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53 points

Git is like shit for Word documents

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25 points

.gitattributes can invoke Word on windows to diff versions, and there are plenty of open source scripts that can do it if you don’t have a copy of Word (or Windows) lying around.

But Word is like shit for papers. Use LaTeX instead.

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26 points

Just like word documents are shit for papers and theses/dissertations it turns out. The formatting alone is a nightmare.

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38 points
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8 points

I also have my reports in latex inside a git repo, complete with a makefile to generate graphs from csv containing simulation results. However I am too ashamed to publish the entire version control to a public repo

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#LyX 2.0 created this file. For more info see http://www.lyx.org/

Wait, I thought you guys did it manually…

Anyway, I should still learn it.

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1 point

It’s a editor helping you writing it, you cat still go inside and change things manually if you need/want to do that.

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11 points
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Why on Earth would you curse yourself with MS Office anyway, especially if writing docs is your professional responsibility?

Why not use Git+Markdown+Pandoc, have your copy, data and layout separate?

I understand that a lot of istitutions/companies impose stylistic/technical requirements for docs and publications, - still doesn’t mean you gotta stay married to the worst tooling.

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4 points

This is the way.

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6 points

Why on Earth would you curse yourself with MS Office anyway

idk it says .docx in OP’s image

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1 point

Oh sorry, I was too focused on calling out the silliness of the idea.

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2 points

This is the way.

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63 points

But better for LaTeX

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16 points

and then there are fucking PIs insisting on word files who never heard of tracked charges let alone of file naming conventions.

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10 points

I dunno what a PI is, but my honours thesis supervisor was the person who first introduced me to TeX. And gods, I wish I had known about it earlier in uni, or even back in high school. It is so useful when writing any sort of papers with sections and diagrams and bibliography.

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4 points

Then start writing in Markdown. Markdown is easier in syntax, supports LaTeX equations, has metadata and is in plain text so you can use git. And the killer feature is you can use pandoc to convert the markdown file into word, pptx, LaTeX pdfs, html etc. you can also setup a make file that runs pandoc when you ask like this

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28 points

Unzip the docx with a pre-commit hook

(This is not a serious suggestion)

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8 points

Still better than using file names.

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