Counterpoint: advisor said no.
“Just use Word, everyone else does. I have never heard of this latex thing, so must be just some trendy useless overengineered software that does Word’s job but worse. Word can track changes just fine, and you can leave comments.” proceeds to strikethrough, highlight, and inline comment everything instead of using either of those features “I want to read what you wrote, not fight technology” proceeds to email you three separate times after forgetting to attach v28 about how a graphic looks wrong because Word ate it
While correct in the sense of word and versioning via mail being a nightmare, I really don’t think you can expect anyone to learn latex just so they can comment in your document. I would have offered to send a pdf. Shoot me.
I would have offered to send a pdf
I would have never considered doing anything but sending a PDF. Even if they do know LaTeX. Unless they’re offering to help edit the code for me, what good is it? It’s objectively harder to read than the formatted PDF.
That said, marking up a PDF is much more difficult and does require more specialised software and know-how than editing plain text or even editing a Word document. So there are some advantages to it.
This is exactly it. My advisor wanted a word doc to edit, not a PDF. I wasn’t quite snooty enough to think that he should learn latex. Though, if he ever took the time to learn (what time?), I’m sure the writing process would be unbearable for other reasons not entirely related.
you can still use word with git. it’s versioning first, diffing and merging only where possible. since you probably won’t branch you won’t need the latter, though.
Preaching to the choir. “But Box already supports ‘versioning’, why use a confusing hacker tool instead?”
oh I see, you have a shared drive. i assumed you send it around as emails.
Missing diffs is a problem, though.
I don’t get how Microsoft owns GitHub yet hasn’t figured out any way to actually create a spec that would be git compatible for Excel, Word, and PowerPoint files yet.
I’m going to send you a pdf, you van email me back with the notes or comments in the PDF itself, whatever souts your fancy, and I’ll keep those notes and send you a new PDF with them.
I did this and I had no issues with any of the thesises I have submitted in my bachelors or masters.
First year calculus teacher, thank you SO much for forcing us to write submissions in latex.
Also, overleaf is a thing, this is not like my 1st year of uni, this 11 years later or so. If your fucking professor never heard of latex they are just bad at academia and shouldn’t be teaching honestly. It’s not just about the field knowledge.
I’m going to send you a pdf, you van email me back with the notes or comments in the PDF itself, whatever souts your fancy, and I’ll keep those notes and send you a new PDF with them.
I do this, but from Word.
I learned Latex for my master thesis. Never used it again afterwards, except for my resumé.
The weird part is that most modern office software has version control built right in.
And I still do this with all my files anyway.
Use date/time in your file name,using GMT:
Metrics of Sales 2024-05-22_14-29.docx
Very unlikely to have 2 docs with the same down-to-the-minute time stamp in the name.
If you think this process involves enough mindpower to check the time, let alone figure out where the dashes are in whatever language keyboard setup I’m using at the time, you are wildly overestimating how much care goes into doing this.
Well, if you can’t be bothered to ensure file names mean something, then you get to enjoy the results.
In the Real World®, sometimes files get shared and traded around, and conversations happen about them, and you need to be able to quickly verify you’re looking at the same doc.
We can’t all be connected to the same version control system.
I generally do this on my NAS, combined with nightly and bi-weekly backups, plus a 6-mo safety backup, to a backup drive. Also, basic off-site nightly backups for important stuff. If I worked on really important stuff that required lots of versioning, though, I’d probably go with a versioning system instead of inserting the date.
I should write my resume in LaTeX.
Do you have a good LaTeX template for it. I did make a data driven based LaTeX pdf for my resume but it’s a nightmare when applying for jobs these days, since they have that ATS parser nonsense, which will throw the entire resume down if it isn’t as very plain and boring word document without much formatting.
I know it’s a long video but you have no idea what’s possible.
HTML. Some it people have their CV on their personal website.
(And CSS and JS, I guess)
I have enjoyed switching mine to HTML format which I then generate a PDF from. The only downside is that different browsers can render stuff slightly different, but that’s normally fixable with one line css change. And it’s not like I need to update my resume constantly on different machines.
I was on Word, then LibreOffice Writer.
Now thinking of making it a markdown source, with CSS styling to get an HTML based PDF.
This way, the same source can be used on a webpage with different generation code.
This seems to me, to be simpler than LATEX, but still good enough for a resume.
There is a standard called json-resume with a lot of generators for html and pdf or react-resume which is more like a CMS (not entirely sure about spelling, to lazy to search for it now)
I like this idea. What tool do you use for converting the markdown to html?
git tag "FINAL FINAL FINAL DRAFT - v20"
Git is like shit for Word documents
and then there are fucking PIs insisting on word files who never heard of tracked charges let alone of file naming conventions.
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.
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
That’s why we wrote our thesis in LaTeX: https://github.com/jonte/GGS-report/blob/a9d9d20bcc22a524629e371ce5984f131490b743/report.lyx#L362
#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.
.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.
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.
Why on Earth would you curse yourself with MS Office anyway
idk it says .docx in OP’s image
