Many life scientists use WYSIWYG-editors, while LaTeX is widely used by dry-lab scientists. While the amount of dissertations I have seen may not be statistically relevant, I still see a pattern there. Take a look at those dissertations covering math, physics and computer science topics. Many ‘life science’ dissertations look plain ugly: inconsistent typesetting, bad justification, worse hyphenation. Here are 5 reasons, why you should seriously consider writing your thesis (and most other scientific documents) with LaTeX. But often it is much more complicated to find one of Word’s sub-submenus than it is to remember a simple text command. These commands look a bit like a programming language, which seems to scare many people off. Unlike Word, which is controlled by mouse, various menus and buttons, LaTeX uses text commands to define the way your document is typeset. Now, what exactly is LaTeX? It is a typesetting engine. The results are almost always superior to everything you could have done with a “What you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) editor like MS Word, openOffice, etc. LaTeX takes this task off your hands by providing highly efficient algorithms to properly format your texts. Surprisingly, many life scientists try manically to control the appearance of their documents by hand with programs like MS Word.
In today’s technology-driven world, we leave so many things to our electronic gadgets.
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