Granted it was 30 years ago but when I was a grad student in physics, there were a variety of options for how to write your dissertation. From what I observed,

Granted it was 30 years ago but when I was a grad student in physics, there were a variety of options for how to write your dissertation. From what I observed, my guess would have been that Latex takes about twice as long as Word. But it wasn't a fair comparison, because the students using Latex were also using Unix computers, and were genuinely interested in the nuts and bolts of the process. They were also settled on being able to push a button and have a beautiful book slide out of the laser printer. The students who used more primitive tools simply accepted that their formatting would be more primitive. I used an antiquated scientific word processing program called T3 on a MS-DOS machine, and covered for its deficiencies by fixing my manuscript with pen and ink before taking it to be photocopied. In my dad's dissertation from the 1950s, the equations, chemical diagrams, and graphs, are all drawn by hand. You wrote your manuscript by hand, and paid a typist to make the final copies after your committee had approved it. Today, I think formal typesetting is disappearing. They should compare Latex, Word, Jupyter, and the e-mail editor.