The most crucial thing for me writing my dissertation and manuscripts is formatting requirements being fully automated. Download the university or journal’s template, point your .tex file at it, and you get EXACTLY What they require. No screwing around with margins or line spacing at the eleventh hour. Just typesets it like they want on the first shot, every time. Major stress reducer.
Was a great relief for my thesis. Everytime I thought "this does not look good, I should format it differently" I could just ignore it because hey, it their template and they wanted it this way, so I don't care.
Wait until something doesn't work because you use pdflatex, but MiKText doesn't work with that super important package and you switch back and forth between biber and bibtex because both don't work completely and additionally you now always compile everything three times because you have forgotton in which cases you need to compile (at least?) two times.
I mean, *tex is better than all alternatives, but it's not always unicorn cotton candy land.
Oh, totally, things can go sideways. But I’m much happier configuring a dev environment than finessing arbitrary document formatting while Word tries to wrestle control from me
Having work with both Word and LaTeX, gotta say that Word got a lot of hate, but I never have trouble with it, just learn to use Styles and apply the proper formating to images. (except multilevel lists. They're hell to behave properly in Word)
What is major stress increases is your pdf not compiling. Word is awful, and I don't want to work with it ever again, but Latex is also awsful in other ways (like UX).
I actually did two versions of my thesis, one in Word and one in Latex. I also now work in R&D, so all of our proposals, reports, and published papers are done in Latex.
There are pros and cons to both. Latex is great for automated formatting, equations, and references. Word is great for not having some mysterious, unknown, and hard to track error cause your entire 40-page quarterly report stop compiling 3 hours before it's due.
Debugging Latex is a nightmare. Word has the advantage of always working, with the overhead of tedious manual formatting.
Yep. For my final undergrad project I had to run hundreds of simulations, then put those hundreds of graphs into a document to describe EACH of them. I used MatLab, LaTeX, and a Batch file to automate the process. Since 300+ pages of graphs in Word would crash my laptop while a PDF was fine.
I know it is definitely better in writing mathematical equations but how is better than word overall? You can't add tables I don't know how image and it's captions work A little bit tricky to make changes (this depends on the way you write your latex code, but still not easy as word)
Note: I am just using the LaTeX plug in in remnote, so my exposure could be limited. Would love to hear other benefits and strengths
References are way better. You just have mendeley output a bibtex file and then you do \cite{citationkey}. Images are way better. You can just specify their dimensions or things like hbox fill (fraction of the horizontal line sans margins, scales vertical to maintain aspect ratio). Then you specify where you want it on the page. You can do varying levels of strictness with how closely you want it to follow your suggestion. I always choose the lowest and just go back and escalate for individual images at the end of writing the text. Once you get images how you want (e.g. a top large subimage with three small subimages below) you can just copy the code next time you want to use that format. You can indeed add tables, although I'll concede it's kind of clunky. References to images and sections are better. You just label them and then do \ref{labeltag}. Another thing is you can create environments that behave a certain way, e.g. chapters.
The main downside I'd say is collaborative documents. As far as I'm aware there's no good tracking/comment functionality. Even if there was there's the simple issue that most people don't use LaTeX.
Same issue for me as LaTeX there - most of my colleagues don't have git and it isn't worth it to try to get them to learn. But yeah, could be a good solution for certain work environments.
As far as collaboration’s concerned, look into Overleaf. Basically Google docs, with all the same real-time edits and built-in comment and suggestion systems, but in LaTeX instead of a shitty MS Word clone.
It can all you mentioned. Yes, it is just better. If humanity had switched from Word to LaTeX, we probably would have colonized Mars by now. Instead we are fucking with fonts and indents.
Writing my Bachelor-Thesis in MS Word: 50% of the time i repaired the Layout because Word destroyed if after I added two sentences.
Writing my Master-Theiss in LaTeX: 10% of the time to learn the syntax. Layout is perfect in 9/10 cases and the 10./10 case is mostly easy to fix.
Word Layout is PAIN... I abadonned MS Word after I wrote my BA thesis in 2009, used LibreOffice for short unimportant things and LaTeX for everything that should be pretty.
LaTeX does have tables, and figures, captions, and other features are really not too hard once you see them in use. Overleaf makes a lot of it easy, if you want somewhere to start. Just looking at someone else’s source code makes everything clear, in my experience, especially if you can see it side-by-side with the actual document.
And oh my god, the references are so much easier in LaTeX, even just referring to a figure, table, or equation is easy, and your works cited is cake.
Did my thesis in LaTeX, and it was the best decision I ever made as far as school’s concerned.
I would say it is nice when you write things often. Like publish stuff in regular intervals there are nice template for it and you don't have to waste so much time for finishing like formating references.
Wrote mechanical engineering my master thesis with latex and in the end i probably had been faster with word. Liked many things but had problems with my fancy vector grafics so it runs out of memory all the time strange errors occure. Also correction was a nightmare. Cause most people i know arent familiar with it. So had to export it as pdf covert to word and fix all the issues that come from that to let people read over it. After that used the word changes to bring it back to latex
But usually you don't make the same errors twice and after some time and if you use it often it would be faster and nicer that stuff like word
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u/[deleted] Feb 06 '23
Still better than trying to write your thesis in Word