4 ms·
Speaking as a grad student who has been reading a lot of papers/theses lately, we can tell if you used LaTeX or Word, and if you used Word we mock you for your
by jff 16y ago
Speaking as a grad student who has been reading a lot of papers/theses lately, we can tell if you used LaTeX or Word, and if you used Word we mock you for your ugly fonts and amateurish layout.
- smackfu 16y agoGrad students mocking people? Now that's something new.
- djcapelis 16y agoThey don't pay us enough to be nice. We're allowed to be bitter. :)
- nimrody 16y agoMost research papers typeset using LaTeX use ugly fonts as well -- the computer modern fonts. In fact, when it comes to presenting equations, even major publications use these ugly CM fonts. They usually use Times Roman for the text itself. The mismatch is horrible. There is a reason why there are people specializing in book design. And LaTeX specifically encourages ignoring presentation. [But overall, I agree. Word documents tend to look even worse, unless formatted carefully]
- nzmsv 16y agoComputer Modern is ugly? I guess there's no debating taste. I find very readable and quite good looking. It does tend to look much better on paper than on-screen though, because of the thin lines, and I agree that the pairing with Times is pretty bad.
- coliveira 16y agoComputer Modern is good for math books, so that's why we tend to like it. But try to use it in other areas and you'll see how readability suffers.
- arethuza 16y agoI'm glad to know that I'm not the only person who thinks CM fonts are ugly!
- dpritchett 16y agoI only wrote one thesis and I did it in Word. Most of my publishing since then has been in WordPress. Is learning LaTeX anywhere near as useful to a professional developer as say learning vim or emacs?
- kanak 16y ago> Is learning LaTeX anywhere near as useful to a professional developer as say learning vim or emacs? I would say no (even though I use latex nearly every single day). On the other hand, it is indispensable if you're doing maths or anything that involves lots of formulas, citations, footnotes and what not, because it decouples the structure of the document from the formatting.
- jff 16y agoThere's learning LaTeX, and then there's learning it. I think it's safe to say that most paper authors only need to find the appropriate template/example document and fill it out with their content. Once you figure out basic font modifications (bold, emphasis, "typewriter" (monospace)), tables (easy), and images (also easy), you're pretty much set--that's about the limit of my experience with it. Now, I've only had occasion to use it for some math-heavy crypto assignments, a few IEEE-format papers, and a thesis proposal, but in each case I was able to accomplish what I wanted in a short period of time and with minimal hassle. For the most part, you're only typing stuff like this: \section{A Section} A call to {\tt open()} will {\bf return} an integer, which represents a {\emph file descriptor}.\cite{man-open} Easy mode, plus bibtex is a godsend when you have more than a handful of references.
- coliveira 16y agoLatex is something that is nice to know, but developers have little need to what it offers. Latex is required knowledge if you need to create highly structured documents with fine tuned positioning of equations, such as dissertations, math/engineering books, etc. It is also very useful, but hard to use, if you want to typeset general books, music, etc. For the needs of software documentation, I think XML is a better fit, because you can convert it as needed to other formats, including Latex.