10.1 Tiwilbemba

Today I am sharing with you my biggest regret looking back on uni days, thus, my biggest tiwilbemba: Not learning LaTeX/Markdown early enough.

Many of you are no fans of sitting in front of the computer all day. If you are a student, you will use a significant amount of time writing essays, term papers, and theses. The biggest time sinks with these are formatting, tables of contents, bibliographies, lists of abbreviations, etc. What if I told you that you don’t have to spend any time with this? If you know just enough LaTeX/Markdown, you can skip over all these steps, which equals less time tinkering at the computer. If you watched my first term paper stream, you literally saw me set up a document from scratch in under 5 minutes, including cover sheet, table of contents and bibliography, everything formatted perfectly and updated dynamically as I fill it.

It might feel counter-intuitive to spend even more time learning an entirely new computer skill. But bear with me. The time you spend on learning how to write documents in LaTeX or Markdown is ridiculously small compared to the days if not weeks of formatting frustration you can save yourself. I have always been rather tech savvy, and I know Microsoft Word much better than, I guess, the average user. Still, in hindsight, I feel like I was wasting my time. I wrote all my seminar papers, essays and theses in Microsoft Word. And I regret it.

This section is not a tutorial, rather an encouragement for you to expand your horizon (even though I will upload a simple set up for a term paper in the appendix soon). First, a profile of people that should, in my opinion, learn writing in plain text (LaTeX or Markdown).

Group 1: You have to write…

1. Academic papers
2. Reports
3. Articles
4. Books

Anything that requires a simple style and that doesn’t require a crazy amount of design greatly profits from LaTeX/markdown. Any repetitive work that requires consistent formating, too. If you write larger works like books, you’d be crazy not to use LaTeX. Students definitely belong in this group. I’d say, if you force yourself to learn it now, by the time you write your bachelor thesis, it will have been worth it already.

Of course, there are people who might be happy with graphical programs. To be fair, let’s profile these people, too.

Group 2: You have to write

1. not much at all, only the occasional document
2. Documents with constantly changing formatting
3. Design-heavy documents (e.g. Ad material)

If you belong to this group, you might not profit from learning LaTeX too much, and you probably don’t care for Markdown either. Creative design is difficult, unless you are very experienced already.

Here are some reasons people have against learning LaTeX that are not valid in my opinion.

1. “It’s difficult.”
   As soon as you’ve set it up and learned the basics it is actually sooo much easier. There are also platforms with great communities like Stackoverflow, where almost any problem you encounter has been solved by users with full examples. You just have to search for it.
2. “I am not a programmer”
   Neither am I. Don’t let the syntax scare you.
3. “I’ll learn it eventually, but for now I have to get this paper done quickly.”
   Nope… That’s what I told myself up until a year or so ago.
4. “I’ll need to work with people that use .docx.”
   A good .tex file can be easily transformed into .docx or .odt thanks to tools like Pandoc.

Finally, some reasons people might not consider normally.

• Professionals love it: If you were to write a program, you’d ask a programmer how to do it best. If you were to build a door, you’d ask a carpenter. For some reason, if people do typesetting, they do not use the tools of professionals. Most publishers use LaTeX, and also accept Latex files. It’s definitely not a bad thing to put on your résumé either.
• Focus: not seeing the output immediately is actually a great thing. You might have just hopped onto the train of thought and the words just spill onto the screen when,… Hark! The table you placed so carefully a moment ago moved unexpectedly to the wrong page… Moment over, distraction has won. This is not gonna happen with LaTeX/markdown. I personally find myself micromanaging all the time in word.
• Light weight: if you have an old computer or laptop that is old or cheap (or pretty, expensive but still weak,…you know) Windows and Microsoft Word/MacOS and pages might actually run rather slowly. If you think they are fast, you haven’t experienced the alternative. Especially large documents might take some time to load. If you have everything in plain text files, you’re document loads in a split second. That might take away some subconscious blocks that prevent you even from even opening your project. Just pop it open and quickly add a thought to your paper. Sooo comfy. :) As a matter of fact, I’m currently writing this very article from my phone using an editor called Markor with my source file synced in my cloud.
• Gateway drug: Writing your term paper in plain text might just be the beginning. If you understand LaTeX, you basically get html for free. The principle is the same, just with slightly different syntax. If you use something like Rmarkdown, you can essentially export your project seamlessly into any format with little adjustment needed. You might be tempted to write your own website. Maybe you get into extensible text editors, terminals, scripting, maybe even Linux, maybe even… Vim? The rabbit hole goes deep. ;)