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This post brought to you by the open source Zotero committee.
typeset my thesis using latex, biber and zotero. Very painless, the only slightly painful part was configuring the character encoding
LibreOffice FTW!!!
Needs collab features somehow 🥲
Agreed.
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
tabularrayin 2024, you’re doing yourself a disservice IMHO. I almost use it exclusively except for text formatting as onlytabularxsupports 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
booktabswhich 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.
During my studies I worked at the faculty, „typesetting“ the following for my professor: https://www.amazon.de/Evangelische-Akademie-DDR-Bildungsstätten-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.
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…
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
Nobody knows how to use Word. It’s unlearnable.
But hell, it’s good in pretending to work the way people think it works. All the way until it blows and destroys all the work.
i learned it
i am built different
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.
What do you use?
It’s the best in convincing people they know how to use it.
Word is not horrible as a word processor. The issue is that people try to use it to do typesetting, reference management, and all kinds of non word processor shit. And Microsoft encourages this. If you understand what the tool does it’s really a decent tool.
If you understand what the tool does it’s really a decent tool.
But most don’t. Which makes it a bad tool.
A screwdriver doesn’t become a bad screwdirver just because someone is using it to drive nails. There is a lot to hate about Microsoft, but its basic Office tools are really quite good, when used in the manner in which they were designed. There really are no meaningful competitors for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Outlook as an email client is not great, but its strength is calendaring.
A screwdriver doesn’t become a bad screwdirver just because someone is using it to drive nails.
But if it looks like a hammer…
Office loks like an extended text editor but hides the xml aspect. No wonder most people use it as an extended text editor, doing formatting wrong.
Words problem is partly because they tried to make it into a swiss army knife, but it just ended up being one of those goofy “multi-tool pens”, that don’t do anything good.
Okay, maybe thats an bit of an exaggeration, Word is amazing for text and pretty much any text related formatting you can think of*, but the second you want to add an image, it becomes a nightmare.
*from a non-technical person/ease of the GUI perspective. I know LaTek is much better getting your end goal efficiently, but Word can still get you there…eventually.
People use what they know. Are there better (free) alternatives?
Yes. LibreOffice is better in every way.
And don’t reply with “but it has problems opening Word files”. That’s cause the Word format doesn’t follow any standards. Nothing but Word can correctly open Word files (and even that only works well if they were made with the same version of Word).
Hmm, I’ll check it out, but my field passes around Word files quite often. Might be a tough sale if the user can’t find a workaround. Still, can’t be mad at free software.
It is the easiest way to let other people participate via comments and annotated changes.
Have you ever used Google Docs for that? Vastly superior. You don’t even have to send your updated version to anyone… They can see it and work on it with you in real time.
SharePoint promised to make this same functionality work but never got it right. Same for the web version of office. They’re horrible compared to Google Docs and there’s supposedly even better collab word processing tools.
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?
Math formatting is a very small piece of what LaTeX does.
The common tool for managing citation in a LaTeX document is called BibTeX. You enter details about your sources, and BibTeX will create your bibliography and will also make it easier to cite things in your paper.
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.
Go to overleaf.com and say goodbye to a chunk of your weekend. 😉
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!
Let me introduce Typst: https://github.com/typst/typst.
Just started using it today and it’s pretty neat
I’m using it for a year and it came a long way. Though still in beta and still have some major bummers (which require hacking). But it only came out in 2023. The next update should add a ton of QoL things, so this will be pretty exciting.
Anyone who collaborates with more than five people on articles but doesn’t use automatic reference&citation management is just insane(ly inefficient). I collaborate with lab people who cant use latex and can only use google docs. My absolute requirement was using a citation management extension (like paperpile). Now I also require that we use crossref for figure numbering and refering otherwise I am out.
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.
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
