Your Illiterate

[Angelique Syria]

Illiteratemay be used in both specific and general senses. When used specifically, it refers to the inability to read or write. In a more general sense, illiterate may signify a lack of familiarity with some body of knowledge (as in being "musically illiterate") or indicate a lack of competence in or familiarity with literature.

I'm working at a research institute / university spin-off where the use of MS Office prevails. Aside from the odd PhD student, no one there uses LaTeX for typesetting scientific articles, reports, manuals, scientific posters and presentations, etc.. Some have never heard about it or even do not understand the concept.

That said, frustration with MS Word/PowerPoint/Publisher is palpable at work. As I believe everybody there would benefit from becoming TeX-literate, I've tried to convince my boss to encourage the use of LaTeX at work, but he remains fiercely opposed to it for several reasons:

Despite my boss's skepticism, and with his approval, I'm going to give a 10-15min presentation on LaTeX to try and bring my fellow workers to the Bright Side of typesetting. During that talk, I need to explain what LaTeX is (Stefan's post should come in handy for that), how it works, and why they should consider learning how to use it; in other words, I must dazzle them with the possibilities offered by LaTeX.

Do NOT show about the preamble. If your company was ever to change to a TeX based solution it should be because of its superior functionality inside and that the preamble should be the same for the entire company. Ensure that people should understand, that they need only considering the common things in TeX, itemize, description, equation, align, section, ...

Show what can be done from a single document, i.e. take your favourite \documentclass and show that the same code can be used to generate two very different results, merely by changing one thing (make two layouts and create two classes). Do that, Office (ok, it has styles... but...)! When the company changes, logo, CEO, or whatever, you can immediately create all previously created documents with the corrected things.

Don't delve too much on the fact that floats are floats, but rather, show some bad examples of figure placement in Office, single lines above top figures etc., to make people comfortable with the fact that they (in principle) should not decide where to place floats. Again, the document class can alter the way floats are placed.

Show that dividing a document into several files makes management much easier than having to edit a 200 page Office document. Furthermore, it allows people to edit files simultaneously (be careful here :) ). Also in this regard a version control system can centralize all documents and keep a searchable history. Binary files are often version controlled by copies and date-marks. 20 MB binary documents with 200 history revisions takes up 4Gb of space, how much of that has changed? Maybe 20 MB?

Show them how equations are typeset, again simple examples, show them how references work to label equations (I would not go too deep into the fact that you need several recompilations to achieve the effect). Show them that you can leave a reference in a document, even if you remove the referenced text. When you re-instantiate the text again you will retain the previous reference, as expected. If you ever did that to an Office document, you would loose the reference.

The best way to convince is efficiency. Find examples in which the use of LaTeX is far more efficient than MS Office. Of course, these examples should be relevant to your field of work. Possible aspects on which to focus are:

Another way to convice might be control. In TeX and LaTeX you have total control over nearly everything. Some control mechanisms are more complicated than others, but all is well documented. Find some examples, where this isn't true for MS Office.

In order for more than just a few fellow enthusiasts to "get with the program", i.e., to start using LaTeX rather than MS Word and/or Powerpoint, I believe you and your backers within your organization should be committed to providing the following services, listed in no particular order:

Don't try to do everything all by yourself. Identify and recruit at least two colleagues -- and train them up front, if necessary -- so that somebody is always available if the network-based TeX distribution seems to be experiencing difficulties and users start freaking out.

Make updating and maintaining the underlying TeX distribution as automated as possible. Do not expect more than a handful of dedicated geeks to remember to update the TeXLive or MiKTeX distributions on their own. At the very least, have a place on your network that contains all the latest LaTeX packages and programs, and provide robust scripts that update the local TeX installations from this master in-house repository. If users want to have TeX distributions installed on their own machines (say, because they travel a lot and aren't always on the organization's network), that's fine. However, do provide ample, clear, and correct instructions for these people on how to go about keeping "their" TeX distributions up to date.

If at all possible, also provide a TeX-aware editor package to go along with the TeX distribution. This will let writers have an editor window and a pdf-viewer window open simultaneously, letting them "see" the results of their writing simply by clicking on a button. For Windows-based systems, I happen to be a fan of WinEdt, in part because one can download some amazingly useful macro packages (including some for managing .bib files). WinEdt isn't free, but purchasing a site license shouldn't be prohibitively expensive.

Consider providing a pdf previewer such as "Sumatra" rather than letting people use the "default" pdf reader, which is likely to be either Adobe Reader or Adobe Acrobat. Why? Unlike Reader and Acrobat, Sumatra doesn't need to close the old .pdf file completely before it can re-open the newly updated .pdf file.

Be sure to invest some serious time and effort into coming up with well-designed templates for documents such as internal memos, letters (including letterhead), presentations (presumably using beamer), working papers (including title page(s)), etc. If you keep tinkering with the templates (probably because they aren't all that well set up at first...), many of your colleagues will quickly lose patience and choose to stop using LaTeX. Make it trivially simple for people to "find" and install these templates. Be willing to let users customize these templates to a certain degree, preferably by providing options that can be set when the template is loaded (likely via a \usepackage command). Write a concise yet clear user guide that explains how people ought to use these templates. Don't expect many users to read those user guides thoroughly, though...

Be sure to document these templates with lots and lots of comments. That way, if it does become necessary to modify them, little time will be wasted on figuring out what on earth the previous maintainer was trying to do.

If your organization encourages or requires the use of fonts other than Computer/Latin Modern, Times (New) Roman, and Helvetica, give some serious thought to creating templates that let users use either LuaLaTeX or XeLaTeX instead of pdfLaTeX.

I speak partly from personal experience. A couple of years ago, I wrote a .sty package file and a .bst bibliography style file for the professional staff of my organization who prefer to write their working papers with LaTeX rather than with Word. The number of users who access the .sty and .bst files (and the associated user guide) seems to be rising steadily (though slowly). Speaking for myself, I can definitely tell very quickly if a given working paper was produced in Word or LaTeX, and there's no question that the LaTeX-produced working papers look much better. I find it very gratifying when people I don't know personally call me or email me to let me know that they "found" my templates on our network, and then go on to express their amazement with how easy and straightforward it turns out to be to write working papers that conform to our organization's (rather stringent and unintuitive) style and layout guidelines.

Of course, writing good papers is always going to be a challenge. It just shouldn't be any more challenging -- and, ideally, a whole lot less challenging! -- to write good papers in LaTeX than it is in Word.

This does not really provide what your question demands. For just a 10 to 15-minute presentation, I will say that Marc Van Dongen's video, as linked in his answer, speaks a lot. To tell more within that amount of time might be counter-productive.

Learning LaTeX requires some dedicated amount of time. I have helped one office-mate to switch to LaTeX (doesn't use Word anymore) while eleven others have signified willingness to learn it. (There are only 26 of us at the moment, two who already use LaTeX before we met). In that one successful case, I had to explain the basics and help her out through the errors whenever she met one. Before she got interested, she saw a lot of my test papers first, which are all beautifully typeset in LaTeX. My other co-workers became interested when they saw the beautifully typeset documents, especially when they saw some of the student research papers of our high school students typeset in LaTeX. (My students learning LaTeX is a happier story :)

There is no pressure to have all my co-workers to switch to LaTeX. If they ever want to shift to it, it must be because they have weighed the pros against the cons and tried manipulating small examples just to have a taste of it. So I provide them a lot of minimal examples when they ask me and make sure that I can guide them through from start to finish.

Consider an intermediate step: Lyx For people used to Word, the transition is a lot less frightening and the results are already excellent. Advanced users can easily integrate "advanced LaTeX magic" and those who like it will sooner or later try it, too.

3a8082e126