latex or word for thesis

Why Should I Use LaTeX over Word for Writing My Research? | Orvium

Researchers have long been split on whether to use Word or LaTex for their academic papers. The fact is, you can achieve results with both, and considering the latter is more complex, most don’t understand why LaTeX is so good.

Today, let’s look at the differences between the two and present LaTeX in an objective view, taking into account the benefits it presents as well as the things that aren't so great - such as the big issue with learning LaTeX.

What Is LaTeX?

LaTeX (/ˈlɑːtɛx/, often pronounced lay-tech) is a writing software centered around document creation, allowing users to input commands and add unformatted text. The UI is split between an Edit window, where users can write text and code, and a Typeset Window, which appears after the first save, allowing users to see the results of their work and how the document will look in real-time.

Compared to Word or Word-like document processors, LaTeX is fairly complex. The coding element can be a big hurdle for most researchers or students who are used to the simplicity of opening a document and simply starting to write. However, this issue can be easily overcome through an instructional video:

Benefits of LaTeX over Word for Research

1. Professional typesetting

LaTeX is specifically designed to produce high-quality typesetting, which makes your documents look professional and polished. This is especially important for academic writing, where the appearance of your document can affect how seriously your work is taken.

LaTeX is great because it’s not simply a word processor but rather a typesetting application designed for ultimate freedom when creating documents.

In academic writing, the aspect of your final document matters a lot. And since you’re essentially writing code, you can meticulously fine-tune your document to look exactly the way you want it or in accordance with the highly specific requirements some journals have.

Example: LaTeX automatically generates consistent and visually pleasing formatting for sections, equations, figures, and citations.

2. Efficient handling of large documents

Unlike Word and Google Docs, which lags up when editing large documents, LaTeX is optimized for minimal resource utilization. This allows researchers to work more efficiently on large documents with many equations, figures, images, and cross-references (think dissertations, books, or studies).

LaTeX also generates a table of contents, a list of figures, and a complete list of references which you can manually edit in code. I’m sure you know trying to edit and correct your references in Word is a buggy nightmare, and just the thought of it is enough to raise your levels of anxiety.

Another cool feature for large documents is the autosave option. That way, there is close to 0 risk of losing your work due to crashes or faulty equipment. Once you save your initial file, TeXShop, one of the tools in the LaTeX suite, automatically saves your work regularly.

Example: In LaTeX, the \input and \include commands allow you to split up sources in a controlled way, effectively making large documents into smaller files that can be managed separately.

3. Easy version control

Since LaTeX operates with plain text files, the level of control you have as a user is beyond what traditional word processors can offer. This can prove very handy when collaborating with multiple authors on a big project, as it allows you to use tools like Git or SVN to implement version control and track changes.

4. Wide range of packages and templates

LaTeX comes pre-equipped with multiple packages and templates that allow researchers to work on different types of projects, such as multiple kinds of math papers, articles, letters, memoirs, and more.

Furthermore, you can use online repositories such as the Comprehensive TeX Archive to find more packages and templates specifically made for diagrams, coding, tables, and more.

Example: The "tikz" package in LaTeX allows you to create professional-looking diagrams and illustrations.

5. Portable and platform-independent

Don’t you hate it when there's an issue with old versions of word documents? Or when you’re trying to edit a Word doc on a Mac and it doesn’t initially work? LaTeX removes all those headaches with compatibility.

The plain text docs you work on in LaTeX are portable and platform-independent. This makes sharing documents a breeze, regardless of the operating system or software setup. And it’s especially useful if you need to collaborate with colleagues or co-authors who use different systems.

Comparison Table: LaTeX vs Word

Category	Word	LaTeX
Ease of Use	Relatively easy to use, lack of customization options may lead to time wasted trying to make impossible changes	Difficult to learn, easy to use once you start learning and bookmark effective tutorial channels and creators
Efficiency	Word and word-like software makes it easy to quickly create and edit small documents. However, the more special features and length of your document, the more difficult it is to control.	LaTeX is ok for short documents, but only after a significant learning curve. LaTeX shines when it comes to long-form content: research papers, scientific documents, math textbooks, books in general.
Quality	Word can deliver beautiful documents, yet the legwork to make those documents look like what you’re imagining can be frustrating due to Word’s limitations.	LaTeX being a typesetting editor primarily, it can be used to generate very neat, organized, and beautiful documents that stand out in the scientific and academic community.
Features	Word and word-like processors have a range of basic features, usually varying from tool to tool, which also determines whether those features are paywalled or not.	LaTeX is a well-established open-source tool. This means most of the things you would likely need have been written in extensions by past researchers. Anything new can be created as well.
Compatibility	Generally well-compatible with most newer formats. Backward compatibility with other Word docs and third-party docs can be problematic.	LaTeX uses plain text documents, which are easily accessible but difficult to decypher. PDF export is not editable.
Price	Mostly free if you consider online Word-like processors such as Google Docs.	Free

Who Benefits Most from Using LaTeX

To sum up, LaTeX is better than Word for:

Scientific researchers - from math to physics to chemistry and beyond. Anything that prominently features equations, tables, figures, or other designs is best completed via LaTeX.
Academic dissertations and doctoral theses - from the reference system to the automatic and efficient table of contents, LaTeX makes working on gigantic projects such as these very easy. By comparison, researchers using Word frequently save chapters in separate documents to keep the software from lagging up or crashing and thereby losing their work.
Textbook writing and editing - if you’re authoring math, physics, or other scientific textbooks, your best chance is with LaTeX, and students will thank you as the equations alone will look miles ahead of what Word can accomplish.
Any other book authors and editors - for general authors, LaTeX might be a bit complex but worth the learning curve. Editors, however, tend to need a more professional tool to polish the final document for printing, so LaTeX is the better, more logical choice.
Journalistic investigations - once again, the reference system in LaTeX can easily help journalists keep track of their sources, but it might be too complex on the go.

Overall, LaTeX frequently has a steeper learning curve compared to Word - which is also its biggest disadvantage. However, it offers many benefits that can make research writing more efficient, professional-looking, collaborative, and highly scalable due to its many templates.

If you’re looking to publish your research via Orvium, you should know that our platform is compatible with the LaTeX documents thanks to our integration with Overleaf. But if you want to suggest even more features we should implement in the future, don’t hesitate to reach out.

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Antonio Romero

Led several big-data and ML projects for the R&D between CERN and multiple ICT market-leaders. His work accelerating predictive-maintenance and machine-learning solutions at CERN

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LaTeX vs. Word: Main Differences

Last updated: March 18, 2024

1. Introduction

Microsoft Word and LaTeX have been fundamental tools for crafting and presenting our written content.

In this tutorial, we’ll discuss the differences between Word and LaTeX regarding user interface, use cases, collaboration, and version control features.

2. Software

Two products of Microsoft offer Word editor:

Microsoft Word: This is the official software developed by Microsoft for creating, editing, and formatting documents. It’s part of the Microsoft Office suite and is available for both Windows and macOS operating systems
Microsoft 365 (formerly known as Office 365) : This subscription-based service provides access to the latest version of Microsoft Word along with other Office applications, cloud storage, and various productivity and collaboration tools

To work with LaTeX, we’ll need a TeX distribution and a LaTeX editor:

TeX distribution: This includes the LaTeX typesetting system as well as various tools and packages. Some popular TeX distributions include Tex Live and MikTeX
LaTeX editor: While it is possible for users to create LaTeX documents using a plain text editor (e.g., NotePad or NotePad++), specialized LaTeX editors provide a more user-friendly interface with features like syntax highlighting and error checking. Some LaTeX editors include TeXShop (for macOS users); TeXworks , TeXstudio , LyX (for both Windows and Linux users); or Overleaf (an online and collaborative LaTeX editor that doesn’t require local software installation)

3. User Interface

Microsoft Word’s user interface is renowned for its intuitive design and ease of use , making it one of the most popular word-processing applications worldwide. Its user-friendly ribbon interface neatly organizes a plethora of powerful features into easily accessible tabs, enabling users of all levels of expertise to create and edit documents effortlessly. The following figure shows the screenshot of a Word template provided by IEEE for conference proceedings:

Additionally, its robust spell-check and grammar-check capabilities and real-time collaboration features through cloud integration further enhance its usability. In most cases, it serves as a broad category encompassing all word-processing software that immediately displays the final output. Having this characteristic, Word is usually called a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor rather than requiring initial file processing .

This may seem intuitive and user-friendly for beginners at first, especially when you use Word for elementary purposes like typing a document, making a list, formatting, or choosing fonts. However, when it comes to editing a large document or taking an uncommon command, e.g., creating a table of references or an index list, users tend to Google to figure out how it could be done.

On the other hand, LaTeX’s user interface is distinct from conventional word processors, as it relies on a markup language for document creation rather than a graphical interface . While its learning curve may appear steep for newcomers, it offers a unique level of control and precision in typesetting documents. The following figure shows the screenshot of TeXmaker opening a LaTeX template provided by IEEE for conference proceedings, which has the same format as the above Word template:

LaTeX may be complicated for beginners, and its ease of use only becomes apparent once users become familiar with its syntax and commands. It excels in handling complex mathematical equations , bibliographies , and multi-lingual documents , making it a favorite among researchers, academics, and technical writers.

The famous (yet unknown source) figure below shows the learning curve for users of Word and LaTeX. These curves show how LaTeX becomes easier to use relative to Microsoft Word as the task becomes more complex. On the contrary, for a simple document like taking notes, a simpler tool like Word (or even Notepad) is easier for users:

To sum up, while it may not be as immediately intuitive as WYSIWYG editors like Word, LaTeX’s power lies in its ability to produce consistently high-quality documents with a minimal margin for error, especially for publications, research papers, and theses. For those willing to invest time in learning its intricacies, LaTeX rewards them with unparalleled document typographic control and professionalism.

4. Use Cases

Microsoft Word is commonly known as a general-purpose document creation software . With its suitability for most office tasks, Word is widely used in both schools and offices. Collaboration and real-time editing in Microsoft Word have become significantly more accessible and efficient thanks to its cloud-based features and collaborative tools. Microsoft Word’s collaboration and real-time editing features have made it a versatile tool for teams and individuals who need to work together on documents, making it easier to create, review, and finalize content efficiently and effectively.

Unlike Word, LaTeX is generally considered as a typesetting system commonly used for producing documents with high-quality typography, particularly in fields like academia, research, and technical writing . Because of its ability to handle complex mathematical equations and references, LaTeX is often preferred by scientists and researchers.

Furthermore, graduate students often use LaTeX to format their theses and dissertations. Many universities provide LaTeX templates for students to ensure compliance with formatting requirements. Since it has great ability in writing, controlling page layout, fonts, formatting, and ensuring a professional and consistent appearance, LaTeX is also an excellent tool for publications with complex formatting requirements.

The following figures show the output of Word:

We can see the mathematical symbols produced by LaTeX are higher resolution than that of Word.

5. Collaboration and Version Control

Collaboration and version control in Microsoft Word has become more streamlined and efficient with the integration of cloud-based tools and collaborative features . Real-time collaboration via Microsoft 365 has enabled users to simultaneously access and work on the shared document.

Also, collaborators can leave comments and suggestions on the document. These comments are visible to everyone, and you can reply to them, accept or reject suggestions, and have threaded discussions. Moreover, Word supports real-time co-authoring, where multiple users can work on the same document simultaneously without conflicts . This ensures that all changes are automatically incorporated into the latest version.

Although collaboration and version control in LaTeX can be achieved using various tools and workflows, they may not be as seamless as Word . To collaborate on a LaTeX document, it’s common to use version control software like Git . Git allows multiple authors to work on the same document, track changes, and merge edits seamlessly. Popular online platforms like GitHub , GitLab , and Bitbucket provide hosting and collaboration features for LaTeX projects.

Alternatively, LaTeX users can use Overleaf as an online platform to do collaborative work with their colleagues. Overleaf also supports various academic templates for scientific journals and conferences of different organizations like IEEE or ACM . Nonetheless, Overleaf may be inconvenient since they limit real-time collaborations (only one collaborator for the free license). Complex tools like real-time track changes or full document history and versioning are only available in the premium features.

6. Conclusion

In this article, we discussed the differences between Microsoft Word and LaTeX.

LaTeX often presents a more challenging initial learning curve when contrasted with Word, which constitutes one of its primary drawbacks. Nevertheless, it provides numerous advantages that can enhance the efficiency, professionalism, collaboration, and scalability of research writing. Researchers, book authors, editors, or journalists are those who benefit most from LaTeX.

In contrast, if you just need to write a simple document, a short letter, or a report, Microsoft Word is a better option for its user-friendly typesetting system. Your choice of software depends on your specific needs, familiarity with the tools, and the type of documents you want to create.

because LaTeX matters

Writing a thesis in latex.

Writing a thesis is a time-intensive endeavor. Fortunately, using LaTeX, you can focus on the content rather than the formatting of your thesis. The following article summarizes the most important aspects of writing a thesis in LaTeX, providing you with a document skeleton (at the end) and lots of additional tips and tricks.

Document class

The first choice in most cases will be the report document class:

See here for a complete list of options. Personally, I use draft a lot. It replaces figures with a box of the size of the figure. It saves you time generating the document. Furthermore, it will highlight justification and hyphenation errors ( Overfull \hbox ).

Check with your college or university. They may have an official or unofficial template/class-file to be used for writing a thesis.

Again, follow the instructions of your institution if there are any. Otherwise, LaTeX provides a few basic command for the creation of a title page.

Use \today as \date argument to automatically generate the current date. Leave it empty in case you don’t want the date to be printed. As shown in the example, the author command can be extended to print several lines.

For a more sophisticated title page, the titlespages package has a nice collection of pre-formatted front pages. For different affiliations use the authblk package, see here for some examples.

Contents (toc/lof/lot)

Nothing special here.

The tocloft package offers great flexibility in formatting contents. See here for a selection of possibilities.

Often, the page numbers are changed to roman for this introductory part of the document and only later, for the actual content, arabic page numbering is used. This can be done by placing the following commands before and after the contents commands respectively.

LaTeX provides the abstract environment which will print “Abstract” centered as a title.

The actual content

The most important and extensive part is the content. I strongly suggest to split up every chapter into an individual file and load them in the main tex-file.

In thesis.tex:

In chapter1.tex:

This way, you can typeset single chapters or parts of the whole thesis only, by commenting out what you want to exclude. Remember, the document can only be generated from the main file (thesis.tex), since the individual chapters are missing a proper LaTeX document structure.

See here for a discussion on whether to use \input or \include .

Bibliography

The most convenient way is to use a bib-tex file that contains all your references. You can download bibtex items for articles, books, etc. from Google scholar or often directly from the journal websites.

Two packages are commonly used to personalize bibliographies, the newer biblatex and the natbib package, which has been around for many years. These packages offer great flexibility in customizing the look of a bibliography, depending on the preference in the field or the author.

Other commonly used packages

graphicx : Indispensable when working with figures/graphs.
subfig : Controlling arrangement of several figures (e.g. 2×2 matrix)
minitoc : Adds mini table of contents to every chapter
nomencl : Generate and format a nomenclature
listings : Source code printer for LaTeX
babel : Multilingual package for standard document classes
fancyhdr : Controlling header and footer
hyperref : Hypertext links for LaTeX
And many more

Minimal example code

I’m aware that this short post on writing a thesis only covers the very basics of a vast topic. However, it will help you getting started and focussing on the content of your thesis rather than the formatting of the document.

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Guide to Writing Your Thesis in LaTeX

Step 1: install latex and a latex aware editor.

LaTeX is not a word processor, it is a document preparation system for high-quality typesetting. It is most often used for medium-to-large technical or scientific documents, but it can be used for almost any form of publishing. LaTeX encourages authors not to worry too much about the appearance of their documents but to concentrate on getting the content right.

Because LaTeX source files are just ordinary text files, any text editor can be used to edit them, but it is important to have a LaTeX aware editor. A LaTeX aware editor can do things like syntax highlighting, spell checking, and automatic formatting. It can also run LaTeX on the source files, update the bibliography, then update the document in a viewer all at the click of a button.

Below are links to what you need to get started on various operating systems. Check out the LaTeX Project website for more information.

Your system distribution or vendor has probably provided a LaTeX system. If not, check your usual software source for the texlive package, or otherwise install texlive directly. All of the Linux systems in the ELE Department already have a complete LaTeX system installed.

Two good editors for Linux are Texmaker and TeXstudio .

MacTeX is a full LaTeX system for MacOS which includes an editor.

The editors Texmaker and TeXstudio can also be used.

Microsoft Windows

proTeXt is a full LaTeX system for Windows, which includes MikTeX and an editor. You can also install MikTeX directly with the editor of your choice.

There are numerous good editors for Windows, some of which are TeXnicCenter , Texmaker and TeXstudio .

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Subject Guides

Formatting Your Thesis or Dissertation with Microsoft Word

Introduction
Copyright Page
Dedication, Acknowledgements, & Preface
Headings and Subheadings
Citations and Bibliography
Page Numbers
Tables and Figures
Rotated (Landscape) Pages
Table of Contents
Lists of Tables and Figures
List of Abbreviations
Some Things to Watch For
PDF with Embedded Fonts

Using Microsoft Word to format your thesis or dissertation

[If you want to use LaTeX instead of Microsoft Word, see the Formatting in LaTeX section, below.]

UM-Dearborn Microsoft Word Thesis or Dissertation Template

Most students use Microsoft Word to write their thesis or dissertation. For previous assignments, you likely did not use some of Word's advanced features such as styles, section breaks, rotated pages, automatically generated table of contents, automatically generated list of abbreviations, etc. Some of these things are required for your document, others just make formatting and updating your document much easier, and still others may be needed for your particular document. It isn't intuitive how to do many of these things. Moreover, the University of Michigan-Dearborn has specific requirements for formatting your document and following videos or using templates from other universities may lead to more work fixing formatting issues later, after you have submitted the thesis for the final format check.

The video series on the following pages demonstrates how to use Word to make formatting your document easier while following the UM-Dearborn guidelines. While designed specifically for CECS thesis format using a modified IEEE style , much of what is covered in these tutorials also can be applied to or modified for CASL theses as well as CECS and CEHHS dissertations. Please make sure that you check the requirements for your discipline, program, department, or college regarding formatting and which style guide to follow.

Note: Different versions of Microsoft Word were used in these videos. The first slide in each video will state which version was used. Most things are done the same in different versions of Word, but finding some of the features might vary slightly.

Thesis and Dissertation Formatting Guidelines

Your Master's thesis or Ph.D. dissertation should be formatted according to university guidelines. See the Guidelines for Formatting Doctoral Dissertation and Master's Theses and Deep Blue Archiving web page [coming soon] for details and more information. For questions about formatting beyond what is covered in these resources, please check with your thesis or dissertation advisor.

Formatting in LaTeX

Some CECS students use LaTeX to write their thesis or dissertation. There is no official or sanctioned LaTeX template. Ann Arbor's Scholar Space directs students to the LaTeX template at https://github.com/umangv/ thesis-umich . According to Scholar Space, this template "has proven to be the most actively maintained and accurate that we've seen".

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Overleaf for LaTeX Theses & Dissertations: Home

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Tips and tools for writing your LaTeX thesis or dissertation in Overleaf, including templates, managing references , and getting started guides.

Getting started with your thesis or dissertation

How to get started writing your thesis in LaTeX

Writing a thesis or dissertation in LaTeX can be challenging, but the end result is well worth it - nothing looks as good as a LaTeX-produced pdf, and for large documents it's a lot easier than fighting with formatting and cross-referencing in MS Word. Review this video from Overleaf to help you get started writing your thesis in LaTeX, using a standard thesis template from the Overleaf Gallery .

You can upload your own thesis template to the Overleaf Gallery if your university provides a set of LaTeX template files or you may find your university's thesis template already in the Overleaf Gallery.

This video assumes you've used LaTeX before and are familiar with the standard commands (see our other tutorial videos if not), and focuses on how to work with a large project split over multiple files.

5-part Guide on How to Write a Thesis in LaTeX

5-part LaTeX Thesis Writing Guide

Part 1: Basic Structure corresponding video

Part 2: Page Layout corresponding video

Part 3: Figures, Subfigures and Tables corresponding video

Part 4: Bibliographies with Biblatex corresponding video

Part 5: Customizing Your Title Page and Abstract corresponding video

Managing References

BibTeX is a file format used for lists of references for LaTeX documents. Many citation management tools support the ability to export and import lists of references in .bib format. Some reference management tools can generate BibTeX files of your library or folders for use in your LaTeX documents.

LaTeX on Wikibooks has a Bibliography Management page.

Find list of BibTeX styles available on Overleaf here

View a video tutorial on how to include a bibliography using BibTeX here

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Every project you create has a secret link. Just send it to your co-authors, and they can review, comment and edit. Overleaf synchronizes changes from all authors, so everyone always has the latest version. More advanced tools include protected projects and integration with Git.

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Should I learn to use LaTeX to write up a History Masters Thesis?

So I reviewed the " What are the advantages or disadvantages of using LaTeX for writing scientific publications? " question on this forum and am sitting on the fence at the moment whether or not to use LaTeX to write up my masters Thesis.

I get the feeling that it is best suited for Scientific work but my MLitt is in History. I have searched my university website about LaTeX and most results come back from the maths department.

I am a part-time research student so my thesis with be approx. 50,000 words. At the moment I am using Libreoffice (I'm a Linux user -Ubuntu distro) to write up each chapter as a separate document which I was going to bring into a master theses document. I am using Mendeley to manage all my footnotes and bibliography.

I'm going to be meeting my supervisor over the next couple of weeks and would like to discuss the matter with him as to if I should/can use LaTeX. I'm sure how familiarity or usage of LaTeX within the History department will impact on my decision but would also like to prepare my thesis in the best possible way.

Edit 10/04/14: After a meeting with my Supervisor it appear that the History department has no preference on software for writing the thesis. Only requirement is that final thesis before defence is printed in ring-bound cover and the (hopefully!) accepted thesis is a hardback bound copy. My last written piece to my supervisor was done in LaTeX, using Texmaker on Ubuntu then exported to pdf, and other than some tweaking we need to do to the citation styling he was quite happy with the output. His advise was to use whatever software I was comfortable with (although he had never heard of LaTeX).

I would be grateful for answers from people who have used LaTeX in the Humanities area so as to be best prepared for my own decision on whether or not I would like to use it.

(Edit 10/03/2014) Just based on some of the answers, especially in relation to the learning curve with LaTeX, here is some more info that may be useful. Probably about 95% of my thesis will be text but I shall also need to insert some images (maps and photos) and will probably be entering some tables with stats. As stated above I use Mendeley for my refernece manager and have read some blogs where this is compatible with LaTeX so I think I would continue to us it if I go the LaTeX route.

35 To be fair, how many of the authors of answers suggesting LaTeX have used a recent version of MS Word including its advanced bibliography and auto-numbering features, for more than a couple of weeks? As a LaTeX user, I only have a pale remembering of how it all worked with an older version of Word, but one would have to be proficient with both worlds to write a fair unbiased answer. – Federico Poloni Commented Mar 10, 2014 at 8:49
7 I occasionally have to use the most recent version of word. (Mainly when trying to submit an article to a journal that doesn't accept pdf submissions.) My $0.02 is that LaTeX still > recent Word. Although, I admit that MS are adding some nice features, esp on the bib management side. – user10636 Commented Mar 10, 2014 at 12:20
4 The biggest concern for you should be the references, footnotes and cross references, if you can do that seamlessly and painlessly while splitting the document in several pieces with whatever you are using (e.g. Libreoffice) then no need to switch. The second biggest concern is version control and file corruption, as long as you can handle this for your purposes again no need to switch. Switching is an investment (time and effort, it's free), it makes sense iff the ROI is positive. – Trylks Commented Mar 10, 2014 at 13:56
3 One other thing to consider might be to use something like MultiMarkdown with its LaTeX exporting feature. You write more or less plain text, and then its postprocessor converts your text file into a LaTeX compatible file. – aeismail Commented Mar 10, 2014 at 22:02
5 Don't loose time with LaTeX. Trust me, LO and mendeley work fine. They are not as great as M$ Word, but they do the job. And to all the WYSIWYG haters: when you are writing, you only want to focus on the text and not on stuff like \emph{something important} . You also do not want to have to compile every two minutes. Moreover, losing the track changes option where your promoter can manually change things, saves so much time! Definitely, I moved away from LaTeX for writing in the humanities and I only go back when I have to impress someone. I use a LO plugin to convert to LaTeX if needed. – my.back Commented Mar 12, 2014 at 13:21

17 Answers 17

I'm finishing up a PhD in philosophy that I've written in LaTeX. Here's some suggestions:

make sure your advisor is ok with leaving you comments in pdf. I suspect they will not understand the question and will not be able to give you any feedback unless you submit chapters in word format. This is a deal breaker. Don't make any more problems communicating with your advisor than absolutely necessary.
lots of academic journals in the humanities still don't accept submissions in pdf or latex source form. If you are planning on submitting your stuff to a journal, you might save yourself time writing in word format.
there are some tools available to convert latex to rtf, html and other tools. texht is the best.
If you do decide to go LaTeX, don't get lost in the minutiae of learning how to tweak everything. It's easy to lose lots of time learning new packages and stuff when you should be writing, writing, writing. Use the wikibooks latex guide as your quick start guide when you need to learn how to do something fast.
Especially if you're on Ubuntu, don't get the LaTeX distributed through Canonical's repositories. It's usually out of date (haven't checked in a while). Just go on and get the vanilla TexLive 2013 distribution from CTAN.
The tex.SE site is really, really good. Like ridiculously helpful.
If you are familiar with version control programs like git, mercurial, or svn you can actually keep a very precise idea of exactly how your thesis has grown over time. You can roll back changes, etc. This is kind of advanced stuff for LaTeX, so I wouldn't spend like a lot of time learning this stuff if you aren't already familiar with it, but if you are, it can be really helpful. EDIT: Per @henry's comment below, see the following guide by Roger Dudler to get started with git.

6 Ubuntu 13.10 ships with TexLive 2013, so installing by hand shouldn't be necessary. – Federico Poloni Commented Mar 9, 2014 at 16:44
1 There are only 2 or 3 people in my dept who use latex. This has actually made it a little hard, since LaTeX has a little bit of a learning curve and it's nice to be able to pop down the hall and ask a quick question. Still, it isn't impossible to learn on your own. I did! – user10636 Commented Mar 9, 2014 at 17:22
8 + $\inf$ for git. I used it for my thesis in LaTeX and can't stress enough how helpful this was. – Eekhoorn Commented Mar 9, 2014 at 17:46
11 @biologue Nitpicking, but $\inf$ is LaTeX for the infimum operator. You're looking for $\infty$ . – David Zhang Commented Mar 10, 2014 at 6:01
18 "The tex.SE site is really, really good. Like ridiculously helpful." Seconded. Where else can you find TeX experts falling over themselves to answer your questions? They are very friendly to beginners, a trait which, unfortunately, is not common on tech sites, including those that form part of the SE network. Also, if you can't find something by searching on the site, they don't mind if you ask in chat. Maybe someone can point you in the right direction. An example of their good attitude - downvoting is generally frowned on past -1. – Faheem Mitha Commented Mar 10, 2014 at 17:56

When my husband did his master's, he used LaTeX to write his thesis even though his supervisor preferred Word and everyone else in his lab used Word. He encountered some pros and cons.

Pros of using LaTeX:

Word gets very slow and buggy once your documents are past a certain length, say forty or fifty pages. One of my husband's friends spent a day renumbering all of the figures in his thesis after the numbers mysteriously disappeared. I'm not sure if this issue exists with LibreOffice, but it may.
You mentioned breaking your thesis into smaller documents and combining them later. This is easily and commonly done with LaTeX; it would be considerably harder with LibreOffice . [Edit: derobert pointed out that LibreOffice supports this through a "master document" feature. I wasn't familiar with it.]
It's much easier to change the formatting of the document at the last minute if you discover that, e.g., your margins don't match your university's specifications or your references are formatted incorrectly. It's also easier to keep the formatting consistent.
The results are more aesthetically pleasing, if you care about things like ligatures and kerning.

Cons of using LaTeX:

LaTeX has a much steeper learning curve, as others have mentioned. If you don't need to use it after you're done your thesis, it may not be worth the time investment.
LaTeX forces a slightly different editing workflow since you can't turn on Track Changes. Your supervisor will have to mark up the PDFs you produce or add comments to the tex file itself. This may make your supervisor less happy about your choice.

My recommendation: use LaTeX to write up something short that you need to write anyway to see how it works. Then play around with some of the features you'll need for a thesis: add a footnote, a reference, or a figure. Try the \include command, too. That should give you a sense of whether it's something you want to continue with.

4 Track changes is possible in latex: trackchanges.sourceforge.net – vadim123 Commented Mar 9, 2014 at 15:26
19 A more sound alternative for tracking changes is a version control software (such as git or mercurial) + latexdiff. Of course, this doubles the steepness of the learning curve for you initially. – Federico Poloni Commented Mar 9, 2014 at 16:48
3 @FedericoPoloni Version control is great, I agree, but it doesn't help with editing if gman's supervisor doesn't know how to use it. For example, I use git, so my supervisor compares drafts with git diff --word-diff. gman's supervisor probably doesn't know how to do that. – user6782 Commented Mar 9, 2014 at 22:48
5 @gman Even better then: printing pdf's and receiving hand-written comments is a workflow that translates perfectly well to LaTeX. It would have been way harder if your supervisor used advanced Word commenting/multi-author features. :) – Federico Poloni Commented Mar 10, 2014 at 8:51
7 If you do write a large document in Word, it's much more stable if you use styles everywhere instead of inline markup. Word headings, captions, numbered lists, etc are all done using styles; if you change formatting using the bold/underline/etc toolbar buttons instead of creating/editing styles you're mixing inline markup into the document. Mixing the two ways of format will turn large documents into unstable messes. Large numbers of tracked changes can cause similar problems; unfortunately there's no easy way to only mark old changes read unless you play games with your track changes name. – Dan Is Fiddling By Firelight Commented Mar 10, 2014 at 15:06

I'm sure how familiarity or usage of LaTeX within the History department will impact on my decision but would also like to prepare my thesis in the best possible way.

I would say that it should impact your decision strongly. You should prefer a tool that is used by your colleagues and supervisor to one that is slightly better intrinsically. They are the people who know what you need to do, and how to accomplish it with the tools they know.

I personally prefer LaTeX to LibreOffice, but I would guess that the combination of LibreOffice and Mendeley have all the features you need. (One in particular that I'm going to call out is change-tracking. Enable it as soon as you start, or you'll wish you had before long .) But the advantage of knowing your tool and having colleagues who know your tool outweigh most of LaTeX's advantages.

I didn't know about the change tracking, was going to use comments. Just enabled it and have being doing some writing and its great. Thanks for the tip. – gman Commented Mar 9, 2014 at 15:04
7 One of the biggest problems with word is that when putting the finishing touches to the document (i.e. formatting everything) you really can work on one and only one computer. It's basically impossible to keep the exact same formatting when sending word docs from one PC to another (and don't even think about mixing versions). That's a pretty big downside in my opinion, ignoring all the other problems with word (Word 2010 still can't justify text reasonably, no idea if they got that one fixed in the newer versions). – Voo Commented Mar 11, 2014 at 0:09

I recently made the mistake of writing a novel with each chapter as a separate document in LibreOffice. When I needed to combine them all into a single document, it wasn't pleasant. So that might be a consideration, depending on how many chapters your thesis has. As Imi mentioned, LaTeX definitely has better support for combining documents.

You might be interested in LyX . It's a word processor that uses LaTeX as a backend. You can get almost all of the abilities of LaTeX, but the learning curve is a lot shallower since it has more of the standard word processor features. It's a big help in following shane's advice not to get caught up in the minutiae of LaTeX. I use it for linguistics, where it seems to be pretty widely known. (Linguists have some of the same typesetting challenges as the math people). Newer versions have change tracking, as landroni mentions in the comments. Also, if you do decide to use source control, LyX can help you manage it, although it might take some coercion to set it up. LyX uses its own file format by default, but you can export to LaTeX.

As shane also mentioned, there are tools to convert LaTeX into other formats. Pandoc can even convert LaTeX into Word or Open Office format. Both LyX and Pandoc are available for Ubuntu.

So what I would probably do in your situation is write in LyX or LaTeX, then use Pandoc to export that to docx or odt for your advisor. You can read your advisor's comments in Word, make changes to your original, and export again. It sounds convoluted, but I do think you'll gain a lot in flexibility and tool support over using LibreOffice.

EDIT : Yes, you probably will have to put in some extra work to make the docx files generated by Pandoc usable. On the other hand, LyX and LaTeX can also save you a ton of time that you might have used struggling with LibreOffice's primitive support for pictures and formatting. (And special characters, not relevant to the OP's case, but very much so if you're doing linguistics or math.) If you're not sure, try testing your workflow on a small document: write something in LyX or LaTeX, convert it to odt or docx with Pandoc, and do the work to get the odt or docx file into a usable state. See whether you think it's worth it for what you're doing.

lyx is a nice halfway tool. Thanks for pointing it out. I originally started with lys and eventually decided I wanted to see what was going on "under the hood" and after a while I just preferred to write the code straight. – user10636 Commented Mar 10, 2014 at 12:16
LyX DOES have Change Tracking. It works well as far as I hear. – landroni Commented Mar 11, 2014 at 15:45
For info, exporting from LyX to ODT via pandoc is more of a hassle than it may seem at first. If you need ODT as the final output, for a novice you may as well stay with Word-like clones. – landroni Commented Mar 11, 2014 at 15:47
@landroni: You're right, I was looking at outdated docs. Sorry about that. – tsleyson Commented Apr 6, 2014 at 0:24
Additional benefits of LyX: (1) easy (gui) import/export for .rtf, which would make it easy if you need to switch between programs for any reason (2) deals with auxiliary files cleanly and automatically, (3) easy BibTeX, especially if you're doing in-line citations that are author (year), (author year), athor et al (year), or whatever crazy thing you want (though historians probably favor footnotes?). – webelo Commented Aug 13, 2015 at 0:58

For some people, the crucial features of LaTeX are portability and permanence. With LibreOffice and (especially) MS Word, you are essentially at the mercy of whether developers decide to make all future versions backwards compatible (I have a couple of papers I wrote in grad school that are effectively inaccessible until I find a machine with MS Word 98 for Windows). In contrast, with LaTeX, the source file is just plain ASCII text, so it will be forever readable and editable in any computer, regardless of operating system.

If your advisor is not LaTeX-friendly, you can have a look at this other question , the answers to which provide a number of tools to strip all LaTeX tags from a file, so you are left only with the plain text. From my experience, that is an acceptable compromise to most people.

4 It's not entirely true. Even with LaTeX, packages change and you may not be able to reproduce the exact same result with a later version. You can always recover the text, that's true, but the same holds for Word: a .docx is just a zipped xml file. – Federico Poloni Commented Mar 9, 2014 at 23:31
2 @FedericoPoloni: With TeX archiving your whole environment (including all used packages) and using exactly that two decades later is easy while the same will be extremely hard with *Office. – Martin Schröder Commented Mar 10, 2014 at 7:38
@MartinSchröder Still not convinced. How do you archive your whole environment? Is it easier than installing an older version of Word in, say, a virtual machine? – Federico Poloni Commented Mar 10, 2014 at 8:42
3 @FedericoPoloni: With TeX you can easily archive all input files (i.e. the complete TeX distribution). And since it's open source and portable and stable, you can archive the sources for the binaries (and if you want the operating system (Linux, BSD)) and recreate them later. It's still much simpler than with closed source software like Microsoft Office or complex free software like LibreOffice. – Martin Schröder Commented Mar 10, 2014 at 8:52

It is quite likely your advisor has never heard of LaTeX, so don't expect too much from discussing it with him.

LaTeX has a fairly steep learning curve but it is good for working with references and great for working with math. Since you don't need the latter at all, it may not be worth the effort for you.

2 Just for grins, go up to your advisor and say, "I'd like to write my thesis in Lahtech with PDF output." If he gets that deer-in-the-headlights look (very likely), you'll know you're out of luck. On the other hand, he may only want a hardcopy of the thing, in which case you may be free to use whatever you want. Most likely, you will be required to supply at least the finished result, if not the original source, in some specific format that your department uses. That may relieve you of the choice... Certainly play with LaTeX ahead of time, but don't invest a lot in it yet. – Phil Perry Commented Mar 13, 2014 at 18:08

To answer the question with a clear yes or no would be to oversimplify things. LaTeX is used for much more than just mathematics so I would not hesitate from that point of view. Learning something new is always useful so again, no argument there. What you need to ask yourself is if you are interested in learning LaTeX. this may depend on whether or not there are others using it in your neighbourhood. Being completely alone is tougher than having some other persons with whom to work when learning. Another question is to what extent LaTeX is used in your field for journal publications etc. So, try to assess how much use you will have in your field from learning it. Since LaTeX can be used for writing papers, books and reports as well as for making presentations (a la PowerPoint) and posters, it includes bibliography handling, it is a very useful tool for any field for scientific writing.

Very valid points Peter. I would be interested in learning something new but as a part-time student it can be hard to get time to interact with groups that may be learning. That's something I'll have to check out in my university if there is a LaTeX group. – gman Commented Mar 9, 2014 at 15:17
@gman TeX.StackExchange and the LaTeX section in Wikibooks are both excellent resources. – Moriarty Commented Mar 10, 2014 at 1:33

Yes...unless...

You will have references, many of them. Managing references is a complete pain without the facilities provided by LaTeX or one of the often expensive tools for word (there may be something free for libreoffice, and it may be good). It may be a little easier with the citation styles typical in humanities/social sciences than it is for physical sciences, but still not easy. So unless you have access to a good tool for managing your citations in your wordprocessor, just go for LaTeX.

Cross-referencing between sections and to figures/tables is also much easier.

You may find a tool like LyX suits you - or you may like the freedom of just getting on with it in a decent text editor. This list may be helpful in that regard.

I can thoroughly support the view expressed above that you should start on a smaller document.

When it comes to commenting by your adviser, such as for a dissertation, pdf comments on your work, or handwritten comments are fine, but for collaborative writing of a paper with non-LaTeX users things become a lot harder unless you're in charge.

Using LaTeX to Write a PhD Thesis by Nicola Talbot is well worth a read, it's from a CS background but don't let that put you off, it's clear and well written.

On the other hand, if you start writing in a word processor, you will end up sticking with it, which is fine, plenty of theses get written that way, but nobody ever finds the time to switch from one system to the other.

Also note that if you use libreoffice and you work with people who use MSoffice (or even for different versions of MSoffice) change tracking is rather fragile.

TO update this ten years on: There are now a good many free, and good, reference management tools for Word – Flyto Commented Feb 28 at 11:13

All mentioned pros and cons are valid, but... LaTeX is written by smart people for use by smart people. Word is written by smart people for everyone, including dumb people. Take your pick. For me, 5 dissertation years spent with LaTeX as an everyday companion was thoroughly enjoyable.

I would say it is worth your time and effort, not that the effort required would be great, as other have said first off talk to your professor and ask if he has any opinions on the matter.

I wrote the paper for my B.Sc. in LaTeX and to do so I learned it mostly by myself, with some help from some post grads but those were for issues you will not hit when writing an historical paper, in the spare moments between actually writing the code my paper was about.

Like yourself my paper didn't involve large swathes of mathematical formulas with lots of Greek letters but it did require almost Swiss-like precision, and I felt that with my limited command of Word I would be better of just starting from scratch with LaTex and knowing exactly the cause effect relationship between my actions and the document's presentation (I was and still am weary of losing all my formatting in Word due to a slip of the mouse).

Some of LaTex's strongest points in its favor is the ease with which it can handle citations for you as well as index your pictures, give them captions and etc.

The fact that you use Linux already is also a factor as setting up a good LaTex editor on Ubuntu seems much easier than on Windows to me, I highly recommend Kile as the editor it's not WYSIWG but it will keep you from making syntax errors due to the large amount of LaTeX snippets available and it also simplifies the "make a pdf from all this mark-up" process.

Another point in LaTex's favour is the very friendly and responsive community at the Tex exchange

I have to be honest that it was very easy for me to pick up LaTeX because I already had experience with HTML which is also a mark-up language, but in my opinion if you understand what happens when you bold a word on a Stack Exchange site (see the * * and their effect) then you can understand LaTeX.

1 Yes I also have a little experience of using html as have done some website work in my spare time. Good to know this would help with LaTeX. – gman Commented Mar 10, 2014 at 12:05
1 @gman It will help tremendously. – George Bora Commented Mar 10, 2014 at 12:32

If you're considering other software besides just Microsoft Word or LaTeX, then I would put a vote in for Scrivener , which I switched to halfway through my Masters (submitted in December).

Scrivener is a bit LaTeXy in that it separates the composition from the formatting, with the latter done as a single rendering process at the end, but it also allows a high degree of style and formatting while you write, however this should be viewed as a 'preview' rather than actual formatting.

It was originally designed for novelists, but there's a growing community of academics using it going on the posts in the forums. I found it great for handling things like numbered lists such as figures and tables, and, particularly important for linguistics, example sentences.

The basic workflow is that you compose in Scrivener and then 'compile', which will format the entire document and apply formatting in a single hit, then you can either print directly, or if you need further post-processing (like Endnote), then output as a useful format for you and take it to whatever program you need. My workflow was to go into Word and run Endnote, plus a couple of other small tasks, and then print. For a 50,000 word document, my time spent in Word was about 3 hours (including proofing). Scrivener also supports compiling to a LaTeX document using MultiMarkDown syntax.

Anyway, some dot-points:

Great hierarchical sectioning support, in fact this is key to its organisational structure
Secure in terms of text data, which is stored in individual text files (one for each section/subsection)
Much easier to learn than LaTeX
Support available from the forum from the developers, and very quick response from them (I once suggested a feature and it was rolled-out two days later)
Good support for multiple independent numbered lists (tables, figures)
Good support for cross-referencing to chapters and sections
You can output to .doc or .rtf and have track changes, but see last Con.
Not free; $40 (PC) $45 (Mac) once-off purchase (free 30-day trial, free for Linux)
Originally designed for Mac, and other operating systems are still catching up on features. There is a Linux release but it is in beta (however the features that are missing only affect the compile process, so you could conceivably write in Ubuntu and compile on Mac)
No support for Endnote apart from mapping ctrl/cmd-Y to open Endnote, that is, scrivener does not insert formatted bibliographic citations either in-line or as endnotes (but if you work using raw field codes, then pass them through to Word, it works great)
Formatting presets in Scrivener do not map to 'styles' in Word (although again, there are workarounds)
Not intended to be a complete typesetting program, but a writing program. You should expect to have to post-process your document in another program.
Importing from Word is not very good. This will affect what you do with track changes and supervisor's comments (you'd have to incorporate them yourself manually).

Sorry about the plug – I do not receive any kind of support from the makers of Scrivener; I just think it's the best writing software I've used, and since you're trying to weigh up the benefits and costs of switching to LaTeX, I definitely think you should consider it since it is compatible with LaTeX anyway, and is much easier to work in.

You should definitively learn LaTeX.

MS Word is slow, is instable, and the document is just, if you are not a guru at Word, ugly. You need a lot of expertise to control the blank spaces between words, to get a line break correct, to avoid orphan lines, etc., not to mention more advanced things related to type setting.

The ease to use of MS Word is not real ease. It just makes any secretary think he/she can use it. For a two page document this might be OK, but actually it requires a lot of experience to get a document right.

I don't agree that LaTeX has a steep learning curve. There are tools which make LaTeX pretty much WYSIWYG. Read the first two or three chapters of an introductory LaTeX book, install miktex and simatra PDF viewer on your windows, use EclipseTex for editing, it's pretty easy, and it does not required you to be a rocket scientist to type set documents that are nice to see.

You'll love LaTeX once you started using it. You'll wonder how it is ever possible to use Word any more.

Definitely no.

This may sound like a flippant response but it's actually grounded in experience and much thought.

I'm in a STEM discipline where LaTeX is considered by faculty to be the ONLY way to do word processing so I've had time to really formulate my viewpoint here.

Note: I use Word here but I assume LibreOffice is of the same quality/functionality.

Latex used to be better than Word in terms of controlling your document with precision and with things like formatting, bibliographies, and equations. Now that word has evolved to it's current state there is no advantage to LaTeX unless, as someone has already mentioned, you are into kerning and typography-type stuff. You can easily adjust margins, bibliographies, styles, equations, etc in Word these days. It's just which you learned the idiosyncrasies of first and more thoroughly.

Word is easier and more universally accepted. Everyone knows what to do with a docx file. What would a older professor who may not be a tech person in a history dept know what to do with .tex, .cls, .bib, or .ttf files? If you wanted to get feedback you'd have to put it into pdf and then getting comments would be annoying as others have mentioned.

I just used LaTeX for the first time to write 2 papers in the past couple weeks. I used the ShareLatex site and a template from an academic journal in my area. Without ShareLatex I could not have done it in a timely fashion. It does automatic versioning the entire time(at least for the time I used it). So every single time you make a change it keeps a copy of the document before the change. You can share it with others as the name implies and it will function like Google Docs in this regard. You can specify which compiler you want to use and some other options. It also lets you upload any and all files you might have associated with your document including fonts, images, template class files, etc. The only issue is when fine tuning formatting things make sure you look at the pdf because the little preview display isn't as high fidelity.

Inserting figures can be annoying. Especially with various file types. I had to convert all my figures to jpeg's to avoid issues I had with png's. They don't always go where you put them. LaTeX puts them where ever it sees fit. Yes there are settings to try to force LaTeX to put them where you want instead of where it wants but do you really need to be having a fight of wills with your word processor???

Summary: There is just absolutely no reason I can see to use LaTeX for the average person who is not OCD about kerning, ligatures and pristine fonts. Yes, it's fun at first playing with all the options and features but after awhile you just yearn for the simplicity of Word. In past years before the current state of mainstream word processors maybe LaTeX had it's advantage but now I get better results using Word and it's equation editor and formatting tools than with LaTeX. If you don't have equations and scientific things to display, as I suspect you might not, I would just write it in Word. If you want to play around with LaTeX for the typography aspects then copy what you've written into a .tex which you can then experiment with the nitpicky font details and see that when it's all said and done... the difference in output may be imperceptible.

17 Didn't downvote but this seems slightly biased. Some of the TeX problems you mention sound more like a lack of experience. – Marc Claesen Commented Mar 9, 2014 at 22:09
19 This may sound like a flippant response but it's actually grounded in experience [...] I just used LaTeX for the first time to write 2 papers in the past couple weeks. That's the problem. LaTeX has a steep learning curve, no one here is denying it. You can't expect to use it for two weeks and know enough about it to brand it as useless. How long have you been using Word in comparison? – Federico Poloni Commented Mar 9, 2014 at 23:28
2 Word has actually been quite powerful when it comes to doing things that academic papers require for quite some time (I remember doing this stuff in Word 6.0 and it working very well). The problem is that those features actually have a bit of a learning curve, so much so that people don't use them . – fluffy Commented Mar 9, 2014 at 23:46
7 To summarise the answer: " LaTeX is harder and the same things can be done in ___Office ". This is only true for when you are stuck on the learning curve of LaTeX. But when you get more experience and you get to appreciate the power of user-contributed packages like pgfplots , tikz , siunitx , booktabs , longtable , as well as the various styles, fonts and bib packages ... you see what they can offer that no ___Office can! And after you immerse yourself in LaTeX for a while, you see that the typographical differences are not at all OCD but rather a greater appreciation for clear layout. – badroit Commented Mar 10, 2014 at 1:28
4 I still have problems on my country to open a docx file... just saying. – Braiam Commented Mar 10, 2014 at 18:09

YES... and why not use both!

The learning curve for using LaTeX (with a good template) is actually relatively small, and will save you time/headaches in a large document such as a thesis since the formatting is automatically taken care of, and probably looks much better too (especially equations). Just paste your text into a .tex template, and create a .bib file.

My process is to write the draft (unformatted text) in LibreOffice with each chapter as a separate document, referencing with tags only, and storing the figures in a separate folder. The reason is that I find it easier to think/edit in WYSIWYG. Once I am happy with the draft it takes minimal effort to transfer it to LaTeX: I just go through and create a .bib file from copy and paste EndNote entries whilst I am inserting reference tags.

The end result looks perfect and I have saved time, avoiding the formatting problems that plagued my MS word undergraduate thesis.

I think using dynamic documents is the only way to ensure your work is reproducible. Latex is an important tool in my workflow that helps me achieve this aim, and I view it as a necessity. Word documents are simply not reproducible.

You can read about the issues with Word here , here , here and here .

If you adopt latex you should also use Pandoc , which I don't think anyone mentioned here. Pandoc allows you to convert a document to range of other document types with a simple line of code. I'm imagining the person who tries to cut and paste from the latex generated PDF into a Word document because that is what their advisor wants. Pandoc will make your life easier.

Scrivener is also another nice option that will allow you to write in markdown, it converts to latex on the backend and then converts the latex to pdf. Scrivener is also a great companion for long-form writing.

To the person that said: "You should prefer a tool that is used by your colleagues and supervisor to one that is slightly better intrinsically." I'd argue that you should use the tool that gets the work done most efficiently for you. Latex is going to save you so much time in terms of formatting the document. So, please explain to me why anyone expect that I use a tool that's going to require me to needlessly spend hours out of my productive schedule to tweak the formatting of the document over and over again? Your whole statement is anti-progress.

3 To be fair, I have spend hours tweaking the formatting of a document in LaTeX, too. – Federico Poloni Commented Aug 26, 2014 at 22:49

First, I am a mathematician.

I see no reason whatsoever to use LaTeX for humanities work. I think the best tool to write regular texts or books without formulas is LibreOffice.

I write my non-scientific (and even some mathematical) works in LibreOffice.

This is despite I have rather expert knowledge of LaTeX, I don't like to use it unless strictly necessary.

LibreOffice handles images and tables well. Just learn to use it.

A contrary view, perhaps, but: NO.

If you take the time to learn how to use word properly - understanding styles, using a good reference manager with a Word plugin, and so forth, then it is capable (but keep many backups).

LaTeX is a better tool, but there's a significant amount of time and effort needed to learn it. In STEM fields this is often a good investment for one's future career, but in history you are unlikely to be working with other people who use LaTeX, so future manuscripts etc are likely to have to be in Word to fit with co-authors.

Spend your time using your long-term tool (Word) well - which is not how most people use it - rather than learning a tool that you will be the only user of in future collaborations.

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LATEX or word for thesis

Hello all ,

currently im writing my Bachelor thesis, and i would like to have a perfect research document. So i though of writing it using LATEX, but i have zero experince using it. So is it worth it to learn LATEX or not?

My thesis project will end in june ( so i have around 3 months)

thanks in advance

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Template for a Masters or Doctoral Thesis

This LaTeX template is used by many universities as the basis for thesis and dissertation submissions, and is a great way to get started if you haven't been provided with a specific version from your department.

This version of the template is provided by Vel at LaTeXTemplates.com , and is already loaded in Overleaf so you can start writing immediately.

Checkout this short video to see how to easily create and edit new chapters as your thesis develops.

Please read the unofficial quick guide to the template; it contains some tips and suggestions on how to modify certain things.

(Updated 27/08/17)

Template for a Masters or Doctoral Thesis

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Make MS Word document look like it has been typeset in LaTeX

A few years back, I used to use LaTeX for writing reports and such, and I really liked the look of them.

However, nowadays I am forced to use MS Word to write my reports, but that does not hinder me from playing around with the document layout.

When I see a document typeset using LaTeX, I can often immediately spot it, I'm assuming that is because there is a nice default document template.

What types of setting in MS Word 2007/2010 (fonts, margins, letter spacing etc.) would allow my documents to look similar to default LaTeX documents?

word-to-latex

48 @Philipp: The math typesetting is superior to TeX? In what way? – ShreevatsaR Commented Jan 6, 2011 at 11:38
14 @ShreevatsaR: it allows more fine-grained control over various font-related parameters; it allows kerning between base characters and scripts; it is technically more advanced, moving lots of things from macro packages to Unicode and OpenType where they belong; and, due to OpenType, much more variants (e.g. parentheses of different sizes) can be present in the fonts. Most enhancements have already been backported to LuaTeX. – Philipp Commented Jan 6, 2011 at 12:32
6 @TH. OpenType math fonts have 65 parameters. \cong is a macro in traditional TeX, but a separate character in Unicode (U+2245). The CM fonts have only a few hundreds of math characters, Unicode has thousands. Unicode is not a character encoding. Computer Modern contains four pre-drawn glyphs for the opening parenthesis, Cambria Math has eight. I have already stated two enhancements: more font parameters, base–script kerning; another one is prescripts, which are complete unavailable in traditional TeX. – Philipp Commented Jan 6, 2011 at 23:20
5 ... these are advantages of OpenType which both XeTeX and LuaTeX support (as you noted). I was more curious where Word actually produces better math output. Prescrips are a good example though. Thanks. – TH. Commented Jan 7, 2011 at 0:29
11 @Phillip, @TH: I can't say much about the different parameters, but does Word now handle large documents with a lot of math while staying stable ? The last time (years ago) I tried to type all my formulas with MS Word and it became very slow (2-3 pages of only equations) and finally kept crashing (4 pages) so that it was unusable. – Martin Scharrer Commented Mar 29, 2011 at 17:01

15 Answers 15

I agree that it is impossible to completely imitate (La)TeX in Word. If you just want the font, then there is an OpenType version of Computer Modern , the default font of TeX. If you want the margins, just measure them on a LaTeX document and then set them in Word accordingly (I would recommend that you use KOMA Script or memoir as a base, not the default LaTeX classes, as the look imo better on A4 and letter paper.)

There is also a LaTeX template for Word . Since I don't own Word, I can't tell how good it looks.

4 I've just checked the Word template (after installing the cmr and cmbx fonts mentioned on the template website) and indeed it looks quit good (=similar) – Rabarberski Commented Jan 6, 2011 at 12:23
The margins in plain TeX, (and I presume that it is the same in LaTeX) is 1 inch from each side including footline, excluding headline. Font size is 10pt by default, and you get an A4 paper size in all kind of TeX. – Adam L. S. Commented Jul 3, 2011 at 14:04
lmroman12 fonts also look a lot like Computer Modern; download here . – Yibo Yang Commented Jan 21, 2019 at 19:29
2 Links above are now dead as a dodo! here's a word template on Github github.com/sebnil/LaTeX-template-for-Word . And the fonts one can simply do a google search – Miguel Tomás Commented Mar 7, 2022 at 8:28
Here's a good link with TEX fonts for word gust.org.pl/projects/e-foundry/latin-modern/download – Miguel Tomás Commented Mar 7, 2022 at 8:30

Besides all the ' it isn't possible ' advice, what I would advice is:

Use the LaTeX Template for Word mentioned by Caramdir (make sure to install the 3 mentioned fonts)
The author section of the IEEE website also provides a 2-column Word template for their papers, resembling quite a lot the LaTeX one. Other academic publishers (like Elsevier) also have similar Word templates (use Google to find them).
Make your document look as consistent as possible. I think that, apart from the typesetting, the consistent output produced by LaTeX is one of the things that make it look like LaTeX. Most Word documents have the tendency to be a collection of slightly-different layouted text blocks because there is nothing that forces the user to do otherwise. Practically, this translates to using paragraph and character styles rigorously. These could be the styles from the template mentioned, or your own defined styles. (BTW: The key to using styles in Word is to assign shortcut-keys for the most-used ones)
A wider left margin also might make it more LaTeX-like
Use a small font (10pt or so)
Indent the first line of each paragraph (although I personally don't like that)
Put your tables and figures at the bottom or top of a page

1 I think convention for indenting may vary from one language to the other; I seem to remind that there's even some variations depending on whether the text immediately follows a section title or not. But I'm not an expert in typography :) – chl Commented Jan 6, 2011 at 14:11
1 @chl: as I've always understood it: the indentation visually separates each paragraph (i.e., the reader quickly sees the paragraphs as 'blocks'). An other option would be to use a blank line (or half a line, or similar) between each paragraph, which is what I prefer because it makes the overall layout 'lighter' and less dense. Using spacing between paragraphs thus makes first-line indentation unnecessary, but requires more vertical space overall. – Rabarberski Commented Jan 6, 2011 at 15:07

No, you can't do it. One of the biggest differences between LaTeX and Word (and most other word processors for that matter) is that LaTeX (based on TeX) does run optimization algorithms to decide where to break paragraphs into lines and your document into pages. These algorithms try to find the most “appealing” way to flow the text of your document into pages. TeX will even let you know when it couldn't do a good enough job and sometimes complain about under- and overfull boxes.

Almost every other word processor, including MS Word, will blindly stack words into lines until they don't fit anymore, and start a new line there. Hyphenation makes things a bit better, but still no attempt is done in order to find “good” points to break lines in order to make the paragraphs look better.

33 I don't understand why this answer was upvoted so many times. The question was not whether it is possible, but instead what you can do to resemble it as closely as possible. – Rabarberski Commented Jan 6, 2011 at 12:21
9 @Rabarberski: It correctly identifies the point which will be hardest to replicate, namely line-breaking. Otherwise you're right, the OP didn't ask for anti-MS rants. – Philipp Commented Jan 6, 2011 at 12:34
23 @Philipp: This is most certainly not an anti-MS rant. It's not anti-MS or anti-Word, and it's not a rant. – TH. Commented Jan 6, 2011 at 20:41
2 It also uses expandable glues, that are not available in word. Also as far as I know you can't even typeset the TeX logo. The other way around should work in every aspect. – Adam L. S. Commented Jul 3, 2011 at 14:06
1 It might be worth mentioning that the reason MS Word doesn't implement a better word-wrap algorithm is likely not that it would be hard to replicate the TeX (or any other) algorithm, but that in a WYSIWYG editor it would mean that as you type, the lines above your cursor would keep changing, and that's probably hard to explain to most people. – wrtlprnft Commented Apr 18 at 20:01

I offer two options for you (Option 2 is best if you aren't going to compile anymore) :

Download OpenOffice for free and download writer2latex, also free. It supports xelatex export too! It also does a nice job exporting tables.

Option 2 A project I worked on to make Word documents resemble LaTeX documents. You will need a Mac for this.

https://github.com/macmadness86/applescript

Note: You can edit the plist file to your liking.

set margins
set font sizes for various heading styles
toggle bold or italics for various styles

Additional Scripts

This AppleScript handler sets the font for all styles. It can be expanded to set specific styles, but I have not finished it yet. I recommend using Latin Modern Roman , because it is the unicode font, which replaces CMU when working with XeLateX. Warning : There is a glitch in that when changing the name property of the font object of Word styles, a list template is applied to heading 1. I do not know why this happens. This is not a problem in the original script above, because of a complicated workaround using the find and replace command.

This script zooms word perfectly to fit a styles menu panel on the right side of the program so that you can see the other "Word Styles Setup" in action. Designed for a 13-inch monitor. (tested on Macbook Air)

Neither of the download links work anymore. – Lennart Commented Oct 9, 2013 at 11:25
1 @Lennart Thanks Lennart. I will fix this on the weekend. – Jonathan Komar Commented Oct 11, 2013 at 12:17
1 @Lennart Everything should work again now! – Jonathan Komar Commented Oct 13, 2013 at 13:44
Dear @JonathanKomar thank you for your work! I downloaded msword.academic_style, how should I use it in Word 2019 for Mac OS? Thank you again, D. – Dawson Commented May 19, 2020 at 9:23
@Dawson Glad it can be made useful. The README says to place it under ~/Library/Preferences (regardless of Word version). I imagine that is still relevant. I do not have Word 2019, so I cannot test it. However, unless Microsoft changed their AppleScript API, then I would expect the script to work. – Jonathan Komar Commented May 19, 2020 at 10:39

You can call a mule a horse, but will never make it a horse. No amount of fiddling can make a Word document look like one typeset with TeX, especially one that contains a serious amount of maths.

Major difference will remain in letter spacing, interword space, paragraph justification, hyphenation, page breaking and adjustment of floats.

If you are forced to use Word at work, one way - to simulate TeX with Word - is to typeset your documents with LaTeX and import them as images in your Word document!

3 Well, I guess a mule will have to do. I know there is much more to it with TeX than just fonts and spacings, but what I am trying to do is sort of a "TeX-like" document template. – Theodor Commented Jan 5, 2011 at 10:37
1 Why not export it as a PDF? – alexyorke Commented Mar 29, 2011 at 1:29
1 @alexy13 That would also be ok. – yannisl Commented Mar 29, 2011 at 14:49
Would be better to import as EMF or other vector format that Word can read instead of a bitmap. – lblb Commented Apr 6, 2017 at 21:01

Even if you cannot match LaTeX quality with MS Word, that doesn't mean you cannot produce great-looking documents with it. If you are a designer, you'll get great-looking document no matter what app you're using. Couple of months ago I read an article which made me stop and rethink. The tool one is using is important, but not the most important part of document production. The main actor from the link I provided is witnessing that.

1 IIUC, the layout was achieved by lot of manual tweaking. For example, in the third to last figure (blood red fruit, shown in red), I believe the hyphenation is done manually. Note the manual par break in the 8th line (shin-ing) and the red underline on ing . So clearly, if you put in as much effort as original typographers who laid out text by hand, you can get good results with any tool. – Aditya Commented Mar 6, 2012 at 19:51
8 Same applies to any tool out there, including *TeX. You cannot achieve great results without manual tweaking, sometimes a huge amount of it. I remember some production notes for "The LaTeX Companion": "[...] on maybe 10% of the pages [minor rewriting was needed] in order to avoid bad line breaks or page breaks [...] 45 long spreads, 25 short spreads, 230 forced page breaks, 400 adjustments to the vertical spacing, 100 other manual adjustments (other than rewriting)." Of course, even manual adjustments are easier done with LaTeX, but the point is that they're unavoidable in most cases. – Meho R. Commented Mar 14, 2012 at 18:30
1 Wow! I never realized that so much manual tweaking was done in the LaTeX Companion. – Aditya Commented Mar 14, 2012 at 22:29
1 Knuth's books also have a great deal of manual tweaking. It's naive to think that you can just type stuff and TeX will make it look nice for you. – bubba Commented Jun 17, 2013 at 8:58
Knuth books in 2023... wow. – user236748 Commented Mar 21, 2023 at 17:19

Well, it sounds dumb, but you could technically do this. If you're required to do something in MS Word (and, well, want to "stick it to the man"), you could technically still submit your document in MS Word by first writing it in LaTeX, then writing some sort of script (you're probably stuck using VBA ) to take each page of the PDF or DVI file rendered by TeX and insert it into a page of MS Word, with 0" margins on each side. It wouldn't be editable, but it would definitely look exactly like a LaTeX document. Word can probably also open PDF files as is (don't have a copy to try it out on, so I don't know), so that would also technically be in MS Word.

But beyond this (slightly absurd) suggestion, I completely agree with the other answers. TeX/LaTeX is much, much more than just a template, so trying to implement even an appreciable subset of it's features in a template-like formalism is just not going to cut it.

9 Being "stuck to VBA" (which is a fairly modern programming language) would be much better than being stuck to TeX macros. – Philipp Commented Jan 6, 2011 at 12:35
You can also use VBScript or J(ava)script, and call Word API functions from "outside", meaning a standalone scriptfile. – marczellm Commented Apr 15, 2014 at 16:15

If you are "forced to use MS Word to write my reports", I assume that it is because you are working in a team that uses MS Word to produce collaborative documents, and not that you don't have access to TeX.

I am in a similar situation. I still try to work in TeX as much as possible, because a) I am more comfortable with the workflow and b) because it produces much nicer documents.

These are the workarounds that I use to work with our team.

If I am the owner of the document, I first write it in LaTeX, convert it to PDF, open it in MS Word and save it, before sharing it with the team. This works well with simple documents, but only the Windows version of Word can open PDFs. I incorporate any comments I get back from the team in Word versions back in my LaTeX and make the final product a PDF from the LaTeX. The formatting is translated well, particularly if you use the same fonts, but beware that anything but very simple mathematical formulae can get mangled by this process.

For slightly more complicated documents, I use pandoc , writing the document in Markdown and then using a workflow similar to that described J. Alexander Branham , making a DOCX from the Markdown while the final product is a LaTeX to PDF from the Markdown.

For documents owned by others, I tend to have little control over the format and have to work directly with the Word, but I do what I can to clean up and simplify the mess of styles I often come across, in a way that subtly improves the final product.

If it was vice versa it would be much easier. Using xelatex one can use the Word standard fonts to mimic it's look: http://uweziegenhagen.de/?p=1359

Happy TeXing!

8 But it isn't, vice versa. How is this answer helpful? – Frames Catherine White Commented Jul 4, 2013 at 7:05
Not helpful.... – user236748 Commented Mar 21, 2023 at 16:59

Use this template with the fonts listed:

http://www.frostnova.net/archives/fake-latex.html

And follow these tips:

http://jeffhuang.com/better_word_papers.html

You should get a pretty decent approximation.

A most simple way to produce a latex looking doc in word is simplified into steps.

Use Century font
Refer an original latex document(e: if you are working on a project report, then collect a latex made project report)--- and then type the words exactly in same place as in latex doc... with almost same font size, orientation , position, margin etc.
Save it as pdf (install save as pdf addon if you dont have it).
Now see the magic...your ms word doc will now have 90% similiarity with original ltex made document....

I may have come up with a good way to mimic the style (including the equations and index) to that of a LaTeX document.

Download the Latin Modern math fonts (the Latin Modern Collection—OTF files are also available).

Install all fonts from the ZIP files and then create a style file for Word. With that done just simply export your files as PDFs. Here are my samples.

There are many font files (.OTF) files in the ZIP file. Which font did you use? Related, is the same font for regular text and subtitles? – spindash_st Commented Feb 15, 2022 at 7:45
Download and unzip. Inside the folder, search (in Explorer) for 'lmromancaps' (works without * at the end), and also search for 'lmroman9', which is the one. Install them. With those, an easy LateXish-looking (vectorized-) Word is created in minutes. A simple custom Theme (*.thmx) can be saved if e. g. CAPS are set for Headings. Word has dramatically improved over the last two decades, but is a different animal of course. Recently, I stumbled across a thousands-of-lines LaTeX, since the authors haven't even structure it. Beautiful from a software engineering and quality control perspective. – user236748 Commented Mar 21, 2023 at 17:08
Additional note: When exporting in Word to PDF, in the Export (PDF) options, make sure to switch off "Bitmap text when fonts may not be embedded". In my case, only then is vector-format retained. – user236748 Commented Mar 21, 2023 at 17:16
Additional note 2: Use the Word to PDF printer! I discovered new bitmapping issues when exporting from Word. Easy world. See also superuser.com/questions/652582/… – user236748 Commented Mar 21, 2023 at 21:36
Additional note 3: When printing, to avoid margins and white borders, I print (using PDF24 Creator) as following. Settings: Printer Properties > Advanced... > Paper Size > PostScript Custom Page Size Definition. This will generate a *.prn file, which can be converted back to PDF by ps2pdf in command-line (use latest PowerShell). – user236748 Commented Apr 3, 2023 at 20:39

Mac Instructions only Based on James Lingard's MS Word template page .

Lingard's template file ( LaTeX.dot ) can be used to produce documents that look a lot like they've been typeset in TeX/LaTeX but you'll need to install the Computer Modern TrueType versions of fonts used by LaTeX to make them available in MS Word.

Installing the fonts:

Download the minimum set: cmr10.ttf, cmbx12.ttf and cmbx10.ttf and other suggested tt files ( e.g. bakoma true type fonts )

Once downloaded on the Mac, go to the download location and open the files by double-clicking. This starts Font Book which opens the tt (TrueType) font file. Font Book is included with OS/X. Basic instructions on using Font Book from Apple.

Font Book provides a small display of the font and gives an option to "Install Font" via the button at bottom right of the window.

User installed fonts view in the OS/X Font Book

The next time you open MS Word it will spend 30s or so updating its font listing.

Installing the Template:

Mac instructions only: You add Lindgard's LaTeX.dot file to the appropriate templates folder:

MS Word template location. From the Finder menu; Finder>Go>Go to Folder...

Then create a new MS Word document based on the template via:

From the MS Word menu bar: File > New from Template...

The MS Word "Document Gallery" window opens...

Select "My Templates" in the navigation pane...

Select the template named "LaTeX"

Your new document is now using Lindgard's stylesheet in MS Word, which should also be using the bakoma TrueType fonts. The screen and output should now mimic a LaTeX typeset document very closely.

If you want to use LaTeX, you could get the mk4ht package, and use this to convert LaTeX documents to Open Office format, and open these in Word (2007+) and have the best of both worlds.

That being said, if you have the JDK installed on your system (at least in Ubuntu) this breaks, and you need to use htlatex to convert TeX to HTML and thus to Open Office and hence to Word.

Why not use LaTeX, then parse them through TextoWord? I haven't used it myself, and have absolutely no intention of doing so, but I understand that it works very well. There's also LatextoRTF.

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$latex or word for thesis$

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Template for LaTeX PhD thesis title page
How to Write a Thesis in LaTeX (Part 5): Customising Your Title Page
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$latex or word for thesis$
How to Write a Thesis in LaTeX (Part 2): Page Layout
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COMMENTS

Should I write my thesis with Word or LaTeX?
However, I would never go back to LaTeX for anything smaller than a book. And I used both. For my Master Thesis (100 pages) I used LaTeX. For my Doctoral Thesis (200 pages) I used MS Word.
Why Should I Use LaTeX over Word for Writing My Research?
While LaTeX has a steeper learning curve than Word, it makes research writing more efficient, professional-looking, and collaborative.
How to Write a Thesis in LaTeX (Part 1): Basic Structure
Your thesis could be the longest and most complicated document you'll ever write, which is why it's such a good idea to use LaTeX instead of a common word processor. LaTeX makes tasks that are difficult and awkward in word processors, far simpler.
Is it worth it to master LaTeX or MS Word?
If they change these, then I think it is not necessary for me to learn MS Word or LaTeX in depth. As long as I can write the paper in a readable manner, it should be fine because the journal will make the format better if the paper is accepted. But if there is a specific style and format of the papers published in the journal which must be fulfilled by the authors, then it is a different story.
LaTeX vs. Word: Main Differences
LaTeX vs. Word: Main Differences. 1. Introduction. Microsoft Word and LaTeX have been fundamental tools for crafting and presenting our written content. In this tutorial, we'll discuss the differences between Word and LaTeX regarding user interface, use cases, collaboration, and version control features. 2.
Do you use TeX for writing your thesis or only for its composition?
62 I would like to submit my university thesis composited in TeX. But I am not sure what is the best practise in the writing stage so I would like to ask you - do you write your thesis in a TeX editor or do you use some other text editor/program (MS Word, Libre Office Writer etc.) and after you finish, you transform your work into TeX?
How to get started writing your thesis in LaTeX
Here we provide a guide to getting started on writing your thesis in LaTeX, using a standard template which is pre-loaded into Overleaf. We have a large number of thesis templates in our online library, and you can upload your own if your university provides a set of LaTeX template files. We'll assume you've used LaTeX before and so are ...
Class for my thesis (I am a beginner, just installed LaTeX)… which
Keen for your insight - because at the moment I'm not sure whether I even should use LaTeX as I do not want any problems with licenses or something, because I want my thesis to not be licensed under anything. My thesis is my thesis. So maybe it is better to just use Word? document-classes thesis Share Improve this question asked Jan 10, 2018 at ...
Writing a thesis in LaTeX
Writing a thesis is a time-intensive endeavor. Fortunately, using LaTeX, you can focus on the content rather than the formatting of your thesis. The following article summarizes the most important aspects of writing a thesis in LaTeX, providing you with a document skeleton (at the end) and lots of additional tips and tricks.
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I'm about to start the writing part of my lit review. I wanted to try out some other word processors to see if they'd work for the rest of the thesis. What have folks here used or thought was a good idea to write it in: LaTex, Microsoft Word, or RMarkdown?
Guide to Writing Your Thesis in LaTeX
Step 1: Install LaTeX and a LaTeX Aware Editor. LaTeX is not a word processor, it is a document preparation system for high-quality typesetting. It is most often used for medium-to-large technical or scientific documents, but it can be used for almost any form of publishing. LaTeX encourages authors not to worry too much about the appearance of ...
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Using Microsoft Word to format your thesis or dissertation [If you want to use LaTeX instead of Microsoft Word, see the Formatting in LaTeX section, below.] UM-Dearborn Microsoft Word Thesis or Dissertation Template Most students use Microsoft Word to write their thesis or dissertation.
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Basic thesis template
This Thesis LaTeX template is an ideal starting point for writing your PhD thesis, masters dissertation or final year project. The style is appropriate for most universities, and can be easily customised. This LaTeX template includes a title page, a declaration, an abstract, acknowledgements, table of contents, list of figures/tables, a dedication, and example chapters and sections.
Template for a Masters or Doctoral Thesis
Abstract This LaTeX template is used by many universities as the basis for thesis and dissertation submissions, and is a great way to get started if you haven't been provided with a specific version from your department.
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LaTeX Thesis
LaTeX is a powerful tool for document creation, especially for documents including extensive mathematical notation. LaTeX Downloads Sample thesis Table Help Figure Help Bibliography Help symbols
Make MS Word document look like it has been typeset in LaTeX
Make your document look as consistent as possible. I think that, apart from the typesetting, the consistent output produced by LaTeX is one of the things that make it look like LaTeX. Most Word documents have the tendency to be a collection of slightly-different layouted text blocks because there is nothing that forces the user to do otherwise.

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