A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
Clearly flawed methodology.
The value of LaTeX isn't productivity when making a single document.
The value of LaTeX is productivity when you need to reuse past work, or update it with the latest data and figures, or make a collection of similar documents.
And the ease with which you can generate hundreds of lines of page with a simple text template and code.
Right.
Do your writing in text files accompanying the image files (figures). The LaTeX code is just instructions for how to render the various text sources arrange the figures on pages to be printed or rendered as slides.
It separates the flowing creative experience of writing and documenting what happened in the experiment from the fiddling creative experience of rendering, editing, and presentation to ensure that the text and figures line up appropriately and are on appropriate pages.
Separating fact finding from presentation is an important barrier in the scientific method.
Yup. When I rerun my things, in latex I just overwrite the plots file (pdf/png) and compile latex. In word I have to find where it was and replace it there. It's way easier on latex if you make your code just write plot files in the same location.
You can use a symlink to point to the figures directory of a certain run of the code. Add git history to the mix, and now you have an auditable record of what version of the code's output ended up in each version of the paper.
You can be so anal and precise about everything.
Yup simlink is so nice. I sometimes use it for color vs monocrome plots. Change simlink and compile. Although I learned you can also use if statements in latex, I use that now.
Exactly. Give them a bunch of setup, let them set it up as normal.
Then tell everyone to resize the second pictures and move all images from the side of the page to the right. Then see who does it first.
Storing text in binary formats like word docs instead of plain text like latex makes git version control unusable.
/begin{outrage}
How dare they!?
/end{outrage}
latex exists to make your text look more professional, not to make you more productive, duh.
pig lipstick
I've wasted hours of my life, trying to insert an image in a word document without word compressing it, making it illegible, only to find out that it's impossible. I can't even imagine anything being worse at this point
Sure, but have you ever wasted hours of your life checking the documentation for the exact string of case-sensitive letters that force LaTeX not to yeet your image 45 pages further into the document, because that’s THE MOST PERFECT PLACE to put it?
I never get these comments... I never had these problems in Word and I'm using Office since Office 2003. However what I did repeatedly see are users who, although Office has many possible workflows chose the most complex one and were then too stubborn to change
Sure, i can't rule out user error, especially since im not a word expert. But the "searching for an alternative workflow part" is the one that actually takes the most time.
In the end, the "solution" that worked was to cut up the diagram and put it on multiple pages. Sure, it's not elegant and maybe word had some built in features for this, but i couldn't find them.
Just write everything in markdown and use pandoc to type set.
.md .tex .md
That is what Obsidian is for.
Maybe it takes more time because it allows more editing control over the finished product. The report of an enjoyable user experience for latex would back this up since users were able to produce what they wanted instead of being limited to using words jank as editing and just giving up or using a shitty template. Test against plain text entry I bet there is a positive correlation between limited features and total word count
Word definitely has its niche.
However, I find for many of my tasks, LaTeX or Typst just make sense. I don’t need to worry about out of date figures. I can customize styling instantly. I can track my changes with Git. Grammar checking is rough tho. lsp-like grammar checking would revolutionize my world lol.
I can personally attest that I transitioned to LaTeX from Word, when Word wouldn’t handle equations correctly, or would crash when I had too many. It doesn’t matter if I can put out 50 word equations faster than LaTeX if I’m breaking my flow state to restart my editor.
They overlap in their ecosystem niches but in no way is one a complete replacement for the other. LaTeX has a larger niche than Word which makes it a really safe default.
“Nobody ever got fired for choosing React”
I’ve done a bit more searching and it seems ltex-lsp-plus is the best out there for lsp grammar checking. It’s 1000x better than nothing, though the false negative rate is a bit high for my taste :)
needs more jpeg.
but on a serious note, how do you version control an msoffice/libreoffice document? you can't just put it in git, the repo will get huge quickly
docx is just a zip of xml files. if you add some hooks to git, you could make it unzip it, commit the xml files, then when checking out rezip it into a docx automatically.
Thanks, I hate it
git hooks! Totally forgot it, that sounds interesting
I think libreoffice has an uncompressed format for version control if I remember correctly
I've been questioning the benefits every time someone insisted that I should use latex. Now I have scientific evidence that it won't make my life better!
Use latex. It will make your life better.
Well, latex users reported enjoying the software, so I will give you that credit.
Now judge it by how good the end result looks
But also.... The fuck?
I used it for resumes and assignments in school. Like others said I wasn't trying to save time but to make things look more professional.
I'm imagining what it would be like to write a page long {align} in word and it's terrifying.
Typst >>>>>.
But still, Word sucks ass.
This is an outrage! 🧐
I wonder how typst performs in this regard. That said, does anyone know how to more easily create a diagram?
I’m not sure what kind of diagram you’re after, but Typst has Cetz which is graphing + arbitrary drawing of shapes, paths, splines, etc.
Typst also has fletcher “maker of arrows” for diagrams which is my personal fave for the work I do
Well, duh, I obviously learned LaTeX only to be less productive and procrastinate more. And when I was getting somewhere with it, I had to switch to RMarkdown instead to be able to procrastinate even more! Imagine actually having to think about the content of your work, ugh :/
sample size seems small but im no expert