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When you write your academic papers in Word (aussie.zone)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

I wrote my thesis in LaTeX, which is very unusual for my discipline. Now that I’m done with that, everything we’re doing it’s collaborative Word docs. Collaboration features in 365 have been transformative. (Remembering the dark old days of emailing the Word doc around like a hot potato.)

I’m very used to Word and can get it to do some great stuff that most people don’t even know about, but I wouldn’t touch it for something over 20,000 words.

As for LaTeX, I was fine once I got a good template going. Writing one sentence per line is a fantastic way to draft. But there are some fine tuning things that I remember took up a lot of time that I would have had no problem fixing in Word. I distinctly remember trying to get tables to look right when you had paragraphs or dot points in cells.

Oh, and that one reference whose URL refused to break in the line and instead just went off the page. I never found a fix for that.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago (1 children)

For LaTeX tables, use https://www.tablesgenerator.com/. It's a lifesaver. For URLs, I sometimes used footnotes and sometimes used embedded links.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Talking about tables, if you're not using tabularray in 2024, you're doing yourself a disservice IMHO. I almost use it exclusively except for text formatting as only tabularx supports page footnotes easily.

It has turned LaTeX tables from absolutely annoying to something that actually makes sense and looks nice and comes with most tools you want from tables. Except booktabs which it supports with an option. For example, it supports cells with line breaks, variable width columns, multiline and multi row cells - and even manages to align the text in them correctly. I don't know how Jianrui Lyu did this, but he did.

So yeah. Tables in LaTeX don't have to be pain.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

Thanks for this one! I’ll be giving it a go in my next project