Scientific Workplace vs Latex
exciter
I am a junior researcher who is at the stage of deciding between to
learn Latex or Scientific Workplace. To decide, I have read the old
messages which already compare the two programs. Some people are
against SWP and argue that they prefer "native latex language"
for some reasons. Others say that you dont have to deal with all
commands of Latex.
Well after reading the messages, I was rather more confused than freed
from blurence.
And it is rather a fundemantal decision to make at this moment as I
will follow the route maybe the rest of my life.
1. Therefore, once again, I would like to ask what would your
recommendation be for me?
2. If I ignore Latex, will I loose much?
3. Is learning latex necesserily more difficult than learning SWP?
Thank you in advance.
Regards.
Kevin E. Thorpe
I have no used SWP, so my advice will be one sided.
FWIW, I don't think LaTeX is that difficult to learn, especially
if you read Lamport's LaTeX book.
In the end, it may depend on the sorts of things
you will do. The advantage of LaTeX is that the
source files are all plain text which means that
LaTeX "code" can be easily generated by other
software. For example, I use R for statistical
analysis and there are a number of ways to
incorporate R output within LaTeX.
One other advantage of LaTeX over SWP (or any
proprietary package) is collaboration. If you are
collaborating with other researchers who use
LaTeX but not SWP, you will need to share LaTeX
files and not SWP. I've seen one .tex file produced
by SWP and, IIRC you could not process it on another
computer unless that computer also had SWP.
I hope this helps.
--
Kevin E. Thorpe
Assistant Professor, Department of Public Health Sciences
Faculty of Medicine, University of Toronto