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For me, LaTeX wins on: 1. Bibtex and managing references 2. Modularity and reuse. I can break up a big document into many files, and reuse those files. 3. Co
by frognumber 3y ago
For me, LaTeX wins on:
1. Bibtex and managing references
2. Modularity and reuse. I can break up a big document into many files, and reuse those files.
3. Collaboration and versioning. I can store things in git.
4. Scripting and automation
... and so on.
I'm genuinely more productive in Word / Docs / etc. for anything less than five pages. Above 30 pages, I find things get completely unmanageable with word processors, while with LaTeX, I can use the same types of tools I use to manage, search, version, modify, and integrate source code.
Word, for large documents, is a bit like writing the Windows source code in one big text file. I can swap chapter 4 and 5 in a few seconds, or move a sidebar in a similar amount of time. I can comment out an entire section by commenting one include. Etc.
Oh yeah -- comments are a big thing. Word does comments, but a final version needs to be made into a "clean" copy. It's a mess.
- actuallyalys 3y agoI agree. For short documents, Word is fine. Note that Word does have reasonably good tools for moving around chapters, sections, etc., but Word tends to get slow and buggy when documents get longer. Microsoft has introduced online syncing that technically would allow multiple people to work on the same document, but it's not reliable for long documents in my experience. Personally, I use Markdown and Pandoc for most documents that are long or serious because I can work reasonably quickly while still using version control.