this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2024
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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] 21 points 4 months ago

During my studies I worked at the faculty, „typesetting“ the following for my professor: https://www.amazon.de/Evangelische-Akademie-DDR-Bildungsst%C3%A4tten-Widerstand/dp/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.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 months ago (6 children)

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...

[–] [email protected] 20 points 4 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

word is fine if you know how to use it

But most don't.
I had to rewrite the CV my job coach gave me from scratch. She's a professional and used line breaks for spacing and texts blocks for grouping. Because she didn't know about some key concepts (like frames or line height) you learn from web editing.

and a word processor that can give me compile time errors is not one i'm going to use with much enthusiasm.

That's what happened after i saved her mess (written in MS Office .docx) once in Libre Office and loaded it again. To be fair, this was the document formats fault.

[–] marcos 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

i learned it

i am built different

[–] [email protected] 20 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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.

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

It's the most reachable thing. Markdown feels like a toy for many (not me)

Oh yeah. Markdown. While it does have a place, the limitations on top of my head as to why I wouldn't use it in bigger projects:

  1. There is no standard in that sense, but multiple dialects / flavors
  2. No support for stuff you might want, e.g. alphabetical ordered lists.

It's fine for when you know what output you produce, like for Lemmy or in a wiki or whatever. But once you want more control, you lack options or need to rely on non-"standard" (is there was one) solutions to somehow achieve it.

I think, as an easy, yet powerful solution, AsciiDoc is better-suited.

[–] rustydomino 9 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Word is not horrible as a word processor. The issue is that people try to use it to do typesetting, reference management, and all kinds of non word processor shit. And Microsoft encourages this. If you understand what the tool does it’s really a decent tool.

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

If you understand what the tool does it’s really a decent tool.

But most don't. Which makes it a bad tool.

[–] rustydomino 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

A screwdriver doesn't become a bad screwdirver just because someone is using it to drive nails. There is a lot to hate about Microsoft, but its basic Office tools are really quite good, when used in the manner in which they were designed. There really are no meaningful competitors for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Outlook as an email client is not great, but its strength is calendaring.

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

A screwdriver doesn't become a bad screwdirver just because someone is using it to drive nails.

But if it looks like a hammer...

Office loks like an extended text editor but hides the xml aspect. No wonder most people use it as an extended text editor, doing formatting wrong.

[–] helpImTrappedOnline 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Words problem is partly because they tried to make it into a swiss army knife, but it just ended up being one of those goofy "multi-tool pens", that don't do anything good.

Okay, maybe thats an bit of an exaggeration, Word is amazing for text and pretty much any text related formatting you can think of*, but the second you want to add an image, it becomes a nightmare.

*from a non-technical person/ease of the GUI perspective. I know LaTek is much better getting your end goal efficiently, but Word can still get you there...eventually.

[–] marcos 4 points 4 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Yes. LibreOffice is better in every way.

And don't reply with "but it has problems opening Word files". That's cause the Word format doesn't follow any standards. Nothing but Word can correctly open Word files (and even that only works well if they were made with the same version of Word).

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

Hmm, I'll check it out, but my field passes around Word files quite often. Might be a tough sale if the user can't find a workaround. Still, can't be mad at free software.

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

It is the easiest way to let other people participate via comments and annotated changes.

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

Have you ever used Google Docs for that? Vastly superior. You don't even have to send your updated version to anyone... They can see it and work on it with you in real time.

SharePoint promised to make this same functionality work but never got it right. Same for the web version of office. They're horrible compared to Google Docs and there's supposedly even better collab word processing tools.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Google Docs does not integrate in the typical European (or German) company and can not be deployed on premise.

If you can not control the update path (besides other obv. shortcomings) of the product it is already in a bad light when considering within an enterprise environment.

Since the AI rush I now encounter American software named alongside in requirements like:

"isn't an american, russian or chinese product". These requirements are stated by lawyers and product owners explicitly beforehand.

[–] thechadwick 14 points 4 months ago

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This post brought to you by the open source Zotero committee.

[–] MewtwoLikesMemes 12 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

LibreOffice FTW!!!

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

Needs collab features somehow 🥲

[–] MewtwoLikesMemes 2 points 4 months ago

Agreed.

[–] iAvicenna 11 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Anyone who collaborates with more than five people on articles but doesn't use automatic reference&citation management is just insane(ly inefficient). I collaborate with lab people who cant use latex and can only use google docs. My absolute requirement was using a citation management extension (like paperpile). Now I also require that we use crossref for figure numbering and referring otherwise I am out.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago

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.

[–] [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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (3 children)

As someone who dislikes M$ word, but begrudgingly uses it for lab reports. Can someone tell me what LaTeX for citations is? I know latex as that math protocol for my personal markdown notes.

Also what other software is useful for writing formatted papers?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago

Math formatting is a very small piece of what LaTeX does.

The common tool for managing citation in a LaTeX document is called BibTeX. You enter details about your sources, and BibTeX will create your bibliography and will also make it easier to cite things in your paper.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Also what other software is useful for writing formatted papers?

Nothing is better than LaTeX/XeTeX + BiBTeX to my knowledge.

Also I advocate against using overleaf as someone would suggest. I used texlive before switching to overleaf and we wrote a few papers via overleaf free tier. Sadly enough, now these papers can't be compiled because there is not enough computational resources on a free tier. Moreover, the documents are neither versioned nor blamed which makes me difficult to go back and reflect on the papers.

I'm back to writing papers now and we're using GitHub private repository + LaTeX+ BiBTeX which allows us to overcome all possible limitations of overleaf.

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

Nothing is better than LaTeX/XeTeX + BiBTeX to my knowledge.

LuaLaTeX + Biber

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Go to overleaf.com and say goodbye to a chunk of your weekend. 😉

[–] WormFood 5 points 4 months ago

typeset my thesis using latex, biber and zotero. Very painless, the only slightly painful part was configuring the character encoding

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

Let me introduce Typst: https://github.com/typst/typst.

[–] qaz 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Just started using it today and it's pretty neat

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I'm using it for a year and it came a long way. Though still in beta and still have some major bummers (which require hacking). But it only came out in 2023. The next update should add a ton of QoL things, so this will be pretty exciting.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

It's still rough around the edges, but at least it seems to understand what LaTeX did well, and what people didn't like about it.

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

Oh, that is 100% true. The mental model (and syntax) is much, much better, but the feature set is smol (for academic and legal stuff).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

i just copy the links to a text file as i write and when i'm done with the paper i just paste it at the end and format it correctly

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Btw, https://asciidoctor.org/docs/asciidoc-writers-guide/

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

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