Is LaTeX used outside mathematics and academia?

Question

This seems like an interesting forum to ask if anyone's come across semi-serious LaTeX usage outside of its traditional fields like mathematics, computer science, and other academic disciplines.

While the learning curve is rather steep (for some people), it seems in many cases like it could be a very useful tool in the real world for producing high-quality, semi-automated documents.

So, have you seen LaTeX used in the real world? If so, how? If not, why?

Edit:

Wow, still surprised by the feedback speed of this site!

Lehane writes:

the drawbacks of Word aren't enough to outweigh the cost of learning LaTeX. Also, I actually don't think the review mechanism in Word is that bad.

Yes, whenever collaboration is required then basically all parties must be using the same software. I've never really used Word's change tracking, but I do hear it's very good. In fact, Word 2007's mathematics handling (which is unfortunately incompatible with Word 2008 -- !) is also very good by all accounts, although again I haven't used it myself.

Personally, I hope to continue using LaTeX (or a similar system like ConTeXt), well, forever. The ability to define ad-hoc semantic markup makes my life so much easier when I change my mind about how things should look (or, more importantly, behave) later on.

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@Konrad Rudolph:

While I agree with you that the quality of TeX is better compared to something like Adobe InDesign, the comparison to a tool like Word is apt in that if you're writing a paper or a thesis, then Word is often the only choice for many people. And these days it can do a passable job.

If you're talking about complex image arrangement that some DTPs do, then I'm not sure the comparison to LaTeX really works any more.

Personally, I think of LaTeX as "HTML for real-life documents".

Answer 1

I don't know whether you would call this the real world, but Wikipedia uses LaTeX markup for presentation of mathematical equations. See Quadratic Equation for simple examples.

More information can be found at the MediaWiki Math Markup page.

Edit: I suppose you were asking about instances of its use outside mathematics, so MediaWiki wouldn't count. I can't think of any other instances where I've noticed the use of LaTeX outside the technical sciences.

Answer 2

Not from what I've seen. I've been working ouside academia (where I used LaTeX a lot) for about a year and a half now and my guess is most people haven't even heard of it. Where I am, most documents that are produced will also need to be reviewed/edited by non-technical people, and I guess for this purpose the drawbacks of Word aren't enough to outweigh the cost of learning LaTeX. Also, I actually don't think the review mechanism in Word is that bad.

Answer 3

Still quite mathematical, but also in the industry: I work in a bank, and we use LaTeX to

• write internal documentation (some use LaTeX, some use Word);
• write description of financial products (the LaTeX code is generated automatically, so typically the user only sees a PDF).

Note that lots of people use LaTeX to write books (not necessarily technical books!).

Answer 4

I have personally used LaTeX when writing detailed customer specifications at work. You basically don't have to think about layout and it gives the document a "professional look". In addition the LaTeX source fits nicely into any source control system.

Answer 5

I use it for customer documentation too, just like Thomas. The main advantage over MS Word files is latex sources are text only and thus diff-able in CVS/SVN.

Answer 6

Wow, people actually compare LaTeX to MS Word? This is just wrong. Word is basically a text editor that knows about formatting. LaTeX is a desktop publishing system (DTP).

To see the distinction, it's enough to have a look at Word's fonts menu. Good fonts, such as Hoefler Text, have a host of variants for different characters, depending on the context in the text. They also add metrics to calculate kerning and other fancy stuff (so as information whether two characters intersect). DTP software takes these information into account to enhance the type face. MS Word doesn't. Software like Word or OOo even struggle with basic features such as common ligatures. A DTP goes much further in that it allows the user to edit these font features selectively.

Additionally, Word even lacks basics such as correct small caps (instead, it just uses the uppercase letters and scales them down to approximately match lowercase letters).

Another huge aspect is the algorithm to determine a good black/white ratio in the document, i.e. how words are distributed in a paragraph to make it look balanced. Word has a very basic grasp of how to do it, not at all comparable to a professional DTP.

So, LaTeX shouldn't be compared to MS Word but to other DTP systems. Actually, I can't speak for those. The only DTP that I've used except LaTeX was Aldus PageMaker. Not exactly a modern software. I imagine that in professional type setting, they don't use LaTeX very often because until very recently, handling of different fonts was quite complicated, along with a few other things. While (La)TeX knows all these things, they're not easily configurable. This might be enough for technical publications but most non-technical publications desire a certain level of individuality which is hard to reach using LaTeX.

However, recent distribitions are much better behaved. For example, take the XeTeX settings system which comes with Unicode support switched on by default. In fact, working with anything other than Unicode isn't well supported any more. It also comes with a very good fonts and colour support provided by the fontspec package.

So, in closing let me once again emphasize that MS Word might be a good software but it was never intended to act in place of a professional DTP. While it's actually true that some books are created using Word, this is a shame, for crying out loud. Many modern books are not set by professional typographers any more. I guess they want too much money, greedy bastards, just because they think they know more than we.

Answer 7

@Konrad Rudolph: I quite agree with your answer, and I'm not trying to compare LaTeX with Word. I'm just saying that for some tasks (documentation writing in my example), some people typically choose between LaTeX -outputting in PDF- and Word.

Answer 8

Myth: LaTeX has a learning curve. Bull. A one-hour teaching session is enough to get people producing basic documents. After that you give them "A Guide to LaTeX" (Kopka & Daly) and/or "The LaTeX companion" (Mittelbach) and you tell them about comp.text.tex and ctan.org. In the 80s my secretary used plain TeX to typeset math reports. Really. It's much easier than you think.

Outside of science, TeX/LaTeX is used in languages, especially where strange alphabets are used.

A good reason for using TeX/LaTeX is the separation of content and layout. I had written 200 pages of a book before I ever talked to a designer. Since all layout decisions were captured in macros, incorporating her layout was simply a matter of rewriting the macros. Easy.

Another reason for using TeX/LaTeX for anything is its programmability. I'll give a few examples.

1. A report has sections that are Open, Confidential, or Secret. Every page has to have a marking at the top that is the maximum of the rankings of all the sections on it. It would take me less than an afternoon to write the macros for that. A friend of mine did this for the dept. of defense.

2. Shakespeare's plays are in iambic pentameters, and sometimes one character finishes the line of another. I wrote a macro in about an hour that will automatically indent the second line to where the previous one stopped.

3. A sociologist friend had large numbers of automatically generated tables in his thesis. He dumped the numbers from a database, had a script that transformed them into LaTeX figure environment, and generated the LaTeX code to include them.

Et cetera.

Answer 9

I tried LaTeX after getting more and more fed up with Word doing seemingly random things with tables and bullets. I haven't looked back. Sure, Word might be easier for really quick documents, but for reports, dissertations, etc. there's no contest.

Answer 10

LaTeX is especially convenient for typesetting formulae, but is definitely not restricted to mathematics in terms of actual usage.

Most printed books go through TeX at some stage of their typesetting process. So, it is not only academia either. This remains somewhat hidden from the reader, unfortunately, therefore many people have the same observations as you.

Answer 11

I use LaTeX for almost every written output I produce.

The main advantage for me is reproducibility: I don't have to remember where to click, what option to choose, what pitfall to avoid, I just write the same instructions and it behaves the same. If I don't remember how I did something, I can just take a look at how I did it.

The other great advantage is the completeness of the language and the wealth of mostly well-documented packages to do anything you want.

There is a big difference to HTML, by the way: the display of HTML-"formatted" text is dependent on many things like the user's browser, window geometry, resolution etc., and the HTML coder has little influence on that.

Answer 12

Word is just fine for authoring, just as Latex is. Neither is excellent for typesetting, where they have different weaknesses: Context is well-suited to typesetting, as is Indesign.

The toolchain around Word is better for collaborative editing (track changes, macros for stripping foolish formatting, macros for checking every style issue under the sun, tools for migrating from edited document to document ready for typesetting, etc.) although there is no reason besides developer effort why a better toolset could not be constructed around Latex/Context. Latex's killer feature, for the next few years, could be distributed version control for concurrent editing: I know of a publisher who has good experiences with this. Word is horrible at this.

An important weakness of Latex in publishing is the relative scarcity of editors who know Latex well. There is useful software for converting between Word and Latex: docx2tex and latex2rtf. Getting these to work smoothly in the context of a typical publisher's workflow could make a big difference to the degree of acceptance of Latex as a authoring format by publishers.

Answer 13

I've used LaTeX to programmatically produce PDFs from a website.

Answer 14

LaTeX is often used as part of other programs. For example, in the Inkscape drawing package you can insert any LaTeX output as vector graphics. That gives you access to an enormous number of symbols.

Answer 15

I use LaTeX to an 80 page colour catalogue of products that I sell through my business.

Answer 16

Since the question title is

Is LaTeX used outside mathematics and academia?

I'll skip the feature and Word bashing discussion and come to the point:

Long story short: I know it's used because we use it and we are very far from academia or professional publishing. And we are not even Linux geeks; we use only Windows :-)

We now use LaTeX exclusively to produce our customer documentation related to our software products. We are on Windows and use MikTeX with TeXniccenter.

We used MS Word in the past but had troubles with broken document layouts and lot's of images in documents and collaboration. (Not saying it can't be solved -- it just seemed even more work than switching to LaTeX.)

We basically never need LaTeXs highly regarded math ability, but here's some of the relevant points:

• Easy to handle (merge, compare) in source control (simple text files)
• Automated+scripted document generation from source control
• 100% reproducible document layout
• 100% fixed document layout (The document class defines a fixed title page, fixed copyright disclaimer, etc.)
• (Limited) ability to detect layout/content "errors" that developers make during document generation
• Custom macros - For example, our costomer docs will contain warning or info boxes with an icon like you find in books. This can be automated so that the developer just has to write \OurInfoBox{Text goes here ...}

And here come the negatives :-)

• Tables. Oh god. I hate LaTeX tables. (See also next bullet.)
• Learning effort for anything but simple text insertion. (You have to take into account that these documents also get edited by people for whom using LaTeX/writing customer docs is just a tiny fraction of their work time. If someone only has to edit a LaTeX document once a month - for example to add just one line to a table - then it can become frustrating. Espescially as we do not really have a dedicated LaTeX power user on site to quickly ask if something is broken.)
• Error output of LaTeX is often completely incomprehensible, so it can take literally hours to fix a broken document.

Answer 17

I frequently want to write something without doing any fiddling with the format at the time of writing. I want a compact representation that will do well in a cross-platform (Linux, MacOSX, Windows 7) environment and fit into standard version control systems (I'm currently using Mercurial at home). I sometimes want to have it in a format where I can easily make something halfway professional-looking out of it. These are my requirements; yours of course might vary.

For these purposes, I know of nothing better than LaTeX. I generally don't even care about the math typesetting, since I typically don't put math into my writing.

Besides, this allows me to write in the text editor of my choice (vim), rather than somebody's idea of a word processor. (FWIW, my spelling and grammar are usually good, so I don't benefit much from online spill and grandma checkers.)