Latex To Word Converter Overleaf
Aide Broeckel
The concept of a word count for a mathematical document is usually not appropriate. A more appropriate assessment is to provide some guidance on the page size, line spacing and font size to be used and then define a limit in terms of pages after excluding certain material, e.g. one might exclude figures, tables, appendices, front and back matter from the count.
The standard Linux command wc counts the letters, words and lines in a file. However this will give a gross over estimate on many latex documents due to the large number of words which are actually latex commands and maths. To get a more accurate estimate there is a need to try to count just the actual words in the document.
Note how accurate any of these methods will be likely depends on how your document has been written, potentially the use of latex macros, what your or your examiners definition of a word count is. In particular in the later case only your examiners or academic administration team can likely formally answer how a word count may actually be assessed/applied.
LaTeX is not a word processor! Instead, LaTeX encourages authors not to worry too much about the appearance of their documents but to concentrate on getting the right content. For example, consider this document:
To produce this in most typesetting or word-processing systems, the author would have to decide what layout to use, so would select (say) 18pt Times Roman for the title, 12pt Times Italic for the name, and so on. This has two results: authors wasting their time with designs; and a lot of badly designed documents!
While it was difficult to change the appearance of letters typed on old-style mechanical typewriters, popular computer operating systems are distributed with a range of digital fonts, giving millions of people access both to modern typefaces such as Helvetica, Gill Sans and Calibri, and to centuries-old typefaces such as those of the Garamond family. Such opportunities can be viewed as a distraction, which is why many scientists reject word processors in favour of LaTeX: a document markup language that encourages the user to forget about what the text is going to look like and concentrate instead on its conceptual structure.
To cut to the chase, LaTeX documents are very hard to read until typeset, which is inefficient for both writing and editing. This is a point that programmers ought to understand: if the readability of code is important, then so is the readability of text. LaTeX documents can yield beautifully readable PDFs once typeset, but the experience of editing them might politely be described as sub-optimal.
1. Converting an .odt file with a Zotero-generated bibliography to LaTeX with Pandoc is slightly more difficult than it sounds. In my experience, the best way to achieve it is to open your .odt file in LibreOffice and save it as a .docx file (which turns all the Zotero references and the bibliography into ordinary text), then use Pandoc initially to convert the .docx file to a Markdown file and then to convert the resultant Markdown file to a LaTeX file.
On the issue of LaTeX eliminating a lot of time wasted formating the pages I would say that there is a little bit of truth on both sides of the argument. I know that I have spent time setting up my preamble to obtain the results that I want. Sometimes I have to go to a website to look up the code that I need for a function (stuff that can be just a click of an icon in any word processor). For me it is worth it, I enjoy doing it. For a student who may have a deadline to meet for handing in assignments this can be a problem. As much as I praise LaTeX, I do caution young people that three days or less before an assignment is due is not the time to start learning LaTeX. This is something to do before the school year starts. The good news is that the learning curve has been flattened out thanks to the great LaTeX how-to videos on YouTube.
I find that the new LaTeX text editors both on-line and the software we download can be just as easy to use as any word processor. Yes LaTeX does consume a lot more room on a hard disk but it is not an issue. I have installed LaTeX Live on a Raspberry Pi with an eight gig SD card and still had lots of room to work with files. Today sixteen to thirty two gig SD cards are very inexpensive. For those of you reading this who are looking for a good note taking software that will export to LaTeX or HTML or Markdown check out the Zim Desktop Wiki.
Computer technology has displaced many jobs, I use to work for Kodak. I left Kodak to take a two year course to become a library technician. Within ten years computer technology did the same thing to library jobs that digital photography did to Kodak. I am still employed in library work part-time but my wife who is a highly skilled pre-press graphic artist, has had to leave the industry.
It is not all bad. At one time, book publishers had all of the power. But not anymore as anyone can produce a good looking book using LaTeX. As a law librarian, I see this as a good thing. (The environmental benefits of digital photography are huge, it had to happen)
My first Linux distro was Red Hat 5.0. I looked at LaTeX then and I liked it but was not to happy about the learning curve and my relative low need to use it. Three years ago I took on the task of creating a poster to display at a law library conference and it rekindled my appreciation for LaTeX and now I wish that I had kept on with it. Today I use LaTeX to publish a newsletter and other documents for the library. Yes, it is worth the effort to learn it, and use it, but we must remember that we do not have to learn all of it, just what we need to know for the task at hand.
The appeal of LaTeX is that it seems on the surface to be an ideal combination of both: It is a type-stream product that applies hierarchical structure in the background. The problem, as you point out, is that by default it does a poor job of both. I endorse your idea of composing and editing with a word processing program, then importing the text into a dedicated typsetting or desktop publishing program that you have learned to use skillfully. The difficulty here is that the LaTeX shops that are set-up mainly around academic departments and disciplines seem to value conformity above all; the camaraderie they exhibit is based on a mythology that all they need to do is put their fingers on the keyboard and the rest will take care of itself.
Personally, I find LaTeX very satisfying, both to use and to learn. Do I use it for everything? No, but when it comes to providing consistent high quality output, especially in longer documents I hugely prefer it to the WISIWYG alternatives, but that is just me.
One other thing: seeing the .tex extension on a file fills me with joy. It will be almost certain that I will not only be able to open the file, but that I will be able to compile it to produce the output the author intended. Other systems are still fighting like cats in a sack over file formats and standards, and even applications in the same family cannot be guaranteed to make sense of files produced by their ancestors.
Depending on personality and need one may suit someone very well most of the time, some of the time, or none of the time, but at least there is a choice. We should be free to explore those choices, learn from others, and come to our own conclusions.
Glad to have been of help. Btw, one thing that I forgot to mention above is that you can write in Markdown and use embedded LaTeX for the equations, then generate HTML and .pdf versions of your work from the same original. This can be automated with a Makefile.
Despite the fact that LaTeX is not easy to learn, and has few reasonable applications for philosophers apart from typesetting mathematical logic, it is surprisingly popular, especially among graduate students.
Hello, mathematician here, but one of the few renegade ones who agrees with you. Because I have a learning disability, looking at plain-text markup is especially painful for me, so I was forced to resist the LaTeX indoctrination that every serious math student is now subjected to. Even junior- and senior-level math homework is expected to be typeset at many schools.
I think by the way that one of the fields where LaTeX should be used as a typsetting tool is in the publishing of Novels. With the tool writer2latex I created really beautiful typset books out of odt. Files on the fly so to speak. For these kind of texts LaTeX is superior to Indesign in my opinion because one can produce the pdf result incredibly fast and can change the page settings than very conveniently.
Text structuring is a matter of identifying (say) which words are the heading of a chapter, and which words are the text of that chapter, or which words in the text of that chapter are in one paragraph and which are in another. Typesetting is a matter of (say) centring and emboldening all the chapter headings, and indenting the first line of each paragraph. Text structuring is best done with authoring tools such as LibreOffice Writer, Microsoft Word, Scrivener, etc. Typesetting is best down with typesetting tools such as InDesign, LaTeX, Scribus, etc.
In my current job, I tend to often participate in writing proposals for research projects whose most endearing features are that they are typically in the end 200-odd-pages long and which are strictly regulated with respect to structure and content. They are usually created in a big hurry and under great pressure with little regard to style and aesthetics, they typically represent a cut-and-paste best-off of the last research papers and proposals written concerning this or vaguely related subjects. They also tend to be written, edited and then spliced together concurrently by a group of persons in different time zones, working with different versions of word processing software on different operating systems with minimal coordination. And, for whatever reason, they are typically a complete mess. Especially references, text marks, bibliography, captions to tables and figures, everything which is not plain text.
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