General Disarray

Economist Allin Cottrell is an amazing guy. He wrote GRETL, an open-source, graphical, cross-platform econometrics package. He’s also the author of “Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient,” a widely disseminated article in the LaTeX community. In the article, he essentially makes the case for using LaTeX over word. A case with which I almost whole-heartedly agree. The crux of his argument is that in LaTeX you compose — write the words and structure of your document — while in Word you typeset — fidget with formatting, etc.

It is right to prefer composition to typesetting if you are a serious author. Yes, typesetting matters because a readable document is more likely to be read completely. But form should really be an afterthought.

He acknowledges in his article that one can use the composition mode of writing in Word; the problem is that few do. Since Word is probably the most common format for collaborative writing, however, it pays to be able to use Word like a pro. And if you prefer composing to typesetting, then you need to learn to use Word like it was LaTeX. Here’s how:

Use the styles that are built in to word. When you want to insert your title, use the title style. When you want to insert a top-level header, use the Header 1 style, etc. Customize these styles to your liking, then save a blank document containing these styles as a Word template. That way you only have to mess with the typesetting component once. Making custom Word templates is actually much easier than creating custom style files for LaTeX (at least in my opinion).

LaTeX does a great job of formatting papers to look like journal articles. Many journals use LaTeX to make their articles, so this isn’t surprising. The default Word files aren’t so professional. These tips will help you make your document look more like the journals:

• Change the fonts for the header styles to Times New Roman. To do this, open the style palette, select the style you want to change, and click on modify. From this dialog, you can change the font face, size, weight, etc.
• In the same dialog, you can turn on automatic numbering. From the Format dropdown menu, select numbering, then select outline numbering. There are several styles to choose from (1, 1.1, 1.11; 1, 1.A, 1.A.1, etc.)
• Tell the header styles to change to normal paragraph styles upon a carriage return by setting “Style for following paragraph” to normal.
• Tell the normal style to change to a normal indented paragraph upon a carriage return by setting “Style for following paragraph” to normal indented. This way, the first paragraph after a header will not be indented, but every subsequent paragraph will, similar to the style in most books and journals.
• Set your table styles by selecting the Table Grid style. Within the style dialog, there is a dropdown menu named “Apply formatting to.” You can use this menu to change the formatting for header rows, left-most columns, etc. To apply this style, you must select your entire table, not just the next in the table, then click on the Table Grid style.
• Optionally, decrease the line width by changing the margins. Notice that most journals use much larger margins than Word. This is partially because reading long lines is tiring to the human eye.

These are just a few general tips that will help you have (a) more control over the formatting of your document and (b) a more automated writing workflow, so you’ll be able to focus on writing and not formatting, after the initial template is created. Learning how to use Word’s styles well is a good idea; you can format elements well beyond the ones outlined above. If you know how to customize styles, you’ll be able to quickly make global changes to your template, and never have to worry about manually formatting a long document again.