4 ms·

LaTeX is a bit like democracy. It is horrible, but all the alternatives I have tried a worse.

the_svd_doctor 6y ago
Gosh yeah. Imagine writing a 150+ pages thesis in Word. Would give me nightmares. EDIT: To complement: I think it's obviously possible, lots of people do it. But I feel I would spend a lot of time on "keeping the structure right" as I edit it. Feels more straightforward with Latex. And then Math is kind of hard to write efficiently, but that's field specific.
- ketzu 6y ago
  I wonder about that. I don't know word well enough at all to accomplish the same things I do in latex. But I know it can do a lot of those things. I assume it would be similar if I knew as much about word as I do about latex. But there's no way of knowing, as I am not going to learn word without a much better reason than "i wonder if it's actually terrible to write 150 pages when you know how to use it."
  - bobbylarrybobby 6y ago
    While Word has evolved to do many of the things that were exclusive to LaTeX at one point, the problem is that Word is not extensible. When you hit a wall in Word, that’s it — you have no options. In LaTeX you can pretty much always figure out how to do what you want to do, even if it takes learning a fair bit about the packages, and if you don’t want to spend that kind of time you can almost always find relevant info on stackoverflow.
    - lostmsu 6y ago
      Either that changed, or you are technically incorrect. Word is heavily extensible through OLE. You can probably even embed a live ConvNet or a 3D physical simulation in a document. Hell, that was mentioned in Windows 95 book I read as a kid. They used to call it "multimedia".
- m12k 6y ago
  I only needed a single dose of 'Word has decided to move every single image, table and textbox all on top of each other at the very beginning of the document for no apparent reason' before I vowed never to use Word for anything important or complicated.
- marcosdumay 6y ago
  I've done a 70 pages proposal on a computer vision study on Word once (plenty of images). I don't have nightmares with it anymore because I'll never open it again, and never make that stupid decision again (Even if the other side requires it!). I've edited some ~100 pages regulations (so very few pictures and tables) on Word files too. It's not a nightmare because Open Office works quite well with those.
- tomjen3 6y ago
  Start by splitting it up into parts, each document not to contain more than 5-10 pages, then enable "limit formatting to a selection of styles" (anyone who disables this is to suffer the ordeal of the boats). Once everything is the way you want it, copy everything to a new place, add a master document and set the styles as you want. The export to PDF, publish or whatever you want. If you want it truly beautiful, use a DTP and don't format the word documents at all.

Gosh yeah. Imagine writing a 150+ pages thesis in Word. Would give me nightmares. EDIT: To complement: I think it's obviously possible, lots of people do it. But I feel I would spend a lot of time on "keeping the structure right" as I edit it. Feels more straightforward with Latex. And then Math is kind of hard to write efficiently, but that's field specific.

ketzu 6y ago
I wonder about that. I don't know word well enough at all to accomplish the same things I do in latex. But I know it can do a lot of those things. I assume it would be similar if I knew as much about word as I do about latex. But there's no way of knowing, as I am not going to learn word without a much better reason than "i wonder if it's actually terrible to write 150 pages when you know how to use it."
- bobbylarrybobby 6y ago
  While Word has evolved to do many of the things that were exclusive to LaTeX at one point, the problem is that Word is not extensible. When you hit a wall in Word, that’s it — you have no options. In LaTeX you can pretty much always figure out how to do what you want to do, even if it takes learning a fair bit about the packages, and if you don’t want to spend that kind of time you can almost always find relevant info on stackoverflow.
  - lostmsu 6y ago
    Either that changed, or you are technically incorrect. Word is heavily extensible through OLE. You can probably even embed a live ConvNet or a 3D physical simulation in a document. Hell, that was mentioned in Windows 95 book I read as a kid. They used to call it "multimedia".
m12k 6y ago
I only needed a single dose of 'Word has decided to move every single image, table and textbox all on top of each other at the very beginning of the document for no apparent reason' before I vowed never to use Word for anything important or complicated.
marcosdumay 6y ago
I've done a 70 pages proposal on a computer vision study on Word once (plenty of images). I don't have nightmares with it anymore because I'll never open it again, and never make that stupid decision again (Even if the other side requires it!). I've edited some ~100 pages regulations (so very few pictures and tables) on Word files too. It's not a nightmare because Open Office works quite well with those.
tomjen3 6y ago
Start by splitting it up into parts, each document not to contain more than 5-10 pages, then enable "limit formatting to a selection of styles" (anyone who disables this is to suffer the ordeal of the boats). Once everything is the way you want it, copy everything to a new place, add a master document and set the styles as you want. The export to PDF, publish or whatever you want. If you want it truly beautiful, use a DTP and don't format the word documents at all.