• drre@feddit.de
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        5 months ago

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

        • Zagorath@aussie.zone
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          5 months ago

          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.

          • Hundun@beehaw.org
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            5 months ago

            Check out Typst (a newer TeX-like layout engine) if you have time, I’m interested in your opinion. I find it a bit simpler to use than TeX.

            • Zagorath@aussie.zone
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              5 months ago

              Un(?)fortunately I don’t have much cause these days for either TeX or some equivalent to it. Anything I’m writing today is simple enough that it doesn’t need anything more sophisticated than markdown for formatting.

        • prashanthvsdvn@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          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

          • drre@feddit.de
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            5 months ago

            yeah this is what i used for some projects, i.e. rmarkdown which also integrates the statistics part

    • steventhedev@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      .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.

    • dream_weasel@sh.itjust.works
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      5 months ago

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

    • Hundun@beehaw.org
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      5 months ago

      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.