syntax directly in Word, and last year it scrapped Word’s own equation editor. Over the past few years however, the line between the tools has blurred. The article has been viewed more than 240,000 times so far. Nejasmic PLoS ONE 9, e115069 2014) that asked scientists from different fields to put both Microsoft Word and LaTeX to the test ended up being one of the ten most discussed papers online the following year, according to data-science company Altmetric (Altmetric is owned by Digital Science, a firm operated by the Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, which has a share in Nature’s publisher, Springer Nature). Others regard the software as too complicated for all but the most demanding of tasks. Proponents embrace LaTeX because of the total control it offers for document layout, or because it represents a blow to commercial software developers, particularly Microsoft. Since its development in 1985, LaTeX has become popular in disciplines such as mathematics, physics and computer science. The open-source software system - used to create and precisely format scientific manuscripts - is more akin to coding than writing. But for scientists in other fields the merits of LaTeX have largely gone unnoticed. You type your equations in LaTeX style and by clicking on the "LaTeXit" button in the right bottom corner the little program compiles it.LaTeX or Word? For physicists and mathematicians, the choice is obvious. The screenshot below shows the default setup. Here is my workflow on how I include LaTeX based equations into my Keynote slides. Working in engineering science the tool of choice to produce beautifully arranged equations, complicated matrices, or any scientific text is of course LaTeX (pronounced as /ˈlɑːtɛk/). Typically, with students you go deeper into the rabbit hole and more details are needed. I also include there additional results or even helpful illustration to explain certain details of my talk that did not make the cut for the main presentation.Īnother case where I use heavily mathematical notations is on my teaching slides. I keep for all my presentations a series of extra slides (hidden behind my last slide) with more (mathematical) details and even full proofs for eventual follow-up questions. Nevertheless, I still need to incorporate at least some Greek letters for labeling my graphs or sketches, and every once in a while it does make sense to show an entire equation.Īnother case where I include formulae in my slides are, what I call, my follow-up questions slides. In general, I try to keep my talks as free from equations as possible. So, naturally, when I present my work on conferences, summer schools, or other scholarly events, I have to bring at least a certain amount of equations onto my Keynote slides. Working in the field of (soft) robotics and artificial intelligence I deal with mathematical notations and equations on a daily basis.
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