Creating beautiful papers with LaTeX

The LaTeX communities judges about the layout of a paper in a certain unusual way. Everything which looks like a wall of text is qualified as excellent typographic style, while documents which containing of huge amount of white space, images and keypoints are treated as low quality paper. The following Lorem-Ipsum comparison was created in both cases with the LaTeX software and the layout looks complete different.

The page on the right side wasn't created with MS Word but everything was layouted with the LateX engine. The difference is, that the line space was increased, the reggaedright mode was activated, more paragraphs were created and 2 images were added. The judgment about good vs. wrong typography has to do with the preference for wall of text vs accessible typography.

The page on the left side is a typical example for a LaTeX formatted wall of text. It is the reason why MS Word users are arguing that every LaTeX documet looks the same. There is endless of amount of text but no visible anchors for the reader to rest. The content is hard to grasp, the visual layout is missing and additional sections or pictures are not there. The surprising situation is, that from the perspective of LateX the example on the left side is a here to stay This is how an academic text has to look like.

The question which is open yet is why exactly is a wall of text is perceived as high quality typography. Is typography not the same as an easy to read text? This is perhaps the most obvious misconception, creating a document with LaTeX doesn't mean, that it contains of images or has a lot of white spaces to rest. But it means to follow the best practice formatting style used in academics for decades. The assumption in Academia is, to write about the world in a highly abstract language style. Abstraction is the opposite of using images and examples written in tables, but abstraction means to formulate endless long sentences with lots of hard to explain specialized vocabulary. In other words, academic text are hard to read.

The advice to improve the readability of an academic text by using a special formatting and include images is ignoring the principle of a book. By definition there is a difference between a book and a powerpoint presentation. A book contains always of long sentences but has only seldom some images. In contrast, a powerpoint presentation works with the opposite principle. Every presentation divides the subject into easy to grasp sections and every page contains of at least one image. Creating a presentation without images and with full sentences is not recommended.

The main reason why the academic community prefers LaTeX for typesetting books and papers is because LaTeX is the king of formatting a wall of text. It allows to compress the text into the page. Every line looks the same. The bottom border is aligned between both columns.

This visual appearance was realized with advanced typographic algorithms for adjusting the fully justified paragraph, the vertical space between the sections and with the recent microtype extension in the pdftex program the homogeneous effect was increased further. MS Word and even Indesign can't compete with this visual appearance and the result is that since decades LaTeX is the document formatting software of choice in all the universities worldwide.