4 ms·

I know that maybe you do work that is impossible to do in other suite than Office, but, did you try LaTeX? It manages all the references incredibly good, pictu

I know that maybe you do work that is impossible to do in other suite than Office, but, did you try LaTeX? It manages all the references incredibly good, picture captions, TOC... it requires more work than Office, but I think is more rewarding.

sophacles 15y ago
We regularly use LaTeX when it is internal to our group, but a lot of our partners won't use anything but word. Fortunately it is only a small number of documents that reach the limits with them, but unfortunately they take a disproportionate amount of the joint effort :/. For internal stuff, and papers where our group has sole authorship (and some enlightened partners) we have a very nice set of scripts for auto-generating git repos with all the latex styles and generic skeletons for us.
bitwize 15y ago
Yeah, good luck getting LaTeX to be accepted for interdepartmental correspondence, let alone inter-company. Also, Word can track revision history on each document. What's the equivalent for LaTeX? A git repo? The upshot of network effects is that if you work for anybody but yourself, a Windows PC with a moderately recent Microsoft Office is a requirement.
- nknight 15y ago
  Well, maybe in whatever line of work you've chosen, or just whatever big company you've decided to work for, but it's never been a requirement for me.
- gjulianm 15y ago
  If the correspondence does not need to be editable, PDF is the best option, with even less problems than Word or OpenOffice formats. And LaTeX has built-in support for it. I agree with revision history, Word probably manages it pretty good. But git repos aren't a bad option if you are used to them. I personally use Dropbox, so I have a simple revision history without problems. Anyways, I didn't say LaTeX was the perfect solution, that's why I said that he maybe had some impediment to use it instead of Office.
EricDeb 15y ago
I think LaTeX is built for perfectionist, pedantic academics. That is not to say I don't secretly love it, but after spending hours battling the program trying to get it to look right, I usually end up asking myself what's the point?
- dubya 15y ago
  That sounds like a LaTeX koan. If you really must use LaTeX, eventually you reach the state of just writing the content and to heck with the formatting, or you go nuts and learn to write a proper style file. You are pretty certain not to volunteer to write up the department newsletter with lots of pictures from the spring picnic.

sophacles 15y ago

We regularly use LaTeX when it is internal to our group, but a lot of our partners won't use anything but word. Fortunately it is only a small number of documents that reach the limits with them, but unfortunately they take a disproportionate amount of the joint effort :/. For internal stuff, and papers where our group has sole authorship (and some enlightened partners) we have a very nice set of scripts for auto-generating git repos with all the latex styles and generic skeletons for us.

bitwize 15y ago

Yeah, good luck getting LaTeX to be accepted for interdepartmental correspondence, let alone inter-company. Also, Word can track revision history on each document. What's the equivalent for LaTeX? A git repo? The upshot of network effects is that if you work for anybody but yourself, a Windows PC with a moderately recent Microsoft Office is a requirement.

nknight 15y ago
Well, maybe in whatever line of work you've chosen, or just whatever big company you've decided to work for, but it's never been a requirement for me.
gjulianm 15y ago
If the correspondence does not need to be editable, PDF is the best option, with even less problems than Word or OpenOffice formats. And LaTeX has built-in support for it. I agree with revision history, Word probably manages it pretty good. But git repos aren't a bad option if you are used to them. I personally use Dropbox, so I have a simple revision history without problems. Anyways, I didn't say LaTeX was the perfect solution, that's why I said that he maybe had some impediment to use it instead of Office.

EricDeb 15y ago

I think LaTeX is built for perfectionist, pedantic academics. That is not to say I don't secretly love it, but after spending hours battling the program trying to get it to look right, I usually end up asking myself what's the point?

dubya 15y ago
That sounds like a LaTeX koan. If you really must use LaTeX, eventually you reach the state of just writing the content and to heck with the formatting, or you go nuts and learn to write a proper style file. You are pretty certain not to volunteer to write up the department newsletter with lots of pictures from the spring picnic.