LaTeXing in the Humanities
July 10th, 2008I have to confess, I do like LaTeX. It produces such beautiful looking documents. Would you like to see a sneak peak of a couple of pages of my thesis? I have to fix up a couple of things (the footnote citations should be in headline not sentence style, and the commas aren’t being sucked in American-style in subsequent shortened citations) but behold the beauty of LaTeX.
A Melburnian Muslim convert blogs religion, academia and life in general.
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Beautiful documents, as you say, but isn’t LaTeX hideously complicated?
Very nice… Similar setup can be achieved through using templates well in Word or OpenOffice too though, although the concept of separating content from layout/structure is very appealing… reminds me of my old xhtml/css days.
I regularly use OoO for my essays and have it set up as a template so it all works nicely.
Dawood: true - but to be able to easily *change* from one style to another is where LaTeX comes into its own. Say I decide that I don’t want Chicago style footnotes but MLA, well I define a sentence in my preamble and voila!! Biblatex even gives you the ability to swap between author-year and footnote style so long as the author-year isn’t too tightly integrated into the text.
Barney: I thought so too. It has a relatively steep learning curve but once you invest a wee bit of time experimenting and googling for answers on the web, it becomes pretty easy and there are so many people out there who have made mistakes and given answers on the web, even a complete n00b (like I was) with no programming background (like me) can do it!! It’s kinda like learning HTML.
True - and don’t get me wrong I love that concept - but that is why we mere plebs have Endnote and Word eh.
true - but I am on a Micro$oft revolt ;P