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Why do CS doctoral candidates have such a fascination with typesetting? I mean, be into whatever you’re into, I guess. But as soon as someone starts talking a

Why do CS doctoral candidates have such a fascination with typesetting? I mean, be into whatever you’re into, I guess. But as soon as someone starts talking about LaTEX and how they spent months on their macros, I think “another hapless victim has fallen into LaTEX’s trap.” It’s like an ant lion that feeds on procrastinating students.

iNic 1y ago
People who are fascinated with LaTeX are gearhead types. Just the same as photographers who care more about their cameras or chefs who care more about their knives.
- shermantanktop 1y ago
  The problem with gearheads is that they can displace their passion for the activity itself onto the gear around the activity...and get better at having gear but not get better at the activity. E.g., guitarists who own 80 of the same guitar and spend many hours on the internet arguing about tiny variations in what Fender was doing in 1961. And then they put out a video and it turns out they can barely play guitar at all. I wouldn't exactly criticize them for that choice, but it's definitely a choice. Or maybe not a conscious choice, because the road to improvement is hard, but the road to more gear is loaded with honeypots of dopamine.
nailer 1y ago
I find it odd too. The fascination with typesetting limits the paper’s usability on narrower devices which seems a very strange position for engineers.
Swizec 1y ago
> Why do CS doctoral candidates have such a fascination with typesetting? Same reason wantrepreneurs have a fascination with adding dark mode to their CSS. It feels productive while you avoid the real work.
- xigoi 1y ago
  > Same reason wantrepreneurs have a fascination with adding dark mode to their CSS. It feels productive while you avoid the real work. Accessibility is just as important as “the real work”.
thomasfedb 1y ago
I wrote my joint med-CS honours (1 year research thing we have in Aus) thesis in Word. My med supervisor was happy with it. CS supervised insisted I reformat it in LaTeX as he couldn't stand the typesetting. Honestly I don't disagree with him, it looked far better in 'TeX. But that's probably a learnt preference. In essence, it's culture.
wenc 1y ago
It's because LaTeX gives us a sense of legitimacy. (it's also why people go overboard with math notation in LaTeX documents, even when prose is more appropriate). It produces documents that look like those produced by professors, and luminaries in the field. If you write equations in Word Equation Editor, your work just doesn't look very serious. It's the same joy I felt when I laser-printed my first newsletter designed in Aldus PageMaker. I was only in my teens but I felt like a "professional".
- pdpi 1y ago
  > If you write equations in Word Equation Editor, your work just doesn't look very serious. Haven't tried it in a while, but, last I checked, Word Equation Editor output didn't look serious because it looked janky and look like it wasn't really done in a "professional" tool. Part of that is a self-fulfilling prophecy of course, LaTeX output looks right in part because it's what people have been reading for decades, but TeX's formulas just look plain good.
  - Jap2-0 1y ago
    Yet Word is leagues ahead of Google docs... (shudders)
    - emmelaich 1y ago
      There are add-ons for Gdocs. This is apparently pretty good. https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/autolatex_equations/850293439076 https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/autolatex_equat...
  - fluidcruft 1y ago
    I don't know if this is still the case or not but equations in Word can be upgraded to MathType. IIRC the Word equations were a basic version of MathType (i.e. developed by the same people). MathType included latex syntax and much better layout and formatting. It was the only way to stay sane when working on journal articles with collaborators who gave less than zero interest in latex (i.e. physicians).
nextos 1y ago
LaTeX typesetting is a solved problem. Memoir or Classic Thesis, paired with microtype, provide outstanding results and you need to spend zero time on tweaking stuff. Typst is interesting, but it doesn't yet support all microtypography features provided by microtype. IMHO, those make a big difference.
- __float 1y ago
  What in microtype makes "a big difference"? I don't recall using it (my LaTeX years are long behind me), but all of the examples on https://www.khirevich.com/latex/microtype/ https://www.khirevich.com/latex/microtype/ seem incredibly minor. I don't think I'd notice any of them as the reader.
  - nextos 1y ago
    It will tweak spacing, kerning, margin protrusion, and font size to improve readability avoid big word gaps and excessive end-of-line hyphenation. It is what sets professional typography apart. Only Adobe InDesign provides a comparable implementation, tweaking all those details. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hz-program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hz-program for a better explanation and an example. IMHO, the difference is obvious and not minor. Without microtypography texts look ugly: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/Hz_Programm.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/Hz_Progr...
    - Cordiali 1y ago
      Sure, I don't like creeks like in your last example. But I absolutely prefer paragraphs, where the final line would be considered 'too short'. It also makes an appreciable impact for me, in how easy a text is to read. Which is to say, half of these things are pretty subjective.
    - GiovanniP 1y ago
      > Only Adobe InDesign provides a comparable implementation, tweaking all those details. TeXmacs claims to have implemented microtypography as well (https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/news.en.html https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/news.en.html, as I am reading it, in the opening paragraph on version 2.1)
wyager 1y ago
> Why do CS doctoral candidates have such a fascination with typesetting? Why does anyone care about typesetting? Probably because they spend a lot of time working with text and have therefore developed a level of taste. Just because the bottom 80% of consumers have zero taste and will accept any slop you give them doesn't mean there isn't value in doing something only appreciated by the top 20%. In any field, not just typesetting. Most people have ~no refined endogenous preferences for food, art, music, etc.
- shermantanktop 1y ago
  I wonder if any doctoral defense has hinged on how refined the typesetting was. Probably. It’s the sort of ritual humiliation that academia specializes in.
  - smaudet 1y ago
    I'm not sure that it is as much about ritual humiliation as much as that, well, you are supposed to be at some sort of summit, so you must have refined your process. A mountain hiker can wear whatever, but above a certain altitude something must be true of them (fit, trained well, holding various gear, has supplies, or is in a plane/heli and probably even better trained/equipped/fit). I would hope that typesetting is just a qualia of an ordered mind not a goal of it. You can choose to feel "humiliated", but the truth should be closer to that you may simply be inadequate in that regard. I.e. it is not that using LaTeX (or even Typst) makes you a better person, just that certain types of people will tend to use tools, like mountain climbers likely use carabiners.
  - gucci-on-fleek 1y ago
    > I wonder if any doctoral defense has hinged on how refined the typesetting was. At least 1 [0], but that's obviously a rather special case. [0] https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb21-4/tb69thanh.pdf https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb21-4/tb69thanh.pdf
  - xigoi 1y ago
    Poor typesetting is like going to an interview in your underwear. While it may not directly reflect your skill, it says a lot about how much effort you like to put into things.
blindstitch 1y ago
The typesetting is finished whenever you want it to be. I spend most of my time thinking about the content.
unbelievr 1y ago
Here it's typical that a thesis will be printed as a book, and it's that book that will be evaluated. For PhDs, there's a doctoral defence in front of a committee, peers and other interested parties and they're all given the book. Usually the process for ordering books is that you send them a PDF with embedded fonts inside it, and it's made at the university's printing house. They will handle distribution etc. So you really, really want it to look right at the first go. There's been some progress the past few years now where you get to preview the book somewhat, but one surefire way to get it right is to use something like LaTeX. It used to be one of few WYSIWYG solutions out there. And it used to be really hard to do certain required things in e.g. Word. For instance skipping some page numbering and doing others in roman numerals etc.
- yencabulator 1y ago
  WYSIWYG means what you're editing looks like the end result; LaTex and Typst are at the opposite end of the scale, being languages that compile into layout. No, a preview window does not count as WYSIWYG.
- shermantanktop 1y ago
  This answer makes sense to me, because it is rooted in a functional need - the need to have a printing house consume the results successfully. Some other comments are oriented around aesthetics ("taste") or the state of other tools (Word, etc.) which I understand but those issues are more personal.
porcoda 1y ago
Not all of us fell into that trap! My dissertation was written almost entirely using a default document class and a handful of packages, and only towards the end did I apply the university document style to come into compliance. I had more than enough to do on the subject of the PhD and didn’t have the patience to burn time on typesetting or fiddling with macros. I’ve found in the decades since then that my most productive co-authors have been the ones who don’t think about typesetting and just use the basics. The ones who obsess over things like tikz or fancy macros for things like source layout and such: they get annoying fast.
- generationP 1y ago
  Tikz is misplaced in this list; it is how you make any kind of vector drawings in LaTeX. It's not the only way, but perhaps the best documented and most expressive one. If you have any such drawings in your work, you won't get around putting some effort into it. Not comparable with boxed theorems or fancy headings.
  - bee_rider 1y ago
    Tikz is sometimes useful, but it can also be a massive time sucking pain in the butt. I mean it is one of the few packages that can actually manage to annoy LaTeX fans, which is really saying something.
    - volemo 1y ago
      I think the annoyance with TikZ is twofold: (1) it tries to do a really hard thing (create a picture with text in a human writable way), (2) it is used infrequently enough that it’s hard to learn through occasional use. That said, nobody makes you use TikZ, fire up Inkscape and do it wysiwyg.
RheingoldRiver 1y ago
I was a math major in undergrad, we care about typesetting so much because you really do not want to be stuck handwriting everything, but it's not easy to be faster typing than you are with handwriting when you're writing out rows and rows of equations. (Actually physics was generally a lot harder for me to keep up with while typing than math was.) And when your life is revolving around classes or your thesis, the #1 most important thing to you in the world is how easily you can transfer your ideas to paper/digital format. It makes a lot of sense that people care a lot about the quality of their typesetting engine and exchange macro tips with each other (I got a lot of helpful advice from friends, and my default latex header was about 50% my own stuff and 50% copied from friends in my same major)
- duped 1y ago
  On a total tangent, I found out that my grandfather's university digitized their entire library a few years ago including his masters' thesis from 1948. Back then it was written with a typewriter and by hand for everything else. I bet he could have done something more advanced if he had modern computers, but looking at it 75 years later and seeing his handwriting on the page was moving more than the content itself.
generationP 1y ago
I guess monks were procrastinating likewise when they illuminated their manuscripts.
efitz 1y ago
I have often thought that LaTEX' distinctive font and formatting is either a virtue signal or an in-group signal.
thesuperbigfrog 1y ago
>> Why do CS doctoral candidates have such a fascination with typesetting? Probably because Donald Knuth created TeX and Leslie Lamport created LaTeX. Two of the greatest minds in Computer Science created the tools and used them to write papers and articles that are beautiful. Elegant ideas presented beautifully make reading and writing papers a nicer experience.
- jwr 1y ago
  Donald Knuth. Please.
  - thesuperbigfrog 1y ago
    Corrected. Thank you. Autocorrect incorrected it for me.
    - ykonstant 1y ago
      >Autocorrect incorrected it for me. I am saving this entire sequence for later use.
- rrgok 1y ago
  It seems the grammar of the language was an after thought... It amazes me that he spent so much time perfecting the laying out algorithms that he could not come up with a sane language.
roshdodd 1y ago
A small, but important aspect of typesetting/WYSIWYM is the ability to break down a large document (like a thesis) into discrete sub-components. You could work on each section of your document in an individual .tex file and include it later in your top-level .tex file. This setup works well with VCS like git. Another ergonomic benefit is scripting. For example, if I'm running a series of scripts to generate figures/plots, LaTeX will pick up on the new files (if the filename is unmodified) and update those figures after recompiling. This is preferable to scrolling through a large document in MS Word and attempting to update each figure individually. As the size and figure count of your document increases, the ergonomics in MS Word degrade. The initial setup effort in LaTeX becomes minimal as this cost is "amortized" over the document.
- gwervc 1y ago
  > The initial setup effort in LaTeX becomes minimal as this cost is "amortized" over the document. I'm still sour about the 3 days it took me to have something usable for my thesis, and I was starting from an existing template. And it's still not exactly how I want it to be; I gave up on addressing a bug in the reference list.
  - aeroevan 1y ago
    My school just had an official cls file, so my initial setup was just to download the template. So if that's where you're coming from (the journals I submitted to also had official templates), it's really minimal setup.
  - otherme123 1y ago
    I wrote mine in Latex, along a team mate witting in Word. Her onboard was way faster, but she had to fight really hard in the end for Word not messing up everything on the smallest changes. Meanwhile, when I had a decent setup I could move a whole section from the intro to the results and the overall layout didn't suffer (floating tables, figures and code still in place, references still pointing where they should). I had code snippets with colour highlights imported from the actual source code (good luck trying that in Word). I could insert the companion papers with a single line of code per document, and they looked great. I even had a compilation flag to output the ereader version. My take was that Word enabled my team mate to kick a lot of cans down the road (but the cans eventually came back), while for me the reverse was true: build a decent foundation, and after that it was all pure write-cite-compile.
vkazanov 1y ago
I don't know about now but in 2000s anything even remotely math-related was PURE PAIN in Word-likes. In my master's there were like 30 pages of formulas, all interdependent. Typing/retyping these would take forever. Also, something as simple as having per-chapter files or working with an acceptable editor also helps.
cycomanic 1y ago
From watching people write their thesis in both latex and word, I'd say if anything it is the other way around. The people who write their thesis in word (or another wysiwyg editor) spend more time on their layout than the people writing in latex. Worse, they spend the time while writing, while latex allows for separation of tasks, which allows people to get into the flow much more easily. Sure, theoretically you can only concentrate on writing with word and ignore layout. In practice in takes a lot of discipline so instead you see people moving figures around putting spaces or returns to move a heading where they want to etc.. In particular as a way to procrastinate from actual writing.
- yusina 1y ago
  > Worse, they spend the time while writing, while latex allows for separation of tasks, I theory, yes. And that's also what I'm usually trying to do. What I have observed though with Latex folks is that they type 3 words and then look at the preview or re-compile to see if it looks good.
  - gf000 1y ago
    I mean, as with code, the actual typing is not really the bottleneck. I also basically read the right pane rendered output, but mostly as a "reading out what I've written and evaluating whether it sounds good" most of the time, not really messing with layouting (especially that LaTeX and Typst does that very well, I can be reasonably sure that my paragraphs will have decent hypens and such).
    - imtringued 1y ago
      I have written some documents for which I have yet to even look at the 40+ pages produced in the PDF as output. I'll admit thought that I wasted some time finding a nice template before starting to write.
nxpnsv 1y ago
Well during 5 years of undergrad reports and papers, then 5 years of PhD thesis papers, you do tend to hoard some useful snippets, it is more of a byproduct than a fixation... at least for me.
__m 1y ago
It's like developers obsessing over their tools, so i get it.
jeffparsons 1y ago
Another reason to use LaTeX for papers back in the day was that Microsoft Word would routinely corrupt large documents in terrifying ways. Sometimes the root of the corruption existed in the document somehow long before any of it was visible, so even recovering from an old backup would just lead to the problem repeating. I recall the only way to properly "recover" an old backup was to copy it all via plain text (e.g. Notepad), and then back into a brand new Word document. This is all to say, if you're working on a theis or even a moderately large assignment, working in Word was not good for the nerves. Looking back, I probably should have just worked in plain text and then worried about formatting only at the very end, but ummm, yes, I guess another hapless victim did indeed fall into LaTeX's trap. :)
- berti 1y ago
  I’ve run into this exact issue several times with group projects at university in the 2010s, and each time recovery was copying chunks of plain text from backup copies into new documents as you say. Luckily by the time we got to the final year capstone project the whole group was happy to go with LaTeX. Not sure if these Word issues have even been fixed since.
  - jeffparsons 1y ago
    I don't have a source for this, so take it with a huge grain of salt... but for some reason I have a memory of someone telling me that the older versions of Word saved and loaded documents by writing the bytes of in-memory data structures directly to files on disk, with not much in the way of marshalling or validation in the middle. Because it was fast, or something. You can imagine the kind of edge cases and oopsies that might result. The new versions at least serialise to some kind of monstrous XML representation of Word's internal state, so while it's not going to win any awards for world's most elegant document format, it should be slightly harder to corrupt in subtle ways.
oefrha 1y ago
Time spent on typesetting produces immediately visible results (however minor). Actual research doesn’t. It’s the classic feedback loop problem, so like you said, procrastinating students devote lots of time to largely pointless but seemingly productive activities like typesetting. I was there once. In hindsight all the tweaks were a complete waste of time. All I needed was amsart, plus beamer for slides.
blitzar 1y ago
Why does the premier word processing software (Microsoft Word) care so little about typesetting? I am biased however, as my thesis was written in LaTeX with all the plots regenerated at compile time from the raw data.
- xigoi 1y ago
  > Why does the premier word processing software (Microsoft Word) care so little about typesetting? Because its target userbase is people who don’t give a single shit about typography.
  - blitzar 1y ago
    Yet every day all across the world the director is handing the document to their team telling them to work the weekend cleaning it up and make it look good.
eunos 1y ago
When I was in college I found out that I have better reading experience reading LaTeX typsetted books. That's why I prefer to read Springer published reference books rather than class recommended books.
_Algernon_ 1y ago
For me personally, I have yet to figure out how to get a word processor to have text be justified on both sides without inserting big gaps between words. I could use left justified but then the text ends up looking like a saw blade, which is still ugly. Latex' handling of floating figures and tables is also much better. And of course math notation is much nicer to work with in LaTeX (IMO).
- electroly 1y ago
  In Word, set the paragraph alignment to justified and enable automatic hyphenation. You can actually use LaTeX math notation in the equation editor in modern Word.
diffeomorphism 1y ago
This is not limited to CS or Latex in any way. Plenty of students spend a lot of time fiddling with word, powerpoint, note taking systems, citation management (which is surprisingly horrible in MS word), Adobe software etc.. Obvious reasons: - Your thesis is a major output of years of work. Of course you want it to look good. - You might think it superficial, but if the presentation looks bad, many people (subconsciously) interpret this as a lack of care and attention. Just like an email with typos feels unprofessional even if the content is otherwise fine. - Spending time on tooling feels productive even if it is not past a certain point. - People that are into typesetting now have an excuse to spend time on it. That said, in my experience people spent a few hours to learn "enough" latex several years ago and almost never write any macros. Simple reason: you work with other people and different journal templates, so the less custom code the better.
whatever1 1y ago
I give 0 fs about typesetting. But typical mainstream software just cannot freaking process a 500 page document with tables, figures, references, equations etc. If Word/Pages/Openoffice/GoogleDocs could do it, no sane person would sink 100’s of hours in debugging latex out of memory errors. But once you are in the latex world you start noticing how much prettier things can be. And then you end up sinking another thousand hours to perfectly aligning the summations in your multi-line equations.
stared 1y ago
First, you have to (or at least - you had to). I mean, it was the only way to sanely include a lot of formulae and managing bibliography. Then you discover that is id beautiful. Honestly, even using base style sets you above the typesetting of books. With some extra tweaks, it is beautiful. Did I spend a lot of time on LaTeX during my PhD. Sure! But (even counting in all masochism involved into dealing with LaTeX) I both cherish this time, and the results.
gf000 1y ago
Because it's not particularly fun to edit a typo and have your layout completely messed up 10 pages later, which you have no chance of noticing unless a full review. And publishing is the primary way academics communicate en large - it's kinda important to be able write your specific notation without resorting to drawing on paper.

iNic 1y ago

People who are fascinated with LaTeX are gearhead types. Just the same as photographers who care more about their cameras or chefs who care more about their knives.

shermantanktop 1y ago
The problem with gearheads is that they can displace their passion for the activity itself onto the gear around the activity...and get better at having gear but not get better at the activity. E.g., guitarists who own 80 of the same guitar and spend many hours on the internet arguing about tiny variations in what Fender was doing in 1961. And then they put out a video and it turns out they can barely play guitar at all. I wouldn't exactly criticize them for that choice, but it's definitely a choice. Or maybe not a conscious choice, because the road to improvement is hard, but the road to more gear is loaded with honeypots of dopamine.

nailer 1y ago

I find it odd too. The fascination with typesetting limits the paper’s usability on narrower devices which seems a very strange position for engineers.

Swizec 1y ago

> Why do CS doctoral candidates have such a fascination with typesetting? Same reason wantrepreneurs have a fascination with adding dark mode to their CSS. It feels productive while you avoid the real work.

xigoi 1y ago
> Same reason wantrepreneurs have a fascination with adding dark mode to their CSS. It feels productive while you avoid the real work. Accessibility is just as important as “the real work”.

thomasfedb 1y ago

I wrote my joint med-CS honours (1 year research thing we have in Aus) thesis in Word. My med supervisor was happy with it. CS supervised insisted I reformat it in LaTeX as he couldn't stand the typesetting. Honestly I don't disagree with him, it looked far better in 'TeX. But that's probably a learnt preference. In essence, it's culture.

wenc 1y ago

It's because LaTeX gives us a sense of legitimacy. (it's also why people go overboard with math notation in LaTeX documents, even when prose is more appropriate). It produces documents that look like those produced by professors, and luminaries in the field. If you write equations in Word Equation Editor, your work just doesn't look very serious. It's the same joy I felt when I laser-printed my first newsletter designed in Aldus PageMaker. I was only in my teens but I felt like a "professional".

pdpi 1y ago
> If you write equations in Word Equation Editor, your work just doesn't look very serious. Haven't tried it in a while, but, last I checked, Word Equation Editor output didn't look serious because it looked janky and look like it wasn't really done in a "professional" tool. Part of that is a self-fulfilling prophecy of course, LaTeX output looks right in part because it's what people have been reading for decades, but TeX's formulas just look plain good.
- Jap2-0 1y ago
  Yet Word is leagues ahead of Google docs... (shudders)
  - emmelaich 1y ago
    There are add-ons for Gdocs. This is apparently pretty good. https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/autolatex_equations/850293439076 https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/autolatex_equat...
- fluidcruft 1y ago
  I don't know if this is still the case or not but equations in Word can be upgraded to MathType. IIRC the Word equations were a basic version of MathType (i.e. developed by the same people). MathType included latex syntax and much better layout and formatting. It was the only way to stay sane when working on journal articles with collaborators who gave less than zero interest in latex (i.e. physicians).

nextos 1y ago

LaTeX typesetting is a solved problem. Memoir or Classic Thesis, paired with microtype, provide outstanding results and you need to spend zero time on tweaking stuff. Typst is interesting, but it doesn't yet support all microtypography features provided by microtype. IMHO, those make a big difference.

__float 1y ago
What in microtype makes "a big difference"? I don't recall using it (my LaTeX years are long behind me), but all of the examples on https://www.khirevich.com/latex/microtype/ https://www.khirevich.com/latex/microtype/ seem incredibly minor. I don't think I'd notice any of them as the reader.
- nextos 1y ago
  It will tweak spacing, kerning, margin protrusion, and font size to improve readability avoid big word gaps and excessive end-of-line hyphenation. It is what sets professional typography apart. Only Adobe InDesign provides a comparable implementation, tweaking all those details. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hz-program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hz-program for a better explanation and an example. IMHO, the difference is obvious and not minor. Without microtypography texts look ugly: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/Hz_Programm.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/Hz_Progr...
  - Cordiali 1y ago
    Sure, I don't like creeks like in your last example. But I absolutely prefer paragraphs, where the final line would be considered 'too short'. It also makes an appreciable impact for me, in how easy a text is to read. Which is to say, half of these things are pretty subjective.
  - GiovanniP 1y ago
    > Only Adobe InDesign provides a comparable implementation, tweaking all those details. TeXmacs claims to have implemented microtypography as well (https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/news.en.html https://www.texmacs.org/tmweb/home/news.en.html, as I am reading it, in the opening paragraph on version 2.1)

wyager 1y ago

> Why do CS doctoral candidates have such a fascination with typesetting? Why does anyone care about typesetting? Probably because they spend a lot of time working with text and have therefore developed a level of taste. Just because the bottom 80% of consumers have zero taste and will accept any slop you give them doesn't mean there isn't value in doing something only appreciated by the top 20%. In any field, not just typesetting. Most people have ~no refined endogenous preferences for food, art, music, etc.

shermantanktop 1y ago
I wonder if any doctoral defense has hinged on how refined the typesetting was. Probably. It’s the sort of ritual humiliation that academia specializes in.
- smaudet 1y ago
  I'm not sure that it is as much about ritual humiliation as much as that, well, you are supposed to be at some sort of summit, so you must have refined your process. A mountain hiker can wear whatever, but above a certain altitude something must be true of them (fit, trained well, holding various gear, has supplies, or is in a plane/heli and probably even better trained/equipped/fit). I would hope that typesetting is just a qualia of an ordered mind not a goal of it. You can choose to feel "humiliated", but the truth should be closer to that you may simply be inadequate in that regard. I.e. it is not that using LaTeX (or even Typst) makes you a better person, just that certain types of people will tend to use tools, like mountain climbers likely use carabiners.
- gucci-on-fleek 1y ago
  > I wonder if any doctoral defense has hinged on how refined the typesetting was. At least 1 [0], but that's obviously a rather special case. [0] https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb21-4/tb69thanh.pdf https://tug.org/TUGboat/tb21-4/tb69thanh.pdf
- xigoi 1y ago
  Poor typesetting is like going to an interview in your underwear. While it may not directly reflect your skill, it says a lot about how much effort you like to put into things.

blindstitch 1y ago

The typesetting is finished whenever you want it to be. I spend most of my time thinking about the content.

unbelievr 1y ago

Here it's typical that a thesis will be printed as a book, and it's that book that will be evaluated. For PhDs, there's a doctoral defence in front of a committee, peers and other interested parties and they're all given the book. Usually the process for ordering books is that you send them a PDF with embedded fonts inside it, and it's made at the university's printing house. They will handle distribution etc. So you really, really want it to look right at the first go. There's been some progress the past few years now where you get to preview the book somewhat, but one surefire way to get it right is to use something like LaTeX. It used to be one of few WYSIWYG solutions out there. And it used to be really hard to do certain required things in e.g. Word. For instance skipping some page numbering and doing others in roman numerals etc.

yencabulator 1y ago
WYSIWYG means what you're editing looks like the end result; LaTex and Typst are at the opposite end of the scale, being languages that compile into layout. No, a preview window does not count as WYSIWYG.
shermantanktop 1y ago
This answer makes sense to me, because it is rooted in a functional need - the need to have a printing house consume the results successfully. Some other comments are oriented around aesthetics ("taste") or the state of other tools (Word, etc.) which I understand but those issues are more personal.

porcoda 1y ago

Not all of us fell into that trap! My dissertation was written almost entirely using a default document class and a handful of packages, and only towards the end did I apply the university document style to come into compliance. I had more than enough to do on the subject of the PhD and didn’t have the patience to burn time on typesetting or fiddling with macros. I’ve found in the decades since then that my most productive co-authors have been the ones who don’t think about typesetting and just use the basics. The ones who obsess over things like tikz or fancy macros for things like source layout and such: they get annoying fast.

generationP 1y ago
Tikz is misplaced in this list; it is how you make any kind of vector drawings in LaTeX. It's not the only way, but perhaps the best documented and most expressive one. If you have any such drawings in your work, you won't get around putting some effort into it. Not comparable with boxed theorems or fancy headings.
- bee_rider 1y ago
  Tikz is sometimes useful, but it can also be a massive time sucking pain in the butt. I mean it is one of the few packages that can actually manage to annoy LaTeX fans, which is really saying something.
  - volemo 1y ago
    I think the annoyance with TikZ is twofold: (1) it tries to do a really hard thing (create a picture with text in a human writable way), (2) it is used infrequently enough that it’s hard to learn through occasional use. That said, nobody makes you use TikZ, fire up Inkscape and do it wysiwyg.

RheingoldRiver 1y ago

I was a math major in undergrad, we care about typesetting so much because you really do not want to be stuck handwriting everything, but it's not easy to be faster typing than you are with handwriting when you're writing out rows and rows of equations. (Actually physics was generally a lot harder for me to keep up with while typing than math was.) And when your life is revolving around classes or your thesis, the #1 most important thing to you in the world is how easily you can transfer your ideas to paper/digital format. It makes a lot of sense that people care a lot about the quality of their typesetting engine and exchange macro tips with each other (I got a lot of helpful advice from friends, and my default latex header was about 50% my own stuff and 50% copied from friends in my same major)

duped 1y ago
On a total tangent, I found out that my grandfather's university digitized their entire library a few years ago including his masters' thesis from 1948. Back then it was written with a typewriter and by hand for everything else. I bet he could have done something more advanced if he had modern computers, but looking at it 75 years later and seeing his handwriting on the page was moving more than the content itself.

generationP 1y ago

I guess monks were procrastinating likewise when they illuminated their manuscripts.

efitz 1y ago

I have often thought that LaTEX' distinctive font and formatting is either a virtue signal or an in-group signal.

thesuperbigfrog 1y ago

>> Why do CS doctoral candidates have such a fascination with typesetting? Probably because Donald Knuth created TeX and Leslie Lamport created LaTeX. Two of the greatest minds in Computer Science created the tools and used them to write papers and articles that are beautiful. Elegant ideas presented beautifully make reading and writing papers a nicer experience.

jwr 1y ago
Donald Knuth. Please.
- thesuperbigfrog 1y ago
  Corrected. Thank you. Autocorrect incorrected it for me.
  - ykonstant 1y ago
    >Autocorrect incorrected it for me. I am saving this entire sequence for later use.
rrgok 1y ago
It seems the grammar of the language was an after thought... It amazes me that he spent so much time perfecting the laying out algorithms that he could not come up with a sane language.

roshdodd 1y ago

A small, but important aspect of typesetting/WYSIWYM is the ability to break down a large document (like a thesis) into discrete sub-components. You could work on each section of your document in an individual .tex file and include it later in your top-level .tex file. This setup works well with VCS like git. Another ergonomic benefit is scripting. For example, if I'm running a series of scripts to generate figures/plots, LaTeX will pick up on the new files (if the filename is unmodified) and update those figures after recompiling. This is preferable to scrolling through a large document in MS Word and attempting to update each figure individually. As the size and figure count of your document increases, the ergonomics in MS Word degrade. The initial setup effort in LaTeX becomes minimal as this cost is "amortized" over the document.

gwervc 1y ago
> The initial setup effort in LaTeX becomes minimal as this cost is "amortized" over the document. I'm still sour about the 3 days it took me to have something usable for my thesis, and I was starting from an existing template. And it's still not exactly how I want it to be; I gave up on addressing a bug in the reference list.
- aeroevan 1y ago
  My school just had an official cls file, so my initial setup was just to download the template. So if that's where you're coming from (the journals I submitted to also had official templates), it's really minimal setup.
- otherme123 1y ago
  I wrote mine in Latex, along a team mate witting in Word. Her onboard was way faster, but she had to fight really hard in the end for Word not messing up everything on the smallest changes. Meanwhile, when I had a decent setup I could move a whole section from the intro to the results and the overall layout didn't suffer (floating tables, figures and code still in place, references still pointing where they should). I had code snippets with colour highlights imported from the actual source code (good luck trying that in Word). I could insert the companion papers with a single line of code per document, and they looked great. I even had a compilation flag to output the ereader version. My take was that Word enabled my team mate to kick a lot of cans down the road (but the cans eventually came back), while for me the reverse was true: build a decent foundation, and after that it was all pure write-cite-compile.

vkazanov 1y ago

I don't know about now but in 2000s anything even remotely math-related was PURE PAIN in Word-likes. In my master's there were like 30 pages of formulas, all interdependent. Typing/retyping these would take forever. Also, something as simple as having per-chapter files or working with an acceptable editor also helps.

cycomanic 1y ago

From watching people write their thesis in both latex and word, I'd say if anything it is the other way around. The people who write their thesis in word (or another wysiwyg editor) spend more time on their layout than the people writing in latex. Worse, they spend the time while writing, while latex allows for separation of tasks, which allows people to get into the flow much more easily. Sure, theoretically you can only concentrate on writing with word and ignore layout. In practice in takes a lot of discipline so instead you see people moving figures around putting spaces or returns to move a heading where they want to etc.. In particular as a way to procrastinate from actual writing.

yusina 1y ago
> Worse, they spend the time while writing, while latex allows for separation of tasks, I theory, yes. And that's also what I'm usually trying to do. What I have observed though with Latex folks is that they type 3 words and then look at the preview or re-compile to see if it looks good.
- gf000 1y ago
  I mean, as with code, the actual typing is not really the bottleneck. I also basically read the right pane rendered output, but mostly as a "reading out what I've written and evaluating whether it sounds good" most of the time, not really messing with layouting (especially that LaTeX and Typst does that very well, I can be reasonably sure that my paragraphs will have decent hypens and such).
  - imtringued 1y ago
    I have written some documents for which I have yet to even look at the 40+ pages produced in the PDF as output. I'll admit thought that I wasted some time finding a nice template before starting to write.

nxpnsv 1y ago

Well during 5 years of undergrad reports and papers, then 5 years of PhD thesis papers, you do tend to hoard some useful snippets, it is more of a byproduct than a fixation... at least for me.

__m 1y ago

It's like developers obsessing over their tools, so i get it.

jeffparsons 1y ago

Another reason to use LaTeX for papers back in the day was that Microsoft Word would routinely corrupt large documents in terrifying ways. Sometimes the root of the corruption existed in the document somehow long before any of it was visible, so even recovering from an old backup would just lead to the problem repeating. I recall the only way to properly "recover" an old backup was to copy it all via plain text (e.g. Notepad), and then back into a brand new Word document. This is all to say, if you're working on a theis or even a moderately large assignment, working in Word was not good for the nerves. Looking back, I probably should have just worked in plain text and then worried about formatting only at the very end, but ummm, yes, I guess another hapless victim did indeed fall into LaTeX's trap. :)

berti 1y ago
I’ve run into this exact issue several times with group projects at university in the 2010s, and each time recovery was copying chunks of plain text from backup copies into new documents as you say. Luckily by the time we got to the final year capstone project the whole group was happy to go with LaTeX. Not sure if these Word issues have even been fixed since.
- jeffparsons 1y ago
  I don't have a source for this, so take it with a huge grain of salt... but for some reason I have a memory of someone telling me that the older versions of Word saved and loaded documents by writing the bytes of in-memory data structures directly to files on disk, with not much in the way of marshalling or validation in the middle. Because it was fast, or something. You can imagine the kind of edge cases and oopsies that might result. The new versions at least serialise to some kind of monstrous XML representation of Word's internal state, so while it's not going to win any awards for world's most elegant document format, it should be slightly harder to corrupt in subtle ways.

oefrha 1y ago

Time spent on typesetting produces immediately visible results (however minor). Actual research doesn’t. It’s the classic feedback loop problem, so like you said, procrastinating students devote lots of time to largely pointless but seemingly productive activities like typesetting. I was there once. In hindsight all the tweaks were a complete waste of time. All I needed was amsart, plus beamer for slides.

blitzar 1y ago

Why does the premier word processing software (Microsoft Word) care so little about typesetting? I am biased however, as my thesis was written in LaTeX with all the plots regenerated at compile time from the raw data.

xigoi 1y ago
> Why does the premier word processing software (Microsoft Word) care so little about typesetting? Because its target userbase is people who don’t give a single shit about typography.
- blitzar 1y ago
  Yet every day all across the world the director is handing the document to their team telling them to work the weekend cleaning it up and make it look good.

eunos 1y ago

When I was in college I found out that I have better reading experience reading LaTeX typsetted books. That's why I prefer to read Springer published reference books rather than class recommended books.

_Algernon_ 1y ago

For me personally, I have yet to figure out how to get a word processor to have text be justified on both sides without inserting big gaps between words. I could use left justified but then the text ends up looking like a saw blade, which is still ugly. Latex' handling of floating figures and tables is also much better. And of course math notation is much nicer to work with in LaTeX (IMO).

electroly 1y ago
In Word, set the paragraph alignment to justified and enable automatic hyphenation. You can actually use LaTeX math notation in the equation editor in modern Word.

diffeomorphism 1y ago

This is not limited to CS or Latex in any way. Plenty of students spend a lot of time fiddling with word, powerpoint, note taking systems, citation management (which is surprisingly horrible in MS word), Adobe software etc.. Obvious reasons: - Your thesis is a major output of years of work. Of course you want it to look good. - You might think it superficial, but if the presentation looks bad, many people (subconsciously) interpret this as a lack of care and attention. Just like an email with typos feels unprofessional even if the content is otherwise fine. - Spending time on tooling feels productive even if it is not past a certain point. - People that are into typesetting now have an excuse to spend time on it. That said, in my experience people spent a few hours to learn "enough" latex several years ago and almost never write any macros. Simple reason: you work with other people and different journal templates, so the less custom code the better.

whatever1 1y ago

I give 0 fs about typesetting. But typical mainstream software just cannot freaking process a 500 page document with tables, figures, references, equations etc. If Word/Pages/Openoffice/GoogleDocs could do it, no sane person would sink 100’s of hours in debugging latex out of memory errors. But once you are in the latex world you start noticing how much prettier things can be. And then you end up sinking another thousand hours to perfectly aligning the summations in your multi-line equations.

stared 1y ago

First, you have to (or at least - you had to). I mean, it was the only way to sanely include a lot of formulae and managing bibliography. Then you discover that is id beautiful. Honestly, even using base style sets you above the typesetting of books. With some extra tweaks, it is beautiful. Did I spend a lot of time on LaTeX during my PhD. Sure! But (even counting in all masochism involved into dealing with LaTeX) I both cherish this time, and the results.

gf000 1y ago

Because it's not particularly fun to edit a typo and have your layout completely messed up 10 pages later, which you have no chance of noticing unless a full review. And publishing is the primary way academics communicate en large - it's kinda important to be able write your specific notation without resorting to drawing on paper.