I’ve used LaTeX for about 20 years, since I started as a graduate student in philosophy. I now try to avoid using it for all but the most specialised mathematical logic, and I discourage graduate students in philosophy from doing so as well, unless they are doing very specialised mathematical logic. Why?
Let’s start by reviewing what’s good about LaTeX:
Richard Stallman made an important distinction between two senses in which software can be “free”: “free as free beer”, i.e. available to anyone to use at no cost; and “free as in free speech”, i.e. available to anyone to learn from, modify, and redistribute (his point was that it’s the second that’s important). LaTeX is free in both senses.
You have a stylistic construction you use over and over again? Or a idiosyncratic type of diagram or matrix? You can easily (well, not so easily, but that’s another story) extend LaTeX by adding new commands and environments. If your extensions are useful to others, you can package them up as a style and distribute them on CTAN. Or, if you don’t fancy programming your own styles, you can check CTAN to see if someone else has done it already. Need to typeset Frege’s Begriffschrift, and don’t want to encode every formula using LaTeX’s drawing primitives? Easy: you just need begriff.sty (I wrote that one!)
LaTeX is, without doubt, the most fully featured software available for creating mathematical formulae and diagrams. Every basic mathematical and logical symbol is available in it, everything can have any accent applied above or below it. It is easy to create common mathematical expressions that don’t fit on a single line (like integrals). Even commutative diagrams are part of LaTeX’s core support for mathematical expressions.
Anything a professional printer can do, you can do with LaTeX, in your home, for free. Even if you don’t know much about printing or typesetting, just using LaTeX is an education in itself. LaTeX does all the work that a typesetter would do, under the author’s control. It can produce “camera-ready copy”, ready to be handed straight to the press.
LaTeX input files are human-readable plain text documents that you can read and edit in any text editor you like (I use emacs myself, but you may use windows notepad if you like). Unlike most word-processors, you are not tied to a specific (and often bloated and resource-hungry) application merely to edit your documents.
If LaTeX is so good, why do I avoid it myself, and discourage others from learning it?
This first point may seem rather abstract and nit-picky, but in fact it’s the root cause of everything that’s bad about LaTeX (as well as much that is good about it); so please bear with me.
LaTeX (or, more strictly speaking, TeX) is, in essence, a programming language, like C or BASIC. In fact, like both of those examples, it’s a very old fashioned one. It’s useful to constrast it with a pure markup language, such as HTML, the language in which web pages are written. HTML is, in the jargon, a declarative language: an HTML document can only describe some data - a web page; you can’t write a programme in HTML (this is why “HTML coder” is an oxymoron). LaTeX, C, and BASIC, in contrast, are operational languages: their primitive vocabulary instructs a computer to perform various operations such as loads and stores to memory, arithmetic operations, branches to other points in the code stream, and output (in LaTeX’s case, output to a printer).
Superficially, LaTeX resembles a markup language like HTML - “\emph{hello}” means “hello” rendered with emphasis, right? This is one of the things that is so ingenious about it. Internally, however, emph is defined in terms of a procedure that checks what the current font being used to typeset characters is, searches for an italicised version of that font, temporarily changes the current font to that, and then restores things to how they were when the emphasised text has been rendered.
Operational and declarative languages each have their benefits. The benefit of an operational language is its power and flexibility (this is why LaTeX is so powerful - point 2 above). The benefit of a declarative language is that it can describe a set of data independently of the purpose to which that data is put. An HTML or DocBook document can easily and efficiently be rendered for many different kinds of media (the document window of a web browser, a printed document, converted to braille, read aloud by a text-to-speech engine); even kinds of media that were not imagined by the creator of the document or the creators of HTML and DocBook.
LaTeX will never be able to effectively render a LaTeX document to a web browser’s finite view of an infinitely tall document or read it aloud, because its output primitives are oriented around print media, and its apparently declarative constructs are defined in terms of them. (And nor will any other software, see b, below). This is a fundamental design flaw in today’s world of online publishing and accessibility.
It is possible to write a document using only the markup-like subset of LaTeX, never defining any new commands or environments, and avoiding any commands or environments that assume that the output is to be a printed document. If you absolutely have to use LaTeX to prepare an academic paper, this is the best thing to do, and in academic disciplines where LaTeX is routinely used, graduate students are taught to do this when they learn to use LaTeX. The trouble is that this removes all of the flexibility and power that makes LaTeX so fun to work with. And for most purposes (i.e. unless you make extensive use of LaTeX math mode) it is easier to write a document in a declarative markup language such as Markdown which can readily be converted into LaTeX (but not of course vice versa).
I used to append a “please do not send me documents in Microsoft Word format” message to my email signature with a link to an article by Richard Stallman explaining why using Word’s .doc format to store and exchange written documents is a bad idea. In essence, his argument was that .doc format is proprietary to Microsoft Word - by definition, a .doc file is one that can be read or written by Word, and the only definition of the .doc format is “whatever Word does”.
This means that once you have saved your document in .doc format, you are tied to Microsoft forever. Sure, if you want to convert to another format, you can your document into Word itself and then save it in that other format (if it is a format that Word supports); but if you do that, chances are that some of your formatting will be lost. And since it’s in Microsoft’s commercial interests to keep you using Word, they have no incentive to fix such problems. Sure, other word processors will import .doc files; but because the authors of those word processors had to reverse engineer Word to do this, there’s no guarantee that it will work - again, chances are that some of your formatting will be lost. To keep things tough for their competitors, Microsoft changed the .doc format a few times over the years. If you still have a .doc file that you last edited with Word version 4, it’s unlikely that any modern word processor other than Word itself will be able to open it. In fact, there’s a serious chance that even Word itself won’t be able to open it.
Aren’t Microsoft evil? (Well, they’ve changed their ways a little in the the last decade. .docx format is an “open” standard, and not proprietary to Word, though Microsoft assert patent rights over it.)
Shock! In this respect, LaTeX is just as bad as Word. LaTeX input files are proprietary to LaTeX, just as .doc is Word. The only definition of LaTeX as a language is “whatever LaTeX does”. So, once you have written a document in LaTeX, you are tied to LaTeX forever. Sure, you can cut and paste your LaTeX source into a word processor and painstakingly go through it and format it, but do you really want to do that for that 10000-word paper you wrote 15 years ago? Do you remember how the tables and diagrams in that paper were supposed to appear? Sure, if you were wise enough to have written your LaTeX document in the very restricted markup-like subset of LaTeX described above, you might be able to find a programme (such as pandoc or LaTeX2RTF) that will convert it for you. But if you were doing that, then, for the reasons given above, you would have been better off using a declarative markup language that can be converted into LaTeX as well as into other formats.
Though the authors of LaTeX do not engage in anti-competitive dirty tricks the way Microsoft do, the problem of the format changing over time is there too. I began using LaTeX during the last days of LaTeX 2.09, and still have a few papers and style files I wrote for LaTeX 2.09. Needless to say, LaTeX 2e (the current version) will not read these correctly. I took advantage of some of the wonderful styles and extensions to LaTeX that one can find on CTAN. Some of these are now unmaintained and do not (and will never) work with modern versions of LaTeX. I drew diagrams with these packages that I do not now remember what they looked like, and which cannot now be run through LaTeX; my hard work is simply lost to technological change.
Have you ever tried to submit a paper you wrote in LaTeX to a general philosophy journal (and by this I mean any journal that doesn’t have “Logic” in the title)? It’s a nightmare: journal editors will generally put up with you submitting PDF copy manuscripts up until acceptance, but then comes the dreaded email: “For your final manuscript, we require an electronic copy in Word or RTF format.” Editors can afford to be inflexible on this: they know that publication is so important to you that you will do any amount of extra work in order to get your paper published. This will happen even if a journal obviously uses LaTeX to do its typesetting (and increasingly few of them do that these days). That all happens in the printing house; the publisher expects and deals in Word.
Even if you manage to persuade an editor to accept a LaTeX final manuscript, here is what will happen: the editor sends it to the publisher, who sends it to a copyeditor somewhere in the developing world, who is paid a minimum wage to type it into Microsoft Word and send it back to the publisher. The publisher then sends the Word file to the printing house, who convert it back into LaTeX (or some other typesetting language) and finally print it. You’ll be very lucky if your formatting and symbols survive that process.
When I started out as an academic, I naively thought that the evident superiority of LaTeX over Word would, in the long run, win over the publishers, and then the journal editors. In fact the reverse has happenned. Because publishers are increasingly concerned with publication in non-print media, LaTeX has lost ground in the publishing world. The “robber baron” Dutch print houses used to use LaTeX because it is free (as in “free beer”) and they are greedy; they never cared about LaTeX’s technological merits, and it is increasingly looking out-dated to them.
Despite the fact that LaTeX is not easy to learn, and has few reasonable applications for philosophers part from typesetting mathematical logic, it is surprisingly popular, especially among graduate students. Why? It’s fun to use, once you get the hang of it, sure; but only in the same way that any programming language is. If you’re going to muck around with computers for the sheer intellectual joy of it, why not learn Java, or C++, or Python?
I think that the explanation lies in the peculiar phenomenon of “philosophical cringe”. Graham Priest (I think) once defined philosophy as “that academic discipline whose limits lie within its own remit”, and all that navel gazing has a tendency to cause philosophers to be down on their own discipline. It’s common for philosophers to search for a justification for our existence by aligning themselves with other disciplines for whom that justification is supposedly not in doubt. A common (but not the only) move is for philosophers to seek a measure of intellectual rigour by comparing themselves with the formal sciences.
We’ve all see papers with gratuitous formalism (I confess, I’ve even written some). The use of LaTeX to prepare ones academic papers is just another instance of this phenomenon - giving ones papers the outward appearance of a paper in physics or mathematics in order to bask in the glow of intellectual seriousness and indispensability that we attach to those disciplines. But using LaTeX does not make you a mathematician any more than building a runway makes you an airport.
Until September 2016 I am a Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy at Corpus Christi College and an Associate Professor in the Oxford Philosophy Faculty. From then on, I'll be a Senior Adviser at the New Zealand Ministry of Transport.
My intellectual interests are mainly in metaphysics, philosophy of language, and ethics, and of course transport policy.
