October 16, 2021

Why LaTeX is great

 


Sometimes newbie are asking why they should prefer LaTeX over possible alternatives like MS-Word or Libreoffice. The answer is they shouldn't. Instead the best practice method is to give the alternative software a trial and compare the result by themself.
The initial screenshot shows the same paragraph of text formatted with different programs. And the reader has to estimate which of the output was generated by the LaTeX tool. A small hint: it has to do with the amount of hyphenation used in the text. One of the program is able to reduce the hyphenation down to zero the other not.
The interesting point is that the Libreoffice software can't be modified so that it will produce better results. It is a built in bug. And the only way to avoid it is to switch to latex.
 
Both paragraphs have the same amount of lines which is 10. Both are using the same font but only one of the paragraph was formatted well while the other not. There must be reason why most of the technical books and papers were created with LaTeX but not with other programs.  It has to do with the fact that even recent version of libreoffice and MS-Word are not able to create high quality documents. And this example shows only the problem with the word wrapping. Other problems like floating images, biblographic indicies or mathematical formula are not mentioned yet.