Terminally Incoherent

LaTex documents have a very distinctive look. First of all, they do look very pretty in print since they actually use professional typesetting techniques to make the text flow nicely on the page which makes them stand out when juxtaposed against stuff generated by Microsoft Word. But there is another reason why it is easy to spot a LaTex document from a mile away. It’s the default font known as Computer Modern which was created by Yoda Donald Knuth himself. Explanation for the joke can be found here. It is very distinctive, and gives the documents that Tex look and feel:

A lot of people I know, affectionately call this default look as “fucking ugly”. I do not share that sentiment. Personally I think the font has it’s own unique charm, but nevertheless it is not suited for everything. Sometimes you are required to use the ubiquitous Times New Roman font. How do you do that in LaTex? There is nothing simpler - just stick the following two lines in your preamble:

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{times}

The result is subtle, but the difference is clearly visible. Which font you prefer is really a matter of taste:

Sometimes having your document standing out from the sea of papers written in Times. If you want that older book look, you could try to use something like the Bookman font:

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{bookman}

See how it compares to Computer Modern and Times above:

Naturally, when I start talking about fonts, someone immediately starts asking me about Arial. You don’t. Why would I want to infect my pretty LaTex documents with Arial? Nevertheless they keep asking. Arial is the Times New Roman of Sans Serif fonts, despite the fact that it is merely a cheep knock-off of Helvetica. But yes, you can do it just as easily as any of the examples above:

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[scaled]{uarial}
\renewcommand*\familydefault{\sfdefault}

Here is the catch - by default LaTex renders your text in Serif fonts. You will need that last line to switch your whole document over to Sans Serif mode. Here is a sample:

Don’t use Arial though. Use Helvetica which is the de-facto king of Sans Serif world, and a far superior font. Syntax is the same as above:

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[scaled]{helvet}
\renewcommand*\familydefault{\sfdefault}

Quick note about the scaled parameter - you can use it to resize your font. For example using scaled=0.92 will give you size equivalent to 9pt.

Please compare the sample below with Arial, and decide for yourself:

The dirty little secret here is that when you do this, you might not be getting the true Helvetica but rather it’s very close cousin Nimbus Sans. That might depend on your system, and LaTex setup though. Nevertheless, Nimbus is still far better font type than Arial.

If you want to experiment with fonts, or you are simply searching for that unique look of your own, check out the LaTex Font Catalogue. It lists all the most popular supported packages, along with usage examples and sample images.

The other day I finally got around to installing LaTex on my Windows box after the last major reinstall. There are several different LaTex releases that will run on Windows. They all do pretty much the same thing, but now that I had to do this over again, I realize that the choice might be confusing to some.

If you want to start playing with LaTex on Windows I recommend you download ProText. Why? Because it ships along with everything you need to start working. The following products are included in the ProText package:

1. MikTex - one of the more popular LaTex packages for Windows
2. GhostScript - a windows release of the ultimate postscript interpreter
3. GsView - the windows postscript and dvi viewer which you will need to open some of the Tex generated files
4. TeXnicCenter - my favorite LaTex IDE.

It all comes bundled in a single neat package. The installer is a bit funky but don’t be discouraged. You get a self extractable rar archive that will dump bunch of files into a temporary folder of your choice. Inside you will find a setup file. If you run it it will open a PDF document which outlines the installation process step by step. It includes embedded links that launch installers for the products I listed above. It is a bit odd, and unconventional way of installing applications but it is very easy to follow.

Naturally you could get all these things separately, but ProText just makes it easy and convenient. I’m mainly putting this out here for people who might be new to LaTex. Also, I’m documenting this for myself because it took me a little while to remember which one was the nice PDF based bundle that I used last few times.

My brand new goal in life is to get more proficient with teh Emacs so I can experience the juicy goodness of the elisp that people keep telling me about. So yes, this will be another Emacs post and there will probably be another one before the end of the week. But today I won’t be talking just about emacs - this is also about LaTex.

If my calculations are correct, the combination of Emacs + LaTex should have scared away roughly 60 to 80% of the readers. Those who remain either already use Emacs, use Emacs to code LaTex, or are just sticking around to tell me I should stick with Vim. And no, I’m not abandoning the good old Vim - I will probably still use it till I die. But while vim is probably the best text editor on the planet Emacs is actually a very good general purpose IDE like framework.

For example, I do most of my coding in Kile (KDE Based LaTex IDE) and TeXnicCenter (a windows based IDE). I searched long and hard for a multi platform LaTex IDE that would work for me, and I failed. Instead I found two damn good platform specific ones. Unfortunately, when I switch from the desktop to the laptop I have to switch my LaTex editing environments, key bindings and etc..

Other than that, both systems run almost identical set of software - Firefox, Thunderbird, Eclipse, Komodo Edit and Vim. And no, none of the Tex plugins for Eclipse really worked for me. They just didn’t work the way I wanted to. Eclipse is great for Java, but that’s about it.

In my search for the perfect IDE however, I completely ignored Emacs. I mean, that’s a text editor, right? What I need an IDE with like toolbars, code completion and the whole 9 yards. Am I correct?

You can put the pitchforks and torches down! I was wrong, naturally. Saying that Emacs is just a text editor is like calling iPhone just a phone. Sure, it is that, but it can also do all other things. No other text editor has a powerful programming framework that allows you endless customization at it’s core. Elisp can be used to make Emacs do just about anything, from editing text files, fetching your email, browsing the web to playing games (try doing M-x tetris and see what happens).

In and by itself it is a very decent LaTex editor with nice syntax highlighting. But it’s not an IDE yet. What you need is some of that elisp awesomeness that I mentioned above. Enter AUCTex - a nifty little package which will turn your Emacs into a awesome LaTex IDE and blow your mind. I could just sit here listing all of it’s features, but instead of doing that, I’ll simply show you my Emacs buffer with AUCTex:

First thing you will probably see is that with AUCTex the LaTex mode will actually use helpful visual hints in addition to just regular highlights. So section headings will actually be bigger than regular text, \textbf blocks will actually render in bolface and etc.

Second striking feature is that AUCTex lets you preview headings, formulas and image inline. Yes, it will actually compile the code, and render pretty images in the buffer. You can toggle between code and image at any time by middle mousing it or using the context menu. The only LaTex toll that does that is Lyx. But Lyx is kinda funky and I never really liked their philosophy of almost-sorta-WYSIWYG.

If you look at the menus, note the LaTex and Math ones. They are chock full of functions and key bindings for auto generating code, and auto inserting code for various characters and environments.

How do I get this big bowl of awesome, you may ask. Well, if you are running Ubuntu, you are in luck - there is actually nothing simpler:

aptitude install auctex, preview-latex

Once you restart Emacs and open a tex file you should see the AUCTex environment preloaded. To get the Math menu simply drop the following line into your .emacs file:

;; Math mode for LaTex
(add-hook 'LaTeX-mode-hook 'LaTeX-math-mode)

You may also want to add the following lines if you don’t have them there already

;; mouse scrolling
(mouse-wheel-mode t)
 
;; spellcheck in LaTex mode
(add-hook `latex-mode-hook `flyspell-mode)
(add-hook `tex-mode-hook `flyspell-mode)
(add-hook `bibtex-mode-hook `flyspell-mode)
 
;; Show line-number and column-number in the mode line
(line-number-mode 1)
(column-number-mode 1)
 
;; highlight current line
(global-hl-line-mode 1)

These don’t really have anything to do with AUCTex but they do make working with Emacs easier. Naturally don’t forget your CUA Mode settings if you need them.

If you are on Windows, then installing AUCTex might be a bit more difficult. Actually, to tell you the truth, it is a major pain in the ass. This is why it will get it’s own post that will appear here another day. Needless to say, it is doable, and it works on Windows but you might actually need to *gasp* compile something.

Anyway, I think I’m sold. I think Emacs will become my main LaTex IDE from now on. At least it’ll be consistent.

Here are some tips on how to “compress” your paper vertically by minimizing white space gaps between elements. I had to do this few days ago when school refused to duplicate my syllabus because it was 14 pages long. I got it down to 6 without any cuts, and then down to 3 after doing some reductions in text.

So how do we squeeze the vertical whitespace? There are many ways to do this, and some are more complicated than the other. My tips range on the easy side, so you won’t need to write custom .sty files or redefine commands using intricate tex sequences.

First we want to set the spacing between paragraphs as small as possible. The commands below should kill just about any space inducing setting in your paper unless you are doing something fancy:

\setlength{\parskip}{0pt}
\setlength{\parsep}{0pt}
\setlength{\headsep}{0pt}
\setlength{\topskip}{0pt}
\setlength{\topmargin}{0pt}
\setlength{\topsep}{0pt}
\setlength{\partopsep}{0pt}

Now the paragraphs are snugly against each other so let’s take a look at line spacing. The \linespread command is usually used to increase the line spacing but we can exploit it to make it smaller by passing in a value smaller than 1:

\linespread{0.5}

You may want to play around with that value - if you set it to small, LaTex will just reject it. Below certain threshold some lines may start running into each other. For me 0.5 value did the trick, and slurped up swaths of white space.

Our next offender are section headings. By default they have huge gaps above and below them. Totally wasteful, especially if you are trying to save trees by decreasing your page count without sacrificing content. So what do you do? There are very complex ways to change the spacing above and below the section headings but we are lazy bums and don’t feel like using them. So let’s use the titlesec package and zero out all the spaces:

\usepackage[compact]{titlesec}
\titlespacing{\section}{0pt}{*0}{*0}
\titlespacing{\subsection}{0pt}{*0}{*0}
\titlespacing{\subsubsection}{0pt}{*0}{*0}

If you look int the documentation, the attributes to \titlespacing are command, left margin, above-skip and below-kip respectively. The * notation replaces the formal notation using plus/minus and etc. If you set it to zero, headings will snug up to the paragraphs above and below them.

Enumerations and itemizations are horrible space wasters too. By default, all the lists are double-spaced. Why? Don’t ask me, but it’s easy to get rid of that by using “compacted” lists provided by the mdwlist package. In your preamble add:

\usepackage{mdwlist}

Then instead of using normal lists use:

\begin{enumerate*}
	\item
\end{enumerate*}
 
\begin{itemize*}
	\item
\end{itemize*}

This is not as straightforward as the other steps, as it will require some search and replace in a pre-existing text. If you know a better way to do this, please let me know.

Last thing I did was to change my margins using the geometry package. My command looked like this:

\usepackage[left=2cm,top=1cm,right=2cm,nohead,nofoot]{geometry}

My document had no headers or footers so I was able to disable them. You should probably experiment a bit with the values above to see what is the maximum range of your printer. Most devices won’t print all the way to the paper edge so you must set margins appropriate to your printer.

My document had no formulas or figures, but had several long item lists. Some of them were very narrow - 2-3 words per item. These types of lists are major space wasters so I set them in multi-column mode. Depending on your list you can either use 2, 4 or either 4 columns. For me 2 columns were the right fit. I recommend using the multicol package. In your preamble add:

\usepackage{multicol}

Then surround your text to be “columnized” (shut up, it’s a new word I just mad up) using:

\begin{multicols}{2}
	% your stuff goes here
\end{multicols}

Once I did all of that, the page count of my document was cut roughly in half. Feel free to add your vertical space squeezing tips in the comments.

If you are a regular reader, you probably saw me mentioning LaTex at various times. I always praise it as the superior solution - one above and beyond the traditional, word processing products. So let me take a minute of your time and explain exactly why I choose to use LaTex, and why you should consider learning it.

Output Quality

The most striking difference between text produced by Word or Open Office and LaTex is the quality of the output. You have to keep in mind that LaTex is not just a mere word processor - it is a typesetting software. It does kerning, hyphenation and all the tricks used by professional typesetters who work in professional publishing industry. This means that your text is always beautifully justified and balanced across the page. Please compare the two screen shots below. This is some random Lorem Ipsum text in MS word:

sample produced in MS Word

Now compare it to the same text sample generated by LaTex:

sample produced in LaTex

They look similar, but you will notice that the LaTex sample just flows better, and looks more professional. Let’s see what happens when I contract some of the words to create really long expressions, and justify the text in word:

justified text in Word

You might be familiar with this situation. Word does not know how to break words across line with hyphens. Nor does it know how to use kerning to bring some letters closer together, and push other ones apart to avoid creating huge white space gaps. LaTex does both:

sample of the same justified text in LaTex

The difference is striking. On one had you have ugly gaps, on the other you have nicely flowing, justified text. Which one do you like more? You be the judge. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. I could show you many cases in which LaTex beats conventional word processing in placing figures, floating text around images, displaying mathematical formulas and etc.

Transparency of Markup

When you write LaTex you work with plain text files. You simply add markup commands to your text. This is very much like writing HTML - just with more features, and more powerful parser on the receiving end. So what do I mean by transparency? You simply always see what is going on. For example, consider the following LaTex code:

Plain Text. \textbf{Bold} Text.

The \textbf command is the equivalent of the HTML <strong> - it makes the text boldface. You clearly see what is going on - the text between braces will be bold, while the text outside will be plain. Word on the other hand utilizes hidden markup. Yes, there are markup characters in word! You can actually see some of them: such as paragraph breaks, tabs, section breaks and etc. Other ones, such as boldface, and font tags are hidden. But they are there. Consider the following situation:

Hidden formating in Word

Note that when I backspace too close to the boldface text, all of a sudden I find myself typing in bold again. This happens because the symbol that ends the boldface “tag” was inserted directly to the left of the space following the word Bold. Deleting that space, deleted the markup symbol, throwing me back into boldface mode.

When I taught a Fluency in Technology course at MSU this was one of the consistent issues that frustrated the students to no end. All the faculty members I talked to noticed the same thing. We know why this happens - but an average person takes it as a weird software quirk, a bug, or some sort of failing on their part. If you ever see someone struggling with Word, look for this moment:

Word paragraph formating quirks

Ask the user what do they think happen, and how do they feel about it. Reactions will likely range from disbelief to death threats addressed at Bill Gates. But this is the same exact problem that I illustrated above. Some hidden formating symbol gets deleted, and messes up all your paragraph format. How to avoid situations like this one? You can control it by being careful with what you format, and where do you put white space. But if someone gives you a file, there is really no way of clearly identifying issues like this.

In LaTex, markup is transparent. There are no nasty surprises. You match the opening brace to the closing brace, or \begin statement to \end statement - and it’s easy to see if one is missing. It saves a lot of frustration.

Ease of Modifying Styles

This is something that happens to you when you try to publish a paper. You write a really long document using one citation and formating style, and then you find out the journal requires a completely different style. So for example, you may need to two columns, different spacing between paragraphs, different ordering of bibliographic references, different style for figure captions and etc. If you are using word, chances are that once you change the font, the margins, the column layout and paragraph spacing, all your figures will end up in weird unexpected places. You may need to move them around manually. Same goes for your page breaks, section breaks and etc. You probably have a lot of work ahead of you.

In LaTex you will usually only have to edit few lines in your preamble. If you are changing to a known style such as IEEE for example you can simply download appropriate templates, toss them to your project directory and add one or two lines to your document - for example:

\documentclass[peerreview]{IEEEtran}
\bibliographystyle{IEEEtran}

Or something among those lines. The rest is done by the parser and typesetting engine. It will move around the figures as appropriate, format the text the way it should be, change the the way bibliography and table of contents is displayed and etc. It’s easy, and requires almost no manual tweaking, unless you were doing something very complex and specific. As opposed to word - it just works.

Ease of Debugging

Most of issues with a LaTex document can be fixed by analytical process of analogous to debugging code. The markup language has a strict syntax, and most mistakes will generate errors, and force you to deal with the immediately. A LaTex user usually problems such as:

• What is causing the error in this particular line of text
• What commands do I use to make this line up properly
• Did I miss a closing brace or an end statement here?
• What do I need to put in the preamble to change the spacing and text flow here

All of these problems are analytical problems that can be solved by careful elimination process, or researched via googling the error messages, or warnings and by reading extensive documentation available online. Word users on the other hand, tend to struggle with OMG WTF kind of issues:

• Why does my whole paragraph loose formating when I hit backspace (see above)
• How the hell did this embedded object get corrupted?
• I put some section breaks in the document and now my paging is all messed up
• Why does word merge these tables when I paste them?
• OMG! Everything breaks when I paste this into the multi-column section!

The only way you can debug weird formating issues in Word is by trial and error, and hitting undo many times, until you get it right. You can’t study the code and find out what you did wrong because most formating marks in your text are hidden, and handled internally. Documentation is usually lacking, and chances of finding good hits via google are directly proportional to how well can you describe the issue in a short search phrase.

No Vendor Lock In

Microsoft makes Office to make a profit. They want to lock you into their platform because they want your money. And unless we can make ODF the national standard, they will tweak their file formats with every edition, release half assed API’s and specs and do everything to make interoperability difficult. Open Office and other products will always be playing catchup. ODF is the only way out of the lock in - but the things don’t look so great on this front. My hunch tells me that Microsoft will succeed pushing their OpenXML specification (which, btw is neither Open, nor a specification - more of an incomplete set of purposefully confusing notes with a restrictive license attacked) as the de-facto format in the upcoming years.

So thanks, but no thanks! LaTex is completely open, and well documented. It has been ported to virtually every platform and architecture. And it does not require a bloated, slow editor to use. You can edit your documents in vim, emacs, notepad, or even Eclipse. You are not tied to a single company, and you are not tied to a single editor. You can pick and choose. And choice, ladies and gentlemen is an essential component of freedom, and individualism.

Don’t listen to the people who talk about the paradox of choice. If you feel paralyzed and unable to make a decision when faced with plethora of different choices, then you are probably either a indecisive person to begin with, a lazy bum who doesn’t want to do the research, or a brainwashed zombie-sheep. Some people all all of the above. Majority of people are at least one of those. But you and me - we are different. If you read this far in this long post, you are probably at least little bit intrigued by LaTex. And so you probably embrace choice and freedom. LaTex gives you that in the same way using ODF format does. The only difference is that ODF is currently supported by very few Office applications - while LaTex does not require any specialized tools. Just a text editor and the phraser/compiler.

Designed for Excellence

Tex the core of the language was designed by Donald Knuth - a man who made some impressive contributions of the field of theoretical Computer Science, and is hailed by many as a living legend. He is considered a father of algorithm analysis. The man is a genius, and he wrote Tex because he was disappointed by all the publishing software that existed at the time.

Tex was then embellished, and improved by Leslie Lamport (who also has impressive set of contributions of the field) becoming LaTex. Quite an impressive pedigree if you look at it. The system was designed by some of the most brilliant people in our field, to be the be-all-and-end-all of document preparation and publishing. Then it was released into the wild as an open source project, to be picked apart by millions of eyes and hands.

Word on the other hand… It was designed to compete and emulate Bravo - the first original WYSIWYG text editor for Xerox Alto. It was initially developed by Charles Simonyi and Richard Bridie. Simonyi was hired to work at Xerox directly from Stanford, and his crowning achievement before Word was development of the mentioned Bravo editor. Brodie was a code jokey who also worked on Bravo, and more recently a professional poker player. Since then it was slaved over by hundreds of developers on tight schedules, high pressure work environment, and conflicting goals of maintaining backwards compatibility, while preventing interoperability with 3rd party software. It’s not an impressive pedigree. Also, if you think about it, Word has all the qualifying prerequisites for a genuine OMG! WTF??? monster of a corporate monster of a project. One of those that you’d be likely to see on The Daily WTF.

I don’t know about you, but I’d rather go with the open source system designed by legends, than by kludge worthy, proprietary, corporate monstrosity. But that’s just me.

Mature and Stable

LaTex is still in active development (at least last time I checked) but the software is mature and stable. The development process is slow and steady. The current releases of the software are rock solid - I have never, ever encountered, or even heard about an issue with the compiler/parser software. The markup language is throughly documented, and widely used. Whenever you need to do something fancy, chances are that someone already did that before you and either published a complete package or at least a well documented solution online.

Office on the other hand is in constant flux. Each version tweaks the file formats, changes the menus, adds more useless functions, and more bloat. Software is unstable, and prone to crashes, and corrupting the binary files for no reason. Because of the poor design it is used by malware writers as an infection vector.

Open office, while more secure is plagued by the same set of issues. It’s a big application that is constantly changing, trying to catch up to the industry leader. Bugs abound, and interoperability with MS Office is still not where it should be.

Unfortunately, Latex is not for everyone

All of that said, LaTex is not for everyone. The learning curve is steep compared to Word or Open Office. You can’t just pick up LaTex by messing around with the UI. You have to understand the syntax, and learn it’s basic rules before you do anything. Users should at least have basic understanding or programming, markup languages, compiling and debugging software. Thus, it’s probably not something that you’d just give to a novice computer user. It’s a tool for technologically competent people who would rather work with a well documented document preparation system with strict, transparent markup syntax, rather than with quirky, buggy and unstable WYSIWYG setup.

LaTex is not something that would find much use in a corporate office environment. Who is LaTex for?

1. College Students - there is no better software for writing essays, term papers, presentations, and research papers
2. Grad Students - I wrote my Master’s thesis in LaTex. I can’t imagine doing anything like that in Word. It would be a suicide. Don’t do it to yourself. Use the proper tool for this task - that tool is LaTex.
3. Writers - LaTex was designed for publishing, and there is no other tool that will produce high quality almost-ready-to-print documents out of your manuscripts
4. Scientists and Researchers - no other tool makes it so easy to write research papers, books and journal articles
5. Professors - in the past I used LaTex to generate great looking multiple choice exams, lecture presentation slides, lecture notes and etc..
6. Developers - you want great looking documentation and user manual? This is the tool for you. LaTex can also output to HTML so you can easily create googlable online copies of all your documents.
7. You - if you read this far, you probably have what it takes to try it, and use it well.

I don’t know if any of this convinces anyone. But those are some of my reasons for using it. Please feel free to add your reasons if you happen to be a LaTex user. And if you are not, check it out. It’s worth it. Don’t forget to let me know what you think of it once you try it.

If you guys want, I could run few introductory articles teaching basics of LaTex here on this blog. For example, if you are to lazy (or busy) to research it on your own, but you wouldn’t mind seeing some simple examples, and code samples here, please let me know.