You remember the epiphany you had when you were sitting down with notepad when somebody said “What are you, crazy? Use Vim!” The very word “Vim” would strike a sense of pure awesomeness into you, and you’d be converted. Or perhaps when you were typing your regular kabillion lines of ifelse in PHP, when somebody said “MVC is life, kid, use a framework“. Then when you first downloaded Vim or learned about MVC and frameworks, every new line of code, every thing you did was golden, it was perfect, it was … the true way of doing it? Well, johnny come back! Here’s another one!

What a lot of people don’t realise is that using your friendly OpenOffice Writer or not-so-friendly Microsoft Word to honk out your usual blabber isn’t the only way of doing it. Those that know programming can probably relate to this by the difference between good ol’ Microsoft Frontpage and honking out blabber in Vim. They produce the same thing. Somewhat. So it’s time to introduce the hidden secrets of text-authoring.

I never thought one day I would be blabbering on about writing stuff, seeing as it isn’t my forte, but here I am again. What you’re all used to is WYSIWYG. For the technophobes, that’s an acronym for What You See Is What You Get. Basically whatever you type on the screen is what your printer is going to spit out at the end of the day.

Oh, and to go a little off topic here, it’s always been amazing to see what happens if things were invented the other way around, such as the typewriter after the computer/printer combo. “Hey look honey, you get the hard copy right away! No tedious two step processes!”

Back on topic. The alternative to WYSIWYG is called WYMIWYG. It’s the same thing except the S has turned into an M. This stands for What You Mean Is What You Get. Though in general we’re all thicker than the Hong Kong phone book, we try to look smart and with a sense of purpose to others. This is what sprung the theory of why don’t we just decide what we’re trying to convey, and let the standards decide how best to express it? The alternative is let’s express something we know bonkers about. Why is the text bold? Dunno, looks good.

The processing goes somewhat like this:

1. You say “I want this bold.”
2. Beam me up scotty, your “code” get’s processed.
3. You get an output format, all pretty with the proper way of bolding things, along with generating all the other things you always wanted with your document.

As you can see, it’s a little step in between before you can see your work slapped on paper.

Explain to me why again I want to create extra work for myself?

Standards and presentation are paramount when taking your brilliant idea/essay/book/article/thesis (yes, thesis’ are very popular about this. Even the University of Cambridge has got online help to get people to use this workflow.)/slides to the big guys, be it your primary teachers, secondary “facilitators”, college guidance or university lecturers. If you sort of skimmed through that last (long) sentence, you might’ve missed the big about thesis’. This is big, when it comes to making things like books and thesis’. Especially long and technical ones. It’s massively popular, even though you might not have heard of it before. Oh, and the people who tell you it’s not used are probably using it themselves in secret and just want a better grade. Shame on them.

This system is called LaTeX (pronounced lah/lay – tech). Basically you write your document in a code form, which’ll then turn into your final product. Here’s an example (not using real LaTeX code, just pseudo code for a simplicity):

{this-is-a-booklet} [double sided, A4paper, 10pt]

{title: My Test Page}

{author: Dion Moult}

{document starts}

This is some [emphasize{special}] text.

{document ends}

It’s somewhat more complex than that, but that’s a good gist of what’s going on. After converting the code to your final product, you might have a .html or .pdf document which you can print. (Sorry, no .doc or .odt, but you don’t need those anyway)

Before I continue waffling on, you also get a lot of control over your document, take this for example:

Yes, all through the power of LaTeX. Even though you might not type a lot of Aaaaargh in your documents, it’s pretty cool to see proper functionality.

Alright, let’s take for example the page layouts used in professional documents. Here’s a nifty diagram to help:

As you can see, there are a lot of measurements. All of these have standards, and all for a good reason, too. Tell you what, pick up any average book by a reputable publisher and count the number of characters in a row of text. It rarely exceeds 66. Surprised? Studies shows that’s the optimum length to ensure readability. It’s all justified too, and there’s often a notes margin on the left in textbooks, and plenty of header/footer space for references. That’s just mentioning one page, when it comes to standards on displaying theories, important concepts, graphs and figures, or even a simple contents or bibliography page, each has standards. There are rules on where words can be broken up (hyphenated) when justifying text. There are difference between the minus sign, a hyphen, and em, and an en hypen. (yeah, there are four types of dashes!) There are standards on currency signs, proper display of greek/mathemagical symbols. Take for example your average tilde. Here’s what it looks like  ~.  Type that in word and it’ll be unnaturally shifted to the top like it was supered. What about quotes? Even worse. Proper heading sizes, proper indentations on content pages, don’t even get me started.

LaTeX allows you to disregard all these unimportant hindrances to a beautiful document and focus on what really matters. What you are trying to convey. It does a good job of it too. For one thing, you can now do all your documents in a text editor like Vim, which will increase productivity spectacularly. Not only due to the key shortcuts Vim provides, but also due to the lack of moronic clutter word processing applications try to stuff on your screen.

Don’t be frightened! You can literally write anything you want with LaTeX that is and isn’t possible with Word. Those who have battled with huge documents (50+ pages) will start to hate word processors. What with images and tables jumping here and there for no apparent reason, losing justification, and so many widows and orphans you’d think you’d been through an apocalypse.

Ahh, the rule of thumb of documents. This is actually true. Especially with huge thick books full of technical information. You need a standard for examples, for tips, for optional information, for important stuff, for each header type, for references, for citations, for links, for emphasized text, for everything, really.

Advanced math? It’s all easy pie for LaTeX. It can put whatever you want.

Need to put in graphs? No problem. Yes, that was made with pure text, no graphic apps. Heck, I could even write a musical score with LaTeX!

Here’s an example of a crappy economics essay I found in my “tobedeleted” folder exported to PDF with some examples of LaTeX usage.

Yes, it’s neat, thin (66 characters), easy on the eyes, plenty of good spacing, and looking seriously tight. Even the font and text spacing has been optimised for ultra readability. If you try printing it, you can distinctly notice the professional quality the document has compared to your previous works.

This is all well and good, but how do I get started?

I’m glad you asked! If you’re on Linux, simply use your package manager to install a distribution of LaTeX. Use TeXlive. If you’re on a Mac, there are precompiled binaries available from searching online. If you’re on Windows, well, there’s something for it there but I’m not going to bother to search for it. (It exists, though)

Once you’ve gotten it installed, you should float over to the regular #latex channel in irc.freenode.net. They provide help with syntax and as far as I can see, they’re pretty newbie friendly. You should then download lshort from here, then go through it as you would any other reasonable documentation. Learn some syntax, convert your crappy Econs essays, then the next document you’re asked to produce? Smile at them in the face, say it’ll be a pleasure, and start up Vim.

Note for Vim users: there is a LaTeX plugin/script for Vim called LaTeX suite (search on Vim.org). It gives some menus for generating some of the syntax or characters (such as mathematical stuff) and useful page headers. It also has shortcuts for compiling, which you can set to go right to pdf instead of dvi, which’ll make things super fast.

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