There have been multiple accounts created with the sole purpose of posting advertisement posts or replies containing unsolicited advertising.

Accounts which solely post advertisements, or persistently post them may be terminated.

WhiteHotaru ,

During my studies I worked at the faculty, „typesetting“ the following for my professor: www.amazon.de/…/3374024653

>700 pages in Microsoft Word in 2006. I knew about LaTeX, but was not familiar enough to convert everything to LaTeX and integrate last minute changes on top. The authors of course only knew word and the professor did editing and typesetting in parallel.

Afterwards all my academic text were written in LaTeX with Bibtex and I never looked back.

riskable ,
@riskable@programming.dev avatar

At this point I’m curious: WTF is Microsoft Word even good for? It’s like the worst-in-class tool for all things word processing, page layout, typesetting, embedding other stuff into the document, and more. Why are people still torturing themselves with this garbage? Just because it’s there? I mean, Wordpad is there too (though maybe not for much longer) but nobody uses that. It’s also garbage but still…

MadhuGururajan ,

It’s the most reachable thing. Markdown feels like a toy for many (not me) and people outside of academia look at you kinkily if you suggest latex and bibtex.

Beegzoidberg ,

What do you use?

polonius-rex ,

skill issue

word is fine if you know how to use it

none of its direct competitors have the same feature set, and a word processor that can give me compile time errors is not one i'm going to use with much enthusiasm

marcos ,

Nobody knows how to use Word. It’s unlearnable.

But hell, it’s good in pretending to work the way people think it works. All the way until it blows and destroys all the work.

balderdash9 ,

People use what they know. Are there better (free) alternatives?

marcos ,

It’s the best in convincing people they know how to use it.

liss_up ,

I wrote my thesis in LibreOffice and I would have been SOL if not for Zotero. Who cares what people use? Use what works.

azimir ,

I use Google Docs for anything simple (1-3 pages), and if it has no citations or more than 2 figures. After that I upgrade to LaTeX.

I had a conference demand a docx file for the paper submission. I figured “fine it can’t be that bad to use word for a simple 8 page publication” but boy was I wrong! It was torture trying to get it formatted and arranged properly. Every part of the word tool is weird and clumsy.

Oh, and they’ve completely broken the original GUI WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) premise of a GUI style editor. The PDF it creates often doesn’t look anything like what the document looks like on the screen.

I dropped a note on the conference organizers about the docx requirement. I don’t have that many hours to fuck around with bad tools so I can attend your venue. I’ll just go to a conference that doesn’t torture us to participate.

Imgonnatrythis ,

Pretty partial to Mendeley but shame it’s close to dead at this point.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • [email protected]
  • random
  • lifeLocal
  • goranko
  • All magazines
    •