The browser-based editor Overleaf provides an overview of LaTeX equation formatting at go./2eh1daz.

Plain text is wrapped inside commands that describe its formatting (for example, for italics, extitx dx. Unlike ‘what you see is what you get’ text editors such as Word, LibreOffice and OpenOffice, writing in LaTeX is like programming. “Word is when ‘good enough’ is OK and/or I’m working with folks who need to use it.” Coding equations “For me, LaTeX is the tool when I want to get the typesetting just so,” says Casey Greene, a bioinformatician at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Other text editors also support elements of LaTeX, allowing newcomers to use as much or as little of the language as they like.

In 2017, Microsoft made it possible to use LaTeX’s equation-writing syntax directly in Word, and last year it scrapped Word’s own equation editor. Over the past few years however, the line between the tools has blurred. The article has been viewed more than 240,000 times so far. Nejasmic PLoS ONE 9, e115069 2014) that asked scientists from different fields to put both Microsoft Word and LaTeX to the test ended up being one of the ten most discussed papers online the following year, according to data-science company Altmetric (Altmetric is owned by Digital Science, a firm operated by the Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, which has a share in Nature’s publisher, Springer Nature). Others regard the software as too complicated for all but the most demanding of tasks. Proponents embrace LaTeX because of the total control it offers for document layout, or because it represents a blow to commercial software developers, particularly Microsoft. Since its development in 1985, LaTeX has become popular in disciplines such as mathematics, physics and computer science. The open-source software system - used to create and precisely format scientific manuscripts - is more akin to coding than writing. But for scientists in other fields the merits of LaTeX have largely gone unnoticed. LaTeX or Word? For physicists and mathematicians, the choice is obvious.

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