this post was submitted on 22 May 2024
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LPT Do it. (mander.xyz)
submitted 4 months ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to c/science_memes@mander.xyz
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[–] ornery_chemist@mander.xyz 22 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (7 children)

Counterpoint: advisor said no.

"Just use Word, everyone else does. I have never heard of this latex thing, so must be just some trendy useless overengineered software that does Word's job but worse. Word can track changes just fine, and you can leave comments." proceeds to strikethrough, highlight, and inline comment everything instead of using either of those features "I want to read what you wrote, not fight technology" proceeds to email you three separate times after forgetting to attach v28 about how a graphic looks wrong because Word ate it

[–] pufferfisherpowder@lemmy.world 5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

While correct in the sense of word and versioning via mail being a nightmare, I really don't think you can expect anyone to learn latex just so they can comment in your document. I would have offered to send a pdf. Shoot me.

[–] Zagorath@aussie.zone 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I would have offered to send a pdf

I would have never considered doing anything but sending a PDF. Even if they do know LaTeX. Unless they're offering to help edit the code for me, what good is it? It's objectively harder to read than the formatted PDF.

That said, marking up a PDF is much more difficult and does require more specialised software and know-how than editing plain text or even editing a Word document. So there are some advantages to it.

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[–] fushuan@lemm.ee 4 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I'm going to send you a pdf, you van email me back with the notes or comments in the PDF itself, whatever souts your fancy, and I'll keep those notes and send you a new PDF with them.

I did this and I had no issues with any of the thesises I have submitted in my bachelors or masters.

First year calculus teacher, thank you SO much for forcing us to write submissions in latex.

Also, overleaf is a thing, this is not like my 1st year of uni, this 11 years later or so. If your fucking professor never heard of latex they are just bad at academia and shouldn't be teaching honestly. It's not just about the field knowledge.

[–] Hagdos@lemmy.world 2 points 4 months ago

I'm going to send you a pdf, you van email me back with the notes or comments in the PDF itself, whatever souts your fancy, and I'll keep those notes and send you a new PDF with them.

I do this, but from Word.

I learned Latex for my master thesis. Never used it again afterwards, except for my resumé.

[–] WhatIsH2O4@lemmy.ml 2 points 4 months ago

That's assuming they are competent enough to even use a PDF.

[–] What_Religion_R_They@hexbear.net 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

wait, your advisor looks at your work?

[–] ornery_chemist@mander.xyz 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Dude was shall we say, hands on about certain things. My dissertation is still embargoed because he is paranoid about being scooped. Joke's on him, everything that hasn't been published is not exciting enough to meet his own metric for publishability.

[–] 7bicycles@hexbear.net 2 points 4 months ago

galaxy-brain: don't even talk to your advisors, just hand in a finished PDF

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[–] jol@discuss.tchncs.de 11 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I learned LaTeX just so I could effectively use git in it.

[–] lud@lemm.ee 3 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I kinda want to learn LaTeX but I rarely write anything and I hate doing it so won't have much use for it. It's pretty neat though.

I also saw that there was a way to use LaTex to generate PowerPoint which seems extremely useful because PowerPoint is extremely annoying to use.

[–] jol@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 4 months ago

Yes, I also mde my. Thesis slides in LaTeX which was nice as I coukd reuse the figures.

[–] IrritableOcelot@beehaw.org 2 points 4 months ago

I mean yes you can use beamer to make slides, but it is a lot less flexible than ppt/LibreOffice Present.

[–] model_tar_gz@lemmy.world 8 points 4 months ago 
git checkout -b final_version_revised2_REALLYFINALTHISTIME

git commit -am “holy fuck I hope this really is the last edit” 

git push
[–] Turun@feddit.de 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

git tag "FINAL FINAL FINAL DRAFT - v20"

[–] CCF_100@sh.itjust.works 3 points 4 months ago (2 children)

docx files are actually zip archives with xml in them

[–] petersr@lemmy.world 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Let me tell you something. I cannot tell you what company, but I have been tasked with putting Excel files in git "because they are just zip archives with xml" and it is just a disaster. Everytime you save the document it will save certain parts of the xml code in arbitrary ways (like each image is in a list and the order of that list is random everytime), some metadata is re-written everytime like time of last modified and finally all the xml files are one single line. The git diffs are complete useless and noisy and just looking at the Excel file will cause git to consider it updated. So sure, you can use git to snapshot you Office documents... But just don't.

[–] lengau@midwest.social 1 points 4 months ago (2 children)

If you are, like I once was, the poor fool who has to maintain a bunch of VBA macros... Extract them into files and source control those. Make a script to extract them and to put them back, and use git-lfs for the actual workbook if you need a template workbook.

Now pardon me, I need to add this to the agenda for my next therapy.

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[–] MacNCheezus@lemmy.today 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (15 children)

Doesn't matter, to git they are still binary files, which means it'll check in each revision as an entirely new copy.

Yes, you might only see the most recent one in your working directory, but under the hood, all the other ones are still there in the repo.

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[–] SeattleRain@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago (2 children)

What's a good way to learn about Latex and Git. I've tried learning on my own but it's very overwhelming.

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[–] MudMan@fedia.io 1 points 4 months ago (6 children)

The weird part is that most modern office software has version control built right in.

And I still do this with all my files anyway.

[–] Steve@startrek.website 1 points 4 months ago

Its just not trustworthy

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[–] TheReturnOfPEB@reddthat.com 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

"Delete this repository" ate my homework.

[–] notthebees@reddthat.com 1 points 4 months ago (7 children)

I should write my resume in LaTeX.

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[–] lowleveldata@programming.dev 1 points 4 months ago (8 children)

Git is like shit for Word documents

[–] steventhedev@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago

.gitattributes can invoke Word on windows to diff versions, and there are plenty of open source scripts that can do it if you don't have a copy of Word (or Windows) lying around.

But Word is like shit for papers. Use LaTeX instead.

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