LaTeX or MS Word: What’s your preferred typesetting tool?

[Approximate Reading Time : 4 mins]

Most professional authors and researchers will concur on one fact when it comes to writing dissertations or making their manuscripts publishing ready: that LaTeX is a better choice than Microsoft Word. While the latter of course enjoys a huge popularity in the word-processing sphere, its inability to handle long-form scholarly content and restriction to general-purpose documentation is what gives LaTeX the edge when it comes to typesetting.

Typesetting services are required to transform a finished manuscript into a printed book with proper formatting and design, which helps ensure an immersive reading experience across devices and eBook readers. Typesetting services add a touch of professionalism to any book/manuscript by striking a fine balance between book-layout design and structural layout.

Why LaTeX scores over Microsoft Word in the professional typesetting space?

It’s not uncommon for Word to crash over and over again when an author is putting the finishing touches on a sixty-page long chapter or trying to insert citations, images, tables, or other such information. Imagine the pain when one has a submission deadline approaching and he or she is stuck with a typesetting task that takes forever and is still not up to his or her satisfaction. Here is why LaTeX is a better choice in such scenarios:

• Designed for long-form scholarly content that mathematicians, scientists, researchers, authors, and engineers work with. It effortlessly handles bibliographies, citations, equations, tables, charts, and scientific figures and helps create documents that look aesthetic, professional, and are highly accurate.
• The open source means of typesetting is backed by a large community of typesetters who constantly improve its functionality and user-friendliness. Whenever one hits a roadblock, a quick query search can help get all the answers he or she needs to get back on track with LaTeX.
• LaTeX is highly customizable. Need to change your style of page numbering or heading display midway through a document/manuscript/dissertation/seminar paper? Or would like to reset a counter for figures, notes, or pages? It’s easy with LaTeX. Even if your paper is incredibly long and complicated, filled with chapters, headings and subheadings, hundreds of footnotes, a bibliography, a list of archives, table of contents, and so on, throw it on LaTeX, and sit back and relax. The intelligent typesetting language is designed for all this and more.
• Helps create highly modular documents by separating the editing and processing workflows—no cutting and pasting bits of raw work at the end of a document or into a new document that one is forced to do in MS Word. LaTeX allows you to move content around easily, comment bits of content out, or even put those bits back into your project as it evolves.

Are you looking to publish a book/manuscript/paper that is technical and scientific yet must appear aesthetic, elegant, and reader friendly? Amnet Systems provides professional typesetting services that match not just the genre and theme of your content but also your publisher’s specifications.