4 ms·

I'm the one single person in an office that knows how to use Microsoft Word/Libre Office Styles. This is by no means strange. Almost no-one I meet understand th

I'm the one single person in an office that knows how to use Microsoft Word/Libre Office Styles. This is by no means strange. Almost no-one I meet understand them. I doubt it's taught in schools. Without exception, when someone wants to make a heading they click "Bold" and select a larger font-size. And optionally, red text on a blue background (I don't know why they are compelled to do this). They never, ever click "heading" or "title". Nope. Because the idea of a heading to them is "bold" + "bigger". So I'm convinced the argument in favour of writing in LaTeX (and other non-presentation markup languages) is that it generally enforces structure and style where none would otherwise be present. This enables production of a consistently formatted document, that's machine readable and often highly accessible.

viraptor 2y ago
Even when you know they exist, the friction to use them while writing is significant. Unless I'm doing more than 5 pages, I'm clicking that "bold". It also doesn't help that Google docs effectively killed styles. They're kind of there and we're semi-adjustable, but unless something changed recently I believe you can't add your own.
- mcswell 2y ago
  Google docs actually makes Word look good. Or at least Google docs means Word is no longer in last place.
mcswell 2y ago
I used to advocate for using Word styles where I worked. I didn't make many converts. I think one issue is that Word's built-in styles are just so weird. Blue font on a white background for section headings? (if I remember correctly) Who ever asked for that? And yes, you can modify the default styles, but it's a nuisance, it's laborious, and if you ever forget to save one of your changes to your template, it won't show up the next time. (And the modified template can be hard to find next time.) But absolutely the worst thing about Word's styles is section numbering. Nearly every technical document I've ever written has used "legal" numbering (sections 1.1 and 1.2 are under section 1, for example, with 1.1.1, 1.1.2 etc. under 1.1). Word seems inherently incapable of doing this. I know there are web pages that tell how to force it, but (1) it's again quite laborious and error prone, and (2) it's just buggy, for instance if you do a copy-paste of a section to some other place in the document. LaTeX does all this out of the box, with no errors whatsoever. And it also does cross-references to sections correctly, which Word can do--but in my experience, not well. I could go on, but there are other reasons people tend not to use Word's styles.

viraptor 2y ago

Even when you know they exist, the friction to use them while writing is significant. Unless I'm doing more than 5 pages, I'm clicking that "bold". It also doesn't help that Google docs effectively killed styles. They're kind of there and we're semi-adjustable, but unless something changed recently I believe you can't add your own.

mcswell 2y ago
Google docs actually makes Word look good. Or at least Google docs means Word is no longer in last place.

mcswell 2y ago

I used to advocate for using Word styles where I worked. I didn't make many converts. I think one issue is that Word's built-in styles are just so weird. Blue font on a white background for section headings? (if I remember correctly) Who ever asked for that? And yes, you can modify the default styles, but it's a nuisance, it's laborious, and if you ever forget to save one of your changes to your template, it won't show up the next time. (And the modified template can be hard to find next time.) But absolutely the worst thing about Word's styles is section numbering. Nearly every technical document I've ever written has used "legal" numbering (sections 1.1 and 1.2 are under section 1, for example, with 1.1.1, 1.1.2 etc. under 1.1). Word seems inherently incapable of doing this. I know there are web pages that tell how to force it, but (1) it's again quite laborious and error prone, and (2) it's just buggy, for instance if you do a copy-paste of a section to some other place in the document. LaTeX does all this out of the box, with no errors whatsoever. And it also does cross-references to sections correctly, which Word can do--but in my experience, not well. I could go on, but there are other reasons people tend not to use Word's styles.