If you want to write beautiful documents easily, I can't recommend LaTeX enough. It's basically a programming language that you can use to make documents, with an easy-to-use syntax that can be made as easy or as advanced as you want it to be. While some will claim that it has a pretty steep learning curve, there are plenty of templates out there on sites like Overleaf that will handle most of the hard work for you.

If you aren't already using LaTeX for your documents, you definitely should, especially if you've been relying on Google Docs or Microsoft Word up until now. In fact, the chances are that you've seen documents written with it countless times and didn't realize it. In fact, there are some things you can do in it that you simply can't do in Microsoft Word, at least not as easily.

To be clear, nobody is saying you should be using LaTeX for one or two-page documents, but if you're writing a huge amount of text or you want to make a really pretty document (such as a resume), then that's where it really shines.

5 Precise references and citations

One of the best things about LaTeX is how it handles citations and a bibliography. It integrates with tools like BibTeX and Biber for reference management, and it can generate references for you in all kinds of styles that you need. What's even better is that it'll also handle numbering and listing citations at the end of the document, while inserting individual citations on a per-page basis into the footer, too.

If you're writing documents that use citations, this takes a lot of the manual work out of it so that you can focus on writing instead. In contrast, citations in Word can be painstaking and require multiple steps. If you're used to Word then you'll find it seamless, but if you're writing something that requires a lot of citations, then it's likely a large document, which leads to my next point.

4 Manage large documents

Split your documents into parts

Where Word fails is where LaTeX excels, and that's in large documents. In LaTeX, you define styles and formatting rules in the preamble of your document, and these rules are applied consistently throughout. This means you can guarantee that your text, your headings, your tables, and everything else will look the same. There's no manual component to ensure that the design is consistent, even if your document is hundreds of pages long.

As for complex structures like tables, figures, subsections, and more, LaTeX manages those for you too, and automatically generates a layout for what you need. You can easily label them and reference them in the document too.

Finally, LaTeX supports splitting parts of a document into multiple files. You could write a document split into chapters, and then have a "master" document file that uses "\include" commands to include those individual chapters in one major document. It's completely modular which means that you can chop and change things without potentially having a knock-on effect on another part of your document later on.

3 Play nicely with Version Control Systems

Git can be great for documents

Version Control Systems like Git aren't just for developers, and LaTeX plays incredibly nicely with them. That's thanks to the fact that LaTeX is all plaintext, rather than using a binary document format like Microsoft's .docx. It's great for collaboration and also rolling back to previous versions, and for open-source documents, can show the complete history of a document easily without needing to download individual document files and look at them one by one.

Not everyone needs or wants to use a version control system, but if you need one for your document, you'll have a much easier time using one with LaTeX than you will with Microsoft Word. It's not even comparable, LaTeX is simply better for it.

2 Easily managed packages for additional functionality and templates

So many to choose from

If you're using LaTeX and want to make something more advanced, it's still incredibly easy to expand on LaTeX's functionality in a way that you can't as easily do with Word. For example, LaTeX has the following packages that you can install that there isn't quite an equivalent to with Word:

• TikZ: For creating professional-quality diagrams and illustrations directly in your document.
• Beamer: For generating stunning presentations.
• PGFPlots: For high-quality plots and graphs.
• Glossaries: For managing and automating glossaries, acronyms, and lists of terms.

There are also libraries specific to certain domains of research that you can automatically import to give you most of the tools you'll need. There's a data science library called "knitr" for integrating code in your page, there's "mhchem" for chemistry, and "lilypond" or "abc" for musicians. Word has plugins, but they're not as easy to integrate and get rid of as you choose.

Plus, there are so many templates for all kinds of use cases out there that you can get. There are plenty of templates out there for Word too, but I love the ones you can find online in LaTeX that come with everything you need and samples too.

1 Automatic document generation

Python and online tools

Because LaTeX is plaintext, it's incredibly easy to programmatically generate documents. You can create templates that are written to text files in a programming language such as Python, which replaces certain parameters with new data collected from user input. While this is particularly niche and may not be useful to everyone, the point is that there are reasons you may want to do it (such as data collection and making multiple documents based on the results), while Word can't really easily do it.

Plus, there are plenty of tools out there that will take the difficult parts of LaTeX documents out of your workload. For example, if you want to benefit from the formatting prowess of LaTeX without manually making tables, there are plenty of LaTeX table generators out there that will make the format for you, and all you need to do is copy and paste the code into your document.