The Benefits of LaTeX

• Beautifully Typeset Output.
  LaTeX is designed by mathematicians for producing beautifully typeset mathematics. Not only are the equations and mathematical symbols beautifully rendered, but LaTeX also does an exceptional job at handling visual components such as fonts, spacing, and line breaks.

• Structured Files.
  LaTeX has the author specify various elements of the document, such as title, authors, chapter and section headings, environments for theorems and proofs, appendices, and the bibliography. This has a number of advantages. For one, it forces the author to organize the document in a logical way, which often has the beneficial side effect of producing exposition that more organized, clearer, and more coherent. Additionally, it allows the author to focus on content rather than layout during the writing process. In LaTeX, the author produces the words in a text editor, while specifying the document's structure. This allows the author to focus on what they want to say and how they want to say it while they are writing. When the document is compiled, LaTeX handles the typesetting, and the author can worry about the appearance at that stage. For particular types of documents (e.g., a scientific paper, thesis, or book), there are usually default LaTeX styles as well as several professionally designed templates that are freely available. Moreover, if you use one style and later decide to change the layout (for instance, at a publisher's request), this is often as easy as cutting and pasting your content into a different template.

• Management of Internal References.
  LaTeX elegantly handles numbering and internal referencing within a document.

• Management of Citations.
  As with internal references, LaTeX handles citations elegantly. If you use BibTeX, which is compatible with most reference management software, it is also easy to change bibliographic styles.

• Customizable.
  One can easily create macros for use within a particular document. Moreover, LaTeX has a coherent package system that makes it relatively easy for users to write extension packages to provide additional features. Since LaTeX is so popular, there are a very large number of such extension packages already freely available online. This means that you will often be able to achieve special effects by finding and using a package already in existence, instead of having to create it yourself.

• User-Friendly.
  Despite an initially steep learning curve, a novice can very quickly get to the point where they are comfortable producing their own documents and can look up answers to many of their questions online. Most LaTeX programs have a very user-friendly interface. Moreover, since LaTeX has existed for so long, there is a great deal of good documentation.

• Commonly Used.
  LaTeX is hands down the document format most commonly used among mathematicians at the present time. This means it is easy to share documents with others and to collaborate with co-authors.

• Easily Converted Files.
  LaTeX files contain markup language that enables them to be readily converted to other outputs (e.g., PDF or HTML), allowing you to change or share your document more easily than if it was in another format.