[Tex/LaTex] What would draw a student of the humanities to (La)TeX systems

latex-misc

I've been given permission to put up a poster in the campus writing center.
The primary users of this writing center are from the humanities—those students who need to write rather long papers on a regular basis.

Given that it is strictly non-technical writing, what features of (La)TeX systems would draw such a user, and how should I advertise these strengths on a small poster or pamphlet?

Best Answer

not sure how to present these in a poster, but here are some features of latex that should be especially attracive to users in the humanities:

  • plain text input, not dependent on software upgrades or versions, and input is not corrupted (or lost) if a run doesn't complete successfully; plain text also means that it's very easy to rearrange paragraphs with minimal side effects
  • access to competent and flexible bibliography tools
  • automatic tables of contents, and reliable indexing facilities
  • ability to use multi-layered footnotes, as required for critical editions, provided by the eledmac package
  • many multilingual capabilities, including language-specific hyphenation (on a paragraph level) and ability to intermix different scripts (latin, cyrillic, greek, arabic, kanji, ...)
  • powerful tools designed for linguistics; a large population of linguists who use latex in their work (including Geoffrey Pullum, one of the authors of the Phonetic Symbol Guide), and a forum devoted specifically to that discipline
  • document classes such as memoir that are more in keeping with humanities work and "fine publishing" than the "usual" technical-oriented styles

some of these capabilities won't be appreciated even for long papers, but as soon as one is ready to tackle a dissertation or a book, there's really nothing new to learn if familiarity with the system has been nurtured through practice with shorter projects.

Related Question