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Comment by santaclaus | Hacker News Reader

> They publish LaTeX-templated Word docs as paywalled PDFs.

Somewhat tangential, but do CS academics actually write papers in Word? During my grad school days I did not encounter a single paper 'typeset' in Word. Writing was usually done with a LaTeX and and a makefile in a git repo.

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Just adding another data point: When I was in CS grad school (late 90s), everyone used LaTeX (including the journals). Then I started hanging out with neuroscience people, and everyone (including the journals) used Word+Endnote, with basically ad-hoc treatment of the figures.

How does Word work out when multiple collaborators are writing at once? One of the cool things about version controlling LaTeX is that conflicts, merges, etc are dealt with using standard tools, which is super helpful when you have collaborators across the globe furiously writing and redoing figures a few days before a deadline.

with office365 it's not terrible, but it's worse than google docs or quip imo. i've run into trouble esp when some people edit from web and some edit from desktop.

Well when you deal with merge conflicts in Word, your standard tool is Word. I don't think you can get much more standard than Office when you consider collaborators outside academia. It's not great for simultaneous editing (although I think this is now possible in 365).

It is, however, very good for tracking changes over versions. Many academics are not familiar with git, diff and so on and it's nice to easily see historical edits in the document. For simple documents like abstracts, it's much easier to send a Word document than it is to send a tex file and assume that everyone on consortium is going to be able to compile it (especially if you work with industry).

    > although I think this is now possible in 365

It would want to have improved since I used it a couple years ago in Word 2013. The main problem was with citation managers - Word would give a paragraph lock to you whenever you edited a paragraph, and it would only unlock that paragraph after a save (either auto or manual). Of course, when you have a citation manager, they have the habit of changing all the paragraphs when you insert a new citation that changes the numbering (ie. [1] becomes [2], etc.).

Word is awkward for this. (At least the offline versions of Word are---I've never tried the online ones.) Word does have a "track changes" feature, which is invaluable when you have multiple authors, at least in the absence of 'traditional' source control tools. I don't think many neuroscientists have tried a LaTeX-git workflow and rejected it---I think the learning curve of LaTeX and git are steep enough that few have tried it. I myself prefer LaTeX, but I think you'll admit it also has its frustrations. And any time I suggesting using it to my neuroscience coworkers, they looked at me like I had lobsters coming out of my ears.

The IEEE Transactions on Education prefer submissions to be in Word format, which suggests that is how they typeset it.

There are several IEEE Transactions that don't like LaTeX, and even one that uses a submission web form that is "Best viewed in Netscape Navigator". I don't understand why IEEE don't mandate a common, sane submission system.

Because the nice thing about IEEE standards is that we have so many of them ;)

It depends on the subcommunity. I have seen LaTeX essentially everywhere in CS, but I recall some exceptions. I'm not sure where, but I think it was applied stuff, probably close to some application domain (e.g., bioinformatics).

I work in bioinformatics and I can confirm that most biologists feel very uncomfortable in the idea of having to touch LaTeX. As a result, in our collaboration project, I'd have to survive with using Word+endnote. It's a fairly painful experience..

There are a lot of bioinformaticians in my office and I also hear that Word is common in that world. One told me that he uses pandoc to convert Word documents from/to something more pleasant, and doesn't even tell his co-authors that he's not using Word.

In bioinformatics this works for me too, up until I get comments and tracked changes back from co-authors - getting Word comments/changes back into a md file isn't worth the headache, after that step I have to use Word too.

I've made some good experiences with Authorea, a paid online collaborative scientific writing tool, I think that one runs on top of Pandoc+git too, but it doesn't have full Word import support yet AFAIK

Edit: 0 mentions for Authorea in this entire discussion, I guess these guys need to do a bit more advertising :)

I've never used pandoc, but I was told that tracked changes were do doable. I see that pandoc converts them from/to special markup which includes the author, etc. It sounds like receiving Word documents with tracked changes is not a problem, but you would need a special tool to turn a diff into a document marked up with your changes when you want to send it back as a Word doc (similar to latexdiff).

I know some faculty members who use Word, and I know some ex-grad students who spent some time converting the format.

Yes. I currently work in academic CS and my group regularly writes papers in LaTeX, Word, and Google Docs.

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