So I recently discovered the wonderful world of LaTeX. For the uninitiatied, this is a type setting, document preparation system that allows you to produce documents whilst giving you much more control than you have in programme such as Word.
It’s like I’ve joined a little gang or clique. We know about something that everybody else is missing out on, poor souls. I’ve never wanted to be in the Mac-users gang – far too pretentious – but LaTeX people are my sort of people.
I guess a lot of people would be scared off by the way a document looks whilst in preparation – you have to put in your own commands and make sure the syntax and punctuation is all correct. One bracket out of place and the whole thing can fall apart, but what can beat the feeling of finding that missing bracket and seeing it all fall into place? [Does this last statement make me very very sad?]
This approach appeals to me hugely. I like to know how something is working and be able to tweak it to be the way I want it. It’s far more satisfying than spending an afternoon trying to persuade Word that I really do want more than one numbered list in my document and trying to ignore that smug little paperclip help thingy. All of this probably says much more about me than I realise…
The editing programme that I’ve been using kindly points out any errors that you may have made and sometimes it does this without much subtly. Yesterday it informed me that if I didn’t correct my error the examples in my linguistics paper were, ‘likely to be screwed up!’
Perhaps it appeals to those parts of me that I secretly know exist, but that perhaps I don’t always like to acknowledge to the world: geekiness, a love of problem solving and a need for control. There is something about knowing that if something isn’t working the way you want it to, it’s because you haven’t put the correct instructions in somewhere. It’s predictable, logical and with a bit of effort it can be mastered. If only the rest of life were so simple…
