LaTeX, For Free Quality Publishing
Lecturer
François Poulain
Summary
LaTeX is a document composition software that was created by Leslie Lamport. Because of its simplicity and strict robustness, it became the #1 writing tool for scientific documents, ie large-sized reports and books.
But, LaTeX can also be used to generate various other document types, like letters, slides, reports, posters, visit cards, etc.
LaTeX comes under the form of a declarative language that requires a somewhat important learning curve, more than what is necessary to use interactive software like OpenOffice.org Writer when it comes to simple documents. But, the learning phase being over, one appreciates to concentrate on the contents and leave LaTeX the formatting tasks. The overall quality of the document is high (math formulas, typographic rules enforcement), the bibliographic references are automatically handled, numbering and table of contents are consistent without any hassle. Besides, LaTeX macro-commands leave users the ability to very easily adjust the software to their specific needs.
LaTeX requires the writer to concentrate on the logical structure of his document, its contents, while the page setting (hyphenation, indention) is left to the software ; LaTeX draws a clear line separating form and contents. Conversely, interactive software allow the writer to concentrate on structure — using styles —, the formatting being automatically displayed. But, though this method is highly recommended, it is not mandatory, thus little used.