At this point I'm curious: WTF is Microsoft Word even good for? It's like the worst-in-class tool for all things word processing, page layout, typesetting, embedding other stuff into the document, and more. Why are people still torturing themselves with this garbage? Just because it's there? I mean, Wordpad is there too (though maybe not for much longer) but nobody uses that. It's also garbage but still...
It's the most reachable thing. Markdown feels like a toy for many (not me) and people outside of academia look at you kinkily if you suggest latex and bibtex.
It's the most reachable thing. Markdown feels like a toy for many (not me)
Oh yeah. Markdown. While it does have a place, the limitations on top of my head as to why I wouldn't use it in bigger projects:
It's fine for when you know what output you produce, like for Lemmy or in a wiki or whatever. But once you want more control, you lack options or need to rely on non-"standard" (is there was one) solutions to somehow achieve it.
I think, as an easy, yet powerful solution, AsciiDoc is better-suited.
skill issue
word is fine if you know how to use it
none of its direct competitors have the same feature set, and a word processor that can give me compile time errors is not one i'm going to use with much enthusiasm
word is fine if you know how to use it
But most don't.
I had to rewrite the CV my job coach gave me from scratch. She's a professional and used line breaks for spacing and texts blocks for grouping. Because she didn't know about some key concepts (like frames or line height) you learn from web editing.
and a word processor that can give me compile time errors is not one i'm going to use with much enthusiasm.
That's what happened after i saved her mess (written in MS Office .docx) once in Libre Office and loaded it again. To be fair, this was the document formats fault.
During my studies I worked at the faculty, „typesetting“ the following for my professor: https://www.amazon.de/Evangelische-Akademie-DDR-Bildungsst%C3%A4tten-Widerstand/dp/3374024653
>700 pages in Microsoft Word in 2006. I knew about LaTeX, but was not familiar enough to convert everything to LaTeX and integrate last minute changes on top. The authors of course only knew word and the professor did editing and typesetting in parallel.
Afterwards all my academic text were written in LaTeX with Bibtex and I never looked back.
I use Google Docs for anything simple (1-3 pages), and if it has no citations or more than 2 figures. After that I upgrade to LaTeX.
I had a conference demand a docx file for the paper submission. I figured "fine it can't be that bad to use word for a simple 8 page publication" but boy was I wrong! It was torture trying to get it formatted and arranged properly. Every part of the word tool is weird and clumsy.
Oh, and they've completely broken the original GUI WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) premise of a GUI style editor. The PDF it creates often doesn't look anything like what the document looks like on the screen.
I dropped a note on the conference organizers about the docx requirement. I don't have that many hours to fuck around with bad tools so I can attend your venue. I'll just go to a conference that doesn't torture us to participate.
As someone who dislikes M$ word, but begrudgingly uses it for lab reports. Can someone tell me what LaTeX for citations is? I know latex as that math protocol for my personal markdown notes.
Also what other software is useful for writing formatted papers?
Also what other software is useful for writing formatted papers?
Nothing is better than LaTeX/XeTeX + BiBTeX to my knowledge.
Also I advocate against using overleaf as someone would suggest. I used texlive before switching to overleaf and we wrote a few papers via overleaf free tier. Sadly enough, now these papers can't be compiled because there is not enough computational resources on a free tier. Moreover, the documents are neither versioned nor blamed which makes me difficult to go back and reflect on the papers.
I'm back to writing papers now and we're using GitHub private repository + LaTeX+ BiBTeX which allows us to overcome all possible limitations of overleaf.
Nothing is better than LaTeX/XeTeX + BiBTeX to my knowledge.
LuaLaTeX + Biber
I wrote my thesis in LaTeX, which is very unusual for my discipline. Now that I’m done with that, everything we’re doing it’s collaborative Word docs. Collaboration features in 365 have been transformative. (Remembering the dark old days of emailing the Word doc around like a hot potato.)
I’m very used to Word and can get it to do some great stuff that most people don’t even know about, but I wouldn’t touch it for something over 20,000 words.
As for LaTeX, I was fine once I got a good template going. Writing one sentence per line is a fantastic way to draft. But there are some fine tuning things that I remember took up a lot of time that I would have had no problem fixing in Word. I distinctly remember trying to get tables to look right when you had paragraphs or dot points in cells.
Oh, and that one reference whose URL refused to break in the line and instead just went off the page. I never found a fix for that.
For LaTeX tables, use https://www.tablesgenerator.com/. It's a lifesaver. For URLs, I sometimes used footnotes and sometimes used embedded links.
Talking about tables, if you're not using tabularray in 2024, you're doing yourself a disservice IMHO. I almost use it exclusively except for text formatting as only tabularx supports page footnotes easily.
It has turned LaTeX tables from absolutely annoying to something that actually makes sense and looks nice and comes with most tools you want from tables. Except booktabs which it supports with an option. For example, it supports cells with line breaks, variable width columns, multiline and multi row cells - and even manages to align the text in them correctly. I don't know how
Jianrui Lyu did this, but he did.
So yeah. Tables in LaTeX don't have to be pain.
Thanks for this one! I’ll be giving it a go in my next project
I wrote my thesis in LibreOffice and I would have been SOL if not for Zotero. Who cares what people use? Use what works.
I tried this plugin, I think it's very painful to use it format. I wrote mine in Typst.
Thank you, but I never intend to write another thesis. One doctorate was enough, and I work in clinical practice so I don't do a ton of academic writing anymore. But thanks for sharing!
Thesis is an example. I use it for any document.
i just copy the links to a text file as i write and when i'm done with the paper i just paste it at the end and format it correctly