Latex or Racket over Word?

Typography & fonts
1

I just wanted to ask if you would advise using Latex or Racket for lawyers for writing out briefs, memos, and even journal articles, or is Word just going to be just as effective but more efficient.

2

That’s really a personal-ergonomics question, which has no objective answer. If I were going to practice law full time, I would probably create a Racket program that compiles markup files into ODT or DOCX files. This seems like a much better way of creating Word-compatible files than actually using Word.

1 Like
3

I’ve done quite a lot of work with LaTeX (and generating LaTeX with Racket), and I feel there are three really obviously valid uses for it that can justify the extra friction it creates:

  1. Academic papers which require a specific LaTeX format
  2. Print books
  3. Personal hobbyist tinkering
4

I just did a large project where I generated HTML with Racket and then used a web browser to convert the HTML to PDF. There’s a limit to the typographic control. But it was a pretty easy way to get from code to PDF.

5

I’m also recently playing around with Typst, which isn’t completely there yet compared to LaTeX, but looks very promising.