I did typesetting in Lyx/LaTeX of two PhD theses: my own (eng) and my GF's (esp) a decade+ later. In both cases the adventure started with admitted a vanilla Wo

I did typesetting in Lyx/LaTeX of two PhD theses: my own (eng) and my GF's (esp) a decade+ later. In both cases the adventure started with admitted a vanilla Word doc without all the bells and whistles (= no templates, no version control). Once you enter the area of strange formatting, chars typed by who knows either a cat walking on the keyboard or sleep deprived student typing madly, fixing these in a binary format is a real PITA. Lyx/LaTex text formats are trivial to grep, diff, etc. Today I would probably start and try to stay as long as possible in Markdown, then reformat it at the very end.