TeX is a typesetting language developed by Donald Knuth in 1978. Often used with macro packages such as LaTeX, it is principally used in academia to produce high quality, portable scientific documents. Despite this, most TeX users in Cambridge are self-taught, and Microsoft Word and other word processors remain the predominant document preparation tool in many undergraduate contexts.
LaTeX is one of the most commonly used systems for typesetting academic documents, and for good reason. It is not unlikely that you will be expected to work in LaTeX at some point in your career. While there is a certain learning curve to achieving proficiency in the language compared to What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) software, its advantages are numerous.
First and foremost is presentation quality: Knuth developed TeX with typographic algorithms cutting-edge at the time and still strongly competitive to date, with particular attention paid to mathematical spacing and text justification; even now, few would contest that the visual presentation of LaTeX documents markedly outclasses modern WYSIWYG word processors such as Microsoft Word.
Second, TeX is extensible: LaTeX is itself an extension of TeX, and the community has built thousands of packages injecting additional features to the language, some of them broadly useful such as microtype, others highly specialized such as chemfig. The Comprehensive TeX Archive Network (CTAN) hosts, documents and serves 5900 packages from 2700 contributors as of August 2020, and is only growing by the day.
Third and finally, the plaintext nature of TeX source files trivialises portability, source control and collaboration. While word processors have made great advances in simultaneous editing and version control, they continue to underperform compared to established decade-old tools for plaintext editing. A .docx file opened on two computers may easily yield different results, but a TeX file will always compile to the same output.
Despite being almost half a century old, TeX remains in popular use to this day. That is a testament to its quality if nothing else, and is all the reason one should need to invest the time to learn it.
CamTeX is a society dedicated to raising awareness of TeX in the Cambridge student community, lowering the entry barrier to TeX fluency and its regular usage, and enhancing the productivity of Cambridge TeX users. CamTeX aims to enable student access to TeX editing tools and educational resources, create platforms for collaboration and assistance between TeX users, and offer weekly LaTeX training sessions with the goal of delivering LaTeX fluency by the end of three weeks.