MacTex – A wonderful open source Tex distribution for Mac that includes the TexShop typesetter. To counter its many flaws-and there are many-I have compiled a list of resources that should make working in LaTex a little easier.
(The meta-sociological paper on LaTex as a disciplinary marker of distinction, though, awaits authorship.) My allegiance to LaTex is basically about aesthetics and even more, the way it weaves into my writing processes itself. Frankly, most of those things do not matter that much for most sociologists they only rarely matter to me. Sometimes people tout other nerdy benefits of LaTex, like the ability to integrate R code via Knitr or to typeset beautiful formulae and tables. As in all coding, the simple ability to comment-out text allows you to explore ideas, make notes, experiment with stylistic shifts, and play with structural changes-all without losing text or awkwardly piling it up at the end of a document, in some “bin” in the margins, or in another window. More importantly, it changes the way you write. (Frankly, it is not worth their time to learn.) Dealing with small formatting problems can be an enormous pain in the butt.īut LaTex produces beautiful documents. Many colleagues have no idea how to use LaTex. Many journals demand MS Word submissions. I joke that as a sociologist, you really have to love LaTex to use it.
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