Dear Hanno & Mahfuz: Thanks for your views. When preparing a big manuscript  (book or thesis or edited volume), LaTeX will be useful in handling equation numbers, citations, and also generating book index. For my mathematical papers, I use LaTeX, but if journals insist, I submit papers using Word. Open-Office is very useful for me to read the papers submitted in other formats like *.odt etc!  Thanks, Sundar

My answer: I´m a Word fan, when writing papers or books because I´m used to it.

Dear Sundar,

When I prepare my research papers for submission, always I use Word. That is because I am familiar to it and I got used to all its buttons and layouts. In addition to that, it is user friendly.

Dear Hanno & Mahfuz: Thanks for your views. When preparing a big manuscript  (book or thesis or edited volume), LaTeX will be useful in handling equation numbers, citations, and also generating book index. For my mathematical papers, I use LaTeX, but if journals insist, I submit papers using Word. Open-Office is very useful for me to read the papers submitted in other formats like *.odt etc!  Thanks, Sundar

Dear Sundarapandian,

I think, it´s mainly a matter of beeing familiar with the one or other technique. I´m editiing mathematical or physical formulas also in word and have no problem to construct a register and to do the formation of head lines, subscripts and chapter names and order etc..

Dear @Sundar, like my predecessors, I do use the word editor. I'm an old fashioned person who does not know LaTeX!

Dear Sundar, I would recommend you to use LATEX for writing papers, for posters and for presentations (called BEAMER) instead of PowerPoint. It is not as complicated and I do use it for more than 25 years already. It is a very good environment with professional output and anything written many years ago is posiible to use now without any problems as well. All dissertations are prepared in our department in LATEX as well.

Dear Ales, thanks for your suggestion on Beamer. In a Tunisia Conference in 2013, I first came to know about Beamer from some friends like Dr. Kais (fractals expert), and I started using it soon after returning to India. I find Beamer very useful for my plenary lectures on Chaos and Control as they involve many modeling examples and equations of dynamical systems, etc. However, preparing talks with Beamer (using PDF-LaTeX) takes quite some time (black and white talks are easy, but giving colour to fonts & giving proper size to *.jpg figures takes some time). On the other hand, Powerpoint is very useful in preparing talks when time is very short. Recently, I have been giving Management talks (thanks to RG), and I've been using Powerpoint only for these presentations. Best wishes, Sundar

Dear Sundarapandian, I use both. Word is easier to exchange versions with others, since Latex is a challenge in different programs and versions. If you write a paper alone, I think Latex is a good option, however if you have a network, you need to have a good deal with your partners to use the same Latex editor. Cheers.

An attractive aspect of LaTeX is this. It is OS-independent. If you send source files & figures prepared in LaTeX and send it to your research partner, whatever OS he/she uses, they will be able to compile quickly and generate output in PDF format. However, if we prepare our files in Word format, then there are some people following FOSS, and they insist on LaTeX or *.odt files. This creates a problem for me. For research collaboration, LaTeX is ideal. If all our team members use MS-Word, then it is quite all right as well! Best wishes, Sundar

I am comfortable working on word. My knowledge of software is little; it is just workable. I have never heard of LaTex. But I certainly feel averse to working on Excel, even as it is not a substitute of word for all purposes..

Nice Latex comment, dear Roland. ;-)

I started using LaTeX about halfway through my Ph.D. thesis for writing papers. It has been incredibly helpful and once you get the hang of it it's very simple and straightforward. LaTeX handles citations, figures, and formatting very well, and it's particularly useful for long manuscripts (books, theses, etc.). I highly recommend it.

If you use OSX TexPad is the best client I've found: https://www.texpadapp.com/osx There are other free options available too.

I use LaTeX (with a lot of TeX commands), Word & also Open Office for preparing manuscripts, and papers. Word is very easy to learn - what you see is what you get. It is the best part of Word. On the other hand, LaTeX - you need to run LaTeX (compile) to see the output on another screen. However, for a book, especially involving a lot of Mathematical equations, LaTeX gives relatively better output and look (spacing between the variables, symbols etc), and also handling labels, eqn. nos, citations, generating table of contents, index - all these are easy with LaTeX. I fully support the move by some Universities to insist on the use of LaTeX (with given style files) for preparing the Masters or Doctorate thesis. This gives nice "uniformity" of the theses, and the printing quality of thesis also improves. I still enjoy reading the book on "TeX", which was a major revolution in the publishing industry. Best wishes, Sundar

It depends on the content - if there are lot of formulas take LaTeX, otherwise Words (its easier to handle) ...

LaTeX is far better and easy 

Best wishes

Inserting figures is easier in Word / OpenOffice Writer when compared to LaTeX. In LaTeX, we insert figures at one point, and it shows up somewhere else in the output document, and we may need to insert some specific package to get around this. All special requirements may be met in LaTeX with the help of \usepackage{...}, but in Word / Writer, there is no need for us to mention any \usepackage{..}. Fonts is also a big advantage with Word, with so many fonts available for various use. Relatively, less number of fonts are available with LaTeX.

Best wishes, Sundar

Certainly Latex. If you use a commercial and closed source program, then you have to pay almost every year to obtain the new version of it. Except that, the size of an article is much more bigger in such a file format, than from a simple tex file.

I prefer Latex, since it is free and very nice 

The scientific world of today requires LaTex. When other disciplines do away with LaTex, we in science can not. I get very frustrated when a journal is asking for a word format for publications, this is ridiculous in the present world and such journals seems to be very weak. I use LaTex all the time and after finishing my manuscript, then one journal is now asking me to submit using word format. LaTex to me is not too technical that a scientist can not learn very quickly. Apart from the easy way of writing scientific manuscripts, life is made easy through many features such as heading styles, automatic page numbering, automatic equation alignment, automatic equation numbering, automatic bibliography and references, easy editing and so on. So many scientific journals now do not accept any other format except LaTex. I learnt the basic of it in just 15 minutes. I do know how to use micro-soft word but will not think about it when it comes to scientific writing.

LaTex is the standard for most academics publishing organization most especially for science  publications. It takes just few period of time to invest in learning it, as it is easy to learn. The academics industry is all about learning and trying to improve on what is already in existence, so to take your research to next level and to make it widely accepted,  I will suggest that you take time to learn LaTex if you have not been using it.

Dear Roland:

For many of my journal publications, I use MS-word only. When the publisher insists on using LaTeX template, I use LaTeX processor.  It is easy to type long Maths papers in LaTeX - so, whenever possible, I type with LaTeX and it depends upon our needs. I also use LaTeX for giving talks using one special package called `beamer'.

Hi, Sundar,

A good tool that may solve most of your problems is Authorea (https://www.authorea.com).

Authorea is an web-based word processor.  You write using LaTeX, then you can export your finished document to PDF, Word, or a LaTeX file. Authorea lets you choose from 87 different journal styles when you export and formats your references for you.

There are shortcut keys for basic LaTeX commands, so it's easy to learn.  It has other time-savers like a reference manager, drag-and-drop figures, etc. Basically it takes care of the time-consuming and complicated parts of LaTeX so you can focus on writing, while still getting the benefit of LaTeX's power.

Also, it's collaborative, so you and your co-authors can all work on the same document at the same time.

Authorea is developed and maintained by a team of former researchers and postdocs (including me!).  We built Authorea because we needed it ourselves.  Hope you find it useful!

From your description of Authorea, I think is a good tool to put a finishing touches on document prepared with latex and removing the complexity of latex. I will exploit the link. Thanks.

Hi, Gbenga,

You're welcome!  Authorea does support importing LaTeX documents (you can also import an accompanying BibTeX file), so you can definitely use it to apply a journal style to a finished document.

Authorea can be used for the entire LaTeX writing process from start to finish.  A great advantage of Authorea is that multiple co-authors can edit the same document at the same time, which means you don't have to email changes around.  It makes collaborative writing much more efficient.

Occasionally for very picky conferences you may need to download the completed LaTeX document from Authorea and add finishing touches by hand.  But most people can just choose a journal style and click "export"!

Be flexible, use both:

1) For a long structured document like PhD/MSc/BSc thesis (with a lot of sections, sub-sections, appendices, lists-of-whatever, indexes, bibliographies, tables, figures, maps, equations, etc.) LaTeX is the best.

2) For short papers (e.g. abstracts, conference papers, short articles) you can quickly use word. Also, many journals require word format for submission, which means that you actually must use word processor to submit them a paper.