Hacker News Reader

I used LaTeX all the time at university. It made citation/bib easy, it made writing reports for mathematics way more efficient, and the presentation of the documents were beautiful. I had a prof rave about how nice the my paper looked once when I turned it in.

I wish I had stuck with it afterward. I write enough that it would make my work less painful, but I let the skill laps. This article is making me think I should pick it back up.

View on HN

I really wish I had bitten the bullet and learned LaTeX in college. At the time, trying to actually write a research paper start-to-finish in Word was too painful, too prone to crash and lose data, and badly incompatible with using version control (CVS and SVN, at the time), and so I settled on a process where I'd write the whole thing in plain-text, and insert my citations in inline parentheses, then when I was all done, have to go back and try to format the thing in Word with proper footnotes and formatting. More than a few times, it took nearly as long to get that post-processing right for printing than it did to actually write the paper.

I'm not in a science department; we have hard requirements to hand in Word documents at times. It hurts my soul.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com