6 ms·
This is completely non-malicious: why are you writing papers in Word instead of more advanced typesetting tools like LaTeX?
by adtac 9y ago
This is completely non-malicious: why are you writing papers in Word instead of more advanced typesetting tools like LaTeX?
- JohnJamesRambo 9y agoHaha oh man. I don't think a single human in academia I work with even knows what that is. We don't need typesetting tools, we just write the text and provide figures and the journal does the typesetting, etc. It just needs to be as easy as possible and looking up LaTex that seems to be a bizarre abstraction that seems even more difficult than typing in Word.
- cozzyd 9y agoYou must be in a very different field than me.... If someone posts a word document on the arxiv, it's almost a reason to ignore it as unprofessional.
- dingo_bat 9y agoIf people are judging research by that criteria they are idiots. I'd prefer not to associate with or gain approval of such persons.
- cozzyd 9y agoIt's more about conforming to the standards of the field. I can think of maybe one or two articles written in Word that I've seen on the arxiv ever (maybe it's different outside hepex and astro?).
- Al-Khwarizmi 9y agoI find it much easier than writing in Word, and so do my colleagues. In fact, when selecting journals to send a publication to, "requires to send the paper in Word" tends to be a big red flag because of the huge work it takes to handle references, format equations, etc. which are trivial in Latex. (fortunately this requirement almost never happens within my own field, but it does when submitting interdisciplinary work, as some related fields use Word). You don't even need to actually know the commands to get started with Latex in academia, it's typically fine to download the journal or conference template and fill in the text. All the PhD students I have worked with learned it just fine and fast.
- _qbxp 9y agoI was in graduate school in the biological sciences, and the vast majority of papers were formatted using word and some extension for reference management. At one point I really wanted to switch to LaTeX, but it was too much of a learning hurdle given all the other stuff I already had to do.
- dagw 9y agoBecause academics shouldn't be typesetting their papers and very few journals accept LaTeX. Most journals will give you a Word template that you're supposed to use and handle the typesetting for you.
- adtac 9y agoJournals wouldn't accept generated PDFs? This genuinely shocking to me. Is this prelevant in all fields?
- dagw 9y agoSome do, if you've used their templates, and some don't. Most journals want to ensure a uniform look and feel across all their papers.
- 542458 9y agoNo. Most places I submit to use PDFs and require authors to typeset themselves. Both Latex and Word templates are typically provided for you to fill your content into. But I still use Word, because odds are good that for any given paper I'll hit at least one collaborator/editor/proofreader/etc who doesn't know how to use Latex, and so using the lowest common denominator (word) saves us all a lot of complication.
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoWord is why HCI papers have such bad kerning and word spacing in general (ironic, because HCI is the CS field closest to design and typography!). I’m from the PL community, where Latex is fairly standard, but co-authored a UIST paper in Word once, it was a nightmare and still didn’t look very good. Word just doesn’t do double columns very well, and such a niche use case doesn’t seem to be a priority for Microsoft.
- 542458 9y agoOh for sure. Column-spanning figures in particular are an unholy nightmare.