 Okay, so there are a lot of people I know who are afraid of LaTeX. And I don't know why. Actually, I do know why. It's because they've never had exposure to it. LaTeX is one of those things which unambiguously has made my life easier since day one. It's one of those things that really everyone should try, and I'm not quite sure why people are so initially turned off. Because it's not something that comes from them trying it and not liking it. No one who learns LaTeX says, oh, well, this is stupid, it's not going to work. Everyone, there are just some people who are a little afraid of writing a document in a kind of markup language and then compiling it. That sounds smart. It looks smart. If you do LaTeX, you look smart. But it's not something that's inherently difficult, and it is something incredibly rewarding and has increased my productivity immensely. And it's just a lot of fun. It's just a lot of fun. So let me go ahead, you know, I want to make the case for LaTeX why you should stop using Word or whatever you're using and Switch. But let me go ahead and let me tell you my, you know, what's the Christian word for it. Let me tell you my testimony. Let me witness to you about how I found LaTeX and how it made my life easier. So I started using LaTeX only maybe two years ago, two, three years ago, when I was actually right finishing my master's degree. And here's the story. I started using LaTeX too late. I wrote a master's thesis. It was around 70 pages or so, and it was entirely in Word. And of course, if you're writing something that is 70 pages, you have a bunch of sections and subsections and you have references and you have stuff in the text referring to references and you have example numbers. You have all this kind of stuff that you have to organize. And you know, usually you have to organize it manually in Word. Some people have little programs that go into Word and do it for them, but you more or less have to do it manually. So here was my problem. Not only did I, while I was writing my thesis, I had to exert an enormous amount of effort just to keep track of all my references and numbers and cross-references and everything. But you know, I go to my defense and you know, I do, I pass, I do fine. But my major professor was like, oh you know what, you should, you should add this here. You know, at the beginning when you're in the introduction, you should add a couple examples in here. Now that sounds something, it sounds like something a little trivial. You just make a little change. It's no big deal. But if you're using Word or something like that, that's an astronomical pain. Because what you have to do is you add in the, you know, new examples or new sections. Then you have to go through all of the references afterwards or all of the sections afterwards in the text where you refer to other examples. You have to change their example numbers. You have to increment them all. You have to change the section headings. You have to go through the whole document again making these little obscure changes. So I don't remember, actually I think the way I copped out of it is I somehow, I think I put it in like a footnote. So it wasn't numbered. So that was my way of getting around because I didn't want to exert the effort. But anyway, after I finished my masters, I actually decided, you know what, that was a pain. Maybe I'll just learn LaTeX. And I learned LaTeX in the space of about a week. And when I say a week, I don't mean like, oh, I was really, you know, it took a week for me to like get the basics and finally understand it. No, it was like a week for me to, what I did is reproduce my entire thesis in a week. And it wasn't just transferring the text. I made all the charts, all the charts, all the examples, all the little, you know, diagrams I had, I remade them entirely in LaTeX. So I learned lots and lots of packages. I basically, you know, I'm nearly as adept at it now as I was then. So that a week, all it took was a week and that was it. And so what are the advantages to LaTeX? Just in case you don't know. So what about my problem with sectioning? What about my problem with references? Well, let's start with references because people, you know, having a bibliography is sometimes a pain to people. Like it takes a lot of effort to organize things and keep things in play. Here's how it works. If any of you guys saw my video on when I show my Vim and LaTeX setup, you'll see that I have like one file where I keep all of my references. And of course, what LaTeX does is you can tell it to look at a certain bibliography file. And in that file, you just list references, you give them all a label, and you just list the author, the title, you know, all the relevant information. And what LaTeX does for you is you just tell it what kind of format you want. And when you refer to some, when you call the tag that refers to that reference, it automatically gives you the reference wherever in your text. It gives you the, you know, if you want APA or MLA, automatically does that. It automatically puts it in the very bottom. You don't have to do anything. You don't have to worry about any kind of, you know, any of the work whatsoever. I don't have to think about, oh, did I remember to put this in or whatever? As soon as I put a reference in my text, as soon as I say like, oh, Chomsky 2000 in my text, that automatically appears in the bottom. So that's something I never have to worry about. And I just keep one file where I have all my references that I use all in one place. And of course, they don't all appear. They only appear in a document when you actually call them. So that's references. That's something you never have to worry about. I'll never have to do, you know, reference a real bibliography again. It's just two lines of code in Lawtech. So the other thing, of course, is sectioning, right? If you have a document that's any amount of length, right, you're going to have to have different sections. Now in Lawtech, all you have to do is you bring up the tag that says section or subsection. And that's it. Lawtech numbers everything at the very end when you're actually compiling it. And of course, you can refer to sections by labeling them with different tags. Let's say I label, the tags are invisible. You label us like the introduction section with the intro tag. And whenever you refer to that, it brings up, whenever you refer to it in the text, it just brings up the number of the section. So you don't have to do any of that work for you, work at all. Or if you add another section in, everything will automatically readjust. Same thing with example numbers. That's something I use a lot in linguistics. It's actually a huge pain keeping track of that kind of stuff. And it's all done automatically. All the most difficult things you don't have to worry about whatsoever. And that's just the general stuff, specifically in linguistics. This might be less relevant for you. But it's no less true in your field. There are packages in Lawtech to do everything and to do everything elegantly. So in linguistics, for example, you might have example sentences in another language or something. And of course, what you do in linguistics is you have these things called three line glosses. You put the foreign language example with all the words and then divide all the morphemes. Then on the second line, you provide English translations of all the morphemes. And they have to be perfectly aligned. And then you have a translation on the third line in sort of idiomatic English. That's something that's a huge pain in the ass to do in Word. Because there are people I know. It's such a shame. There are people I know who are still trying to do this in Word, tabbing everything to some exact length. And it's just a pain. Lawtech does it all automatically. There are packages that you don't even have to worry about. You just put the words in and it just works. It just works. So that's one thing. You can make syntax trees, diagrams are really easy. You just type them in and there they are. There's no using tree form or any of this crap other people use. You can have tableaus and for optimality theory, all these things that are very specific to linguistics. There are packages for it. And of course, this is no less true of math. Any kind of mathematical notation, summation notation, any kind of using Greek letters and all the stuff that might be a pain in Word. I mean, lawtech is made to make that stuff easy. And there's no other way to do it. There are a bunch of people. I mean, I'm talking to you. If you're one of those people who is like, oh, man, I would learn lawtech, I'm sure. It's just hard. And there's all the stuff. I want to be a grad student in math or whatever, but no, you got to learn it. You got to learn it. It's going to be, it's easy. It's easy. Your life is going to get so much easier once you do. So I mean, the thing about it, I guess, is people are just worried about lawtech. Like, oh, it's really, I mean, one of the complaints I hear is that Word is you can easily manipulate what you see. And lawtech, that's not necessarily the case. But the thing is, lawtech, if anything, is a lot more open-ended. There are packages for everything. There are packages like ticks, which is a general sort of, I don't even know how to describe ticks. It's like a general graphical package, which is so, I mean, it's just so dense. Every single package, there's just so much going on. I mean, there's, you can do anything with these things. I mean, if anything, you have a problem of there being too much, like you can never fully know every single package. You just gradually get to the point where you're like, I know everything I need to know about the stuff I do. So one of the other big advantages to lawtech is that if you're in a technical field or if you're in academia or something, something you're going to be doing pretty often is taking a document and putting it into something else. Let's say you have like a thesis. Let's say I made a bunch of charts on my thesis. I don't want to use them for like a qualifying paper or my dissertation or like something that I actually publish. Now in Word, that's a pain because you've got to copy and paste things. Then you have to go back and change all the formatting, blah, blah, blah. But in lawtech, everything, since it's all code, it's all just content which recompiles to whatever document. There's no problem whatsoever. You can literally just copy and paste code. You can copy and paste sections. You can copy and paste examples. And once you recompile it in the new document, bam, now you have all the right numbers. You don't have to worry about it. Same thing with references, same thing with everything. So this is why lawtech is used universally for making like sort of putting journals together. Taking people who have different articles and putting them all together where it doesn't actually matter what formatting they use on their machines. In lawtech, it's all sort of universalized. It's all, it just works. So anyway, the general idea is this, well, people are afraid of lawtech. They're afraid that maybe it can't do what I want to or maybe. I mean, when it comes down to it, I don't even have word on my machine anymore. There's no reason to use word once you have lawtech and you can use it pretty even rudimentarily. I mean, within a couple of days, I knew how to use it. I knew how to do basically everything I can do in word. And it's just an issue of jumping into it. If you don't know where to start, there's, what is it? They're sharelawtech and that's a good site, sharelawtech, I think, dot com. And they have, you can start compiling documents. It's like a Google Docs for lawtech documents. And you can start practicing there. They even have tutorial videos. But of course, I'll probably put some up going over lawtech stuff just because it's so, I mean, it's easy. It really is the kind of thing you can just jump into. So yeah, just do it. I mean, don't be afraid of it. And oh, and there's another thing. There's this idea that, oh, well, you have to be some stodgy academic or you have to do these technical things to use it. Otherwise, it's just useless. Listen, because it's so flexible, because you can copy and paste code and do all this stuff and create unambiguous, really refined documents. If you're writing anything over a couple pages, even if you're writing a term paper for a class, having your references done automatically, having your sections and the times when you refer to sections done automatically is immediately worth it. I mean, and I'm just saying, do it. Just do it. That's the only thing that I can say. Don't hold back. Don't be afraid of it. Just jump into it. Anyway, that's all I wanted to say. So that's it.