LaTeX vs traditional Word Processing: a challenge.

What is LaTeX?

You've never heard about LaTeX?

LaTeX is a powerful and awesome document preparation system based on a markup language.

Yes, it's just an abstract definition and it leaves things as they are.

The only way to understand LaTeX advantages compared to traditional wordprocessor systems if to try and to use it.

Only using LaTeX you can understand the difference between thought and the form of thought.

This article is not intended as a LaTeX tutorial; for any information you can find tons of tutorials on the web, beginning from to the LaTeX Project official site.

Why LaTeX?

The main reason to use LaTeX is his extraordinary efficiency connected to a simple underlying philosophy: don't worry about text formatting and concentrate yourself only on the contents.

All formatting issues are managed by the system itself and absolutely in the best possible way.

You have only to think about the substance of your ideas and you can, then, exponentially unleash your creativity.

Don't worry about spacing, cross referencing, using table of contents, text and images optimizing, etc.

Could you now imagine how much time you can save with a system like this one?

I want to give a little contribution to define the basic difference between conventionally writing and LaTeX writing in terms of efficiency and speed.

To achieve this objective I would use a simple, immediate and immersive concept: time otpmitation.

Time optimization?

Why time optimization?

Time is an essential component of our life.

Everybody wants to save time because... time is money, don't waste time, and so on.

So it would be enough to demonstrate the time efficiency of a resource to obtain proof of the superiority compared to other ones.

The primary LaTeX resource to get a real saving of time is his functionality to elaborate the space between the words.

Space and Time

^SPACE⁄_TIME

Doesn't it seem an equation?

Time reduction is achieved, in LaTeX, through an automatic elaboration of space between the words and the characters that provides a different view from the original text.

Basically the written text is intended as a source code and not as a final shape.

The system applies the following two basic simple rules (which are the same of HTML and programming languages):

1. Space between the words entered in the source text is completely irrelevant: the system recalculates the optimum space regardless of the original distance of words
2. Single carriage return is neutralized. .

   To have an real carriage return you must enter at least a double carriage returns in the source.

Two real-world scenarios

Now we compare two real situations that everybody who writes for business or creativity face every day.

1. On the one hand we have a written or copied or even obtained by scanning text with an optical character recognition program (OCR) needs to be formatted and finished in each component, word by word. It's also necessary to remove every repeated space and any carriage return inside the phrases.
2. On the other hand we have the same text in which all the formatting work is handled very quickly following an automatic algorithm.

For the purpose I scanned a page of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

The original text

The original layout is formatted as a typical page of a book.

Fig. 1: The original Alice's page

OCR software recognizes the text flowing across the above three columns, and put every line in one column. .

Everything else is handled by the word processing program to which the information is passed.

The wp response provides an interesting answer to the starting question: what is the most efficient solution?

The traditional word processor solution.

The answer provided by a conventional word processor (Word, in this case) has a narrow column on the left with hard carriage returns at the end of each line. There's also a huge empty space in the remaining part of the paper.

This is a long way from a final form solution that forces a strong and time-consuming manual reformatting, accommodation, reworking the text to make it presentable (Note carriage returns at the end of each line!).

Fig. 2: Result of raw OCR as it appears in a traditional word processor

The LaTeX solution

The answer provided by LaTeX, however, is totally different: the sistem automatically neutralizes excess spaces between words and simple carriage returns.

Furthermore recalculates the total space, optimize it according to its own layout rules that are independent from the original text.

The shape of the result is perfect. Much more pleasant than the previous solution.

Fig. 3: The LaTeX automatic page processing

Now a summary

Obviously in both solutions it's necessary to review the words, but both versions have the same problem so it does not introduce any difference.

The conclusion is very simple: in the conventional word processors you must spend a lot of time to format text and words and rows and carriage returns, etc.

In LaTeX, conversely, formatting issues are almost totally managed by the system itself and you can focus you attention on the content.

The extraordinarily efficiency of LaTeX against the traditional word processor derives, mainly, from the space-time combination.

This article is also posted on MEDIUM