Andrew Goldstone

Typography or Death!

Scholars, there are alternatives to Word. And the best that I know is LaTeX. LaTeX (like the system it builds upon, TeX) has long been used by scientists because of its superior capacities for typesetting mathematics, but anyone who cares about the appearance of a printed page can use it to produce much better-looking documents than Word can. LaTeX asks you to separate the logical structure of your text from your choices about its appearance on the printed page. You write in a text editor (not a word processor), using LaTeX’s simple markup commands in the flow of text to specify the structure of your document. A preamble, separate from the main body of your text, specifies your layout choices using straightforward commands. Then you use the LaTeX processor to typeset the printed page, which is automatically hyphenated, lineated, and paginated in a very elegant way. It’s true, you have to give up What You See Is What You Get Even If It’s Ugly; in return, you enjoy What You Get Takes Three Extra Seconds and Is Beautiful.

The best place to start is the TeX Users Group website, where you will find nice installation packages for TeX (I use MacTeX, which uses the Apple Installer), good editors and “front-end” programs (such as TeXShop, distributed with MacTeX), and many pointers to tutorials and documentation. Tobias Oetiker’s Not-So-Short Introduction to LaTeX2e is a good starting point, and you, O scholars, can probably skip the chapters on mathematical formulas. Finally, users of fancy fonts and multilingual lovers of Unicode—which ought to be everyone—can now easily integrate those into TeX using the XeLaTeX engine.

For those still needing convincing, I commend to you Dario Taraborelli’s webpage, The Beauty of LaTeX, and his link to another page showcasing Humanities Books Set Using TeX. The sociologist Kieran Healy has a lovely page, Some Resources for Writing and Presenting Work in Social Science, with suggestions, templates, and exhortations for scholarly TeX users.

Further Adventures and Accumulated Wisdom

I’m telling tales of typographical struggle and triumph at a blog, humtex.wordpress.com. I’ll collect discoveries and tips for humanists using LaTeX there, and I invite others who are interested to participate as well.

I’m now accumulating sample files for others to use and modify in a github repository.

Tools of the Trade

• The MacTeX distribution of TeX, LaTeX, XeTeX, etc., with a comprehensive set of packages and add-ons. And now you can stay on the bleeding edge by updating using the TeX Live Manager.
• The TeX Users Group, with support pages and forums.
• Their XeLaTeX page.
• TeXShop, an editor and front-end to the TeX system. More Unix-wizardly types can work with TeX from a command line while writing in a separate editor. I like vim and its cousin MacVim.
• Subversion, the aptly-named version-control software of the people. Since TeX source is simply plain text, unlike the proprietary, unreliable Word format, one can use programmers’ tools to back up and track changes in documents. If you are new to this, consider doing what all the cool kids are doing and learning git as well.
• BibDesk, a graphical front-end for editing your bibtex/biblatex bibliography. Though not perfectly bug-free, this is an amazing program that allows you to do lots of database management and manipulation on .bib-formatted bibliographies. Much better than editing by hand, and much more LaTeX-friendly than the other bibliography managers out there. Pretty good conversion to and from other bibliography formats, too.
• The happily TeX- and Unicode- and multilingually aware aspell.
• Homebrew, for installing things like aspell. (I used to use MacPorts, but homebrew is friendlier, less instrusive, and simpler. And newer.)
• The invaluable pandoc, a document converter that translates LaTeX into HTML, markdown, and many other formats.
• The soothingly open-sourced powers of NeoOffice (or its less Mac-like elder kinsprogram, OpenOffice), for those dark days when we must deal with Word documents.