Although IDEs like LyX and Kile exist, LaTeX continues to be used primarily in text editors.īy contrast, LibreOffice Writer (Figure 2) is a desktop office suite. Like many other pieces of free software, LaTeX has obtained a cult-like status, and professors who supervise graduate work tell me that students frequently become more immersed in the intricacies of LaTeX than in their research. It continues to be widely used in academia and the sciences, especially for mathematical formulas. Released in the early 1980s, for years LaTeX was the premier text-formatting application for Unix and its derivatives. Loosely speaking, it is comparable to raw HTML, but with far more options that allow for professional text layout. LaTeX (Figure 1) is a text-based markup language, which does formatting through tags and then exports to readable output. Advocates of both applications may be surprised by my conclusions. Recently, though, I began to compare the two applications, looking at the precision, their use of styles, their ability to write formulas, their extensibility, and the ease with which they are learned. Too be honest, I never felt competent to assess them, having never worked with LaTeX. For years, I dismissed these comments as irrelevant. Whenever I write about LibreOffice Writer - or, previously, about - I get comments praising LaTeX as a superior alternative.
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