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

Question

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.

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

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.

Answer 6

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.

Answer 7

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.

Answer 8

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.

Answer 9

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.

Answer 10

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.

Answer 11

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:

Pros:

• 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.

Cons:

• 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.

Answer 12

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.

Answer 13

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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

Answer 14

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.

Answer 15

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.

Answer 16

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.

Answer 17

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.