This was originally posted on blogger here.
In the last few years I have changed my workflow for writing papers pretty radically. Previously, I used Microsoft Word along with Endnote as my primary platform (on the Mac, of course). My decision to change was driven by several factors: I had grown tired of the klunkiness of Endnote and the lags in its integration with new versions of Microsoft Word. I had grown even more tired of Word’s tendency to crash, or to do crazy things that could only be fixed by starting with a completely new file. I was just starting to work on a book, and I knew that for a large project like that, using Word would be a nightmare. In addition, my coauthors and I wanted to use a source code management system to coordinate changes to the document, and this was not really practical with Word files.In the end, I decided to move to LaTeX as my primary platform for writing papers and books. For those not familiar with LaTeX, you can think of it as a markup language like HTML, only for writing papers rather than web pages. Editing a paper in LaTeX is not WYSIWYG - that is, you don’t see the actual layout of the paper as you type. Rather, you have to typeset the paper in a separate step. For example, a very short paper might look like this in LaTeX: