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Comment by analog31 | Hacker News Reader

It must depend on the field. A close relative of mine is a PhD advisor in a science field. He's hands-off about it, but is also aware of what his students are doing. If asked, he recommends MS Word, which is also what he uses for his manuscripts.

My own experience was as a physics student, 30 years ago. Students paid a heavy price for being able to print and submit the entire thesis with no manual intervention. The students who chose LaTeX took the longest at it. I didn't have access to a Unix terminal anyway, and banged out my thesis on an MS-DOS machine. Whatever my word processor couldn't support, I added by hand. The readers were OK with this.

My solution to all typographic problems was "take care of it after defense." I spent a few days after my defense getting my copy to be ready for duplication, including sticking all of the page numbers on with glue because I couldn't make inline figures work.

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Sure, one can write a thesis in MS Word. It has come a long way with support for large documents. But I still find its referencing clumsy, opaque and unstable.

For example, automatic updates of figure numbers in captions and references: Countless times it failed on me and I had to manually recreate the fields, bookmarks, cross-references, and whatnot is needed.

Bibliographies are hardly doable without an external tool that comes with its own headaches.

Typography in MS word is quite decent these days, though. Anyway, the content of a PhD thesis shouldn't be judged by its typography (as long it maintains a readable standard).

I think things have changed a bit since you were a physics student. Conferences hand out latex templates and expect you to use them (wish they would also hand out an overleaf template. If any conference organizers are reading this...). Universities also do this with their undergrad/masters/thesis templates. Arxiv expects you to upload tex source code (it'll reject a PDF if you wrote that PDF with latex. It also is terrible at error messaging which is a huge pain since submission timing is for some stupid reason important). I'm sure latex is also easier than back then, but there's a lot of momentum in the latex direction that I think would be really difficult to undo. Even paper acceptance is highly influenced by formatting and figure design. I think it is just a different world as we have a lot more researchers now than even 30 years ago.

Amusingly, some things haven't changed. I was the first student to turn in a word processed term paper at my college, I think in 1983. And I estimate that I earned as much as a full letter grade on my GPA because the prof's had never thought about how to grade a paper that was 100% mechanically perfect. It didn't hurt that I had become a very fast typist thanks to programming. I selectively chose courses where the grading was primarily based on written work, something that most students feared.

I'm sorry, I'm failing to realize why this story is about how things have/n't changed w.r.t. word/latex usage withing the last 30 years in academic writing.

Your comment about formatting and figure design influencing acceptance, triggered my droll little reminiscence. I certainly wasn't disagreeing with you.

> If asked, he recommends MS Word, which is also what he uses for his manuscripts.

My university actually required that people use MS Word for their thesis, which seemed to work out okay for many, despite such a top down approach not seeming like the best option.

Personally, I used LibreOffice anyways and while it was certainly as clunky as Word (especially once images, diagrams and formulas got involved), it was also passable.

Except that things like bibliography refused to work correctly and completely broke, about which I wrote a bit of a rant: https://blog.kronis.dev/everything%20is%20broken/libreoffice...

LaTeX has, like Org Mode, this mythical aura of being super hard. However, replicating the functionality of Word is trivial and takes an hour or two for a savvy computer user to grasp.

There's always Overleaf, Pandoc or LyX to make things even simpler. LyX in particular deserves to be better known.

Complex things, like TikZ, are of course difficult and time consuming. But those are impossible using Word.

IMHO, the biggest advantages of LaTeX are reproducibility and reference management. Big Word documents are quite fragile. And reference management is a mess.

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