Starting a Thesis: Why I Chose LaTeX Over Word (Part 1 of 6)

The Thesis Series

This is Part 1 of a 6-part series on learning LaTeX and writing my Masters thesis at Oakland University.

1. Starting a Thesis: Why I Chose LaTeX Over Word (you are here)
2. Formatting Hell: 19 University Templates and Why LaTeX Wins
3. IEEE Citations and BibTeX: Academic References Done Right
4. LyX: The WYSIWYG Path to LaTeX
5. Writing IsoMob: A Cross-Platform Game Engine Thesis
6. LaTeX Templates, Final Formatting, and Lessons Learned
7. The Finished Thesis: 150 Pages Later

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The Starting Line

Today I created ECE_Thesis_Outline.odt – the first real artifact of what would become my Masters thesis in Embedded Systems at Oakland University. The topic: building a cross-platform open source isometric game engine targeting Android.

But before I could write about game engines, I had to figure out how to write – as in, what tool do I actually use to produce a 100+ page academic document with figures, citations, equations, and a table of contents that won’t implode every time I add a section?

The Word Problem

My first instinct was Microsoft Word. Everyone uses it. The university’s formatting guides are all .doc and .docx files. It’s the path of least resistance.

Except it isn’t. Anyone who’s written a document longer than about 20 pages in Word knows the pain:

• Cross-references break. Renumber a figure? Good luck finding every reference to “Figure 3” that should now say “Figure 4.”
• Styles fight you. You set Heading 2 to 14pt bold, and three pages later Word decides to revert it. Or your paste operation imports someone else’s styles and corrupts yours.
• The Table of Contents is fragile. It works great until it doesn’t. Then you’re manually fixing page numbers at 2am before submission.
• Large documents get unstable. Crashes, corrupted files, mysterious formatting changes. The bigger the document, the more Word struggles.
• Version control is impossible. Word documents are binary blobs. You can’t diff them, you can’t merge them, and Track Changes becomes a nightmare across multiple reviewers.

For a 10-page report, none of this matters. For a Masters thesis with 9 chapters, appendices, dozens of figures, and a bibliography? It’s a minefield.

The Two Paths

Word traps you in a loop of manual formatting fixes. LaTeX compiles to a correctly numbered PDF every time.

What is LaTeX?

LaTeX (pronounced “lah-tech” or “lay-tech”) is a document preparation system built on top of TeX, created by Donald Knuth in the late 1970s. Where Word is a word processor (what you see is what you get), LaTeX is a markup language – you write instructions for how the document should look, and a compiler turns those instructions into a PDF.

Here’s a minimal example:

\documentclass{article}
\title{My Thesis}
\author{Anthony DiPerna}
\date{2011}

\begin{document}
\maketitle
\tableofcontents

\section{Introduction}
This thesis presents an isometric game engine...

\section{Related Work}
Cross-platform development strategies include...

\end{document}

That’s it. The \tableofcontents command generates itself automatically from your \section and \subsection commands. Cross-references use labels:

As shown in Figure~\ref{fig:isometric}, the projection...

\begin{figure}
  \includegraphics{figures/thesisIsometricPicture.png}
  \caption{Isometric projection example}
  \label{fig:isometric}
\end{figure}

Renumber things, move sections around, add figures – the references update themselves on the next compile. No manual fixing. No corruption.

Why LaTeX for a Thesis

The case for LaTeX in academic writing comes down to a few key advantages:

Separation of Content and Formatting

In Word, formatting is embedded in the content. Move a paragraph and its formatting might change. In LaTeX, you write the structure (\section, \subsection, \begin{figure}) and a style template controls how it looks. Change the template, and the entire document reformats instantly.

For a thesis with strict university formatting requirements (1.5-inch left margin, 1-inch top margin, double-spaced body text, specific heading styles), this is critical. Define it once, enforce it everywhere.

Plain Text Files

A .tex file is just text. You can:

• Open it in any editor
• diff two versions to see exactly what changed
• Put it in version control (SVN, Git) and get real history
• Never worry about file corruption
• Search and replace with standard tools

Bibliography Management

LaTeX’s BibTeX system lets you maintain a database of references and cite them with \cite{keyname}. The bibliography formats itself according to whatever style you specify (IEEE, APA, Chicago). Add a citation? The bibliography updates. Remove one? It disappears. No manual formatting of reference lists.

Math and Technical Content

If your thesis has equations, LaTeX is unmatched:

The isometric transform maps $(x, y)$ to screen coordinates:
\begin{equation}
  x_{screen} = (x - y) \cdot \cos(30°) \cdot tileWidth
\end{equation}

Word’s equation editor works, but LaTeX’s math typesetting is the gold standard – literally used by every major scientific journal and publisher.

It Scales

A 10-page document and a 200-page document compile the same way. There’s no performance degradation, no file corruption, no mysterious slowdowns. The compiler doesn’t care how big your document is.

The Learning Curve is Real

I won’t pretend LaTeX is easy to pick up. The first time you see a wall of backslashes and curly braces, it’s intimidating. Common pain points:

• No instant visual feedback. You write markup, compile, then check the PDF. It’s a write-compile-review cycle instead of WYSIWYG.
• Error messages are cryptic. A missing } on line 47 might produce an error message pointing to line 200.
• Package conflicts. LaTeX’s power comes from packages, and sometimes they don’t play nicely together.
• Tables are painful. This is universally acknowledged. LaTeX tables require more markup than they should.

But here’s the thing: you learn it once. The investment pays off on every document you write after that. And for a thesis that you’ll be editing for months, the upfront cost is nothing compared to fighting Word formatting bugs for the entire duration.

The Decision

So today, alongside my thesis outline, I’m committing to LaTeX. I’ll learn the tooling, figure out the formatting requirements, and write the whole thing in a system designed for exactly this kind of document.

Next up: diving into Oakland University’s formatting requirements and discovering just how many .docx template files they expect you to follow.

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This post is part of a series documenting my Masters thesis journey at Oakland University. The thesis describes IsoMob, an open-source cross-platform isometric game engine written in HaXe.