Pwning coworkers thanks to LaTeX

Saying that the alternatives are hard does not do anything to prove that LaTeX is easy.

When you make a syntax error (missing closing brace, forgot to escape that underscore, etc), what's the probability that the latex error message will be at all relevant to the source of the error? It's pretty damn low. In my experience, debugging LaTeX is anything but easy.

Have you tried writing technical reports in LyX? It's not a nightmare and you can see what it looks like.

To provide a counterpoint, I've been writing Technical reports in word for about 15 years, using it for about 20, works fine for most things I've seen.

Like any complex program there are things to learn and quirks to get used to, but it can be a very powerful platform once you get past that.

> It only gets complicated if you want to deviate from the design that your document class uses by default.

Which is always, because defaults are ugly as hell. Might work for math papers, but not much else.

My only real issue with LaTeX though is its error reporting, which is less readable than C++ template metaprogramming fails, and the fact you have to compile the same file $magic times in a row to get a stable render.

Writing a dissertation in word is fine. Preparing for a dissertation for print in word is a pain in the ass. The 'correct' way to do it is to write in Word, do citations in Endnote, and then lay the whole thing out in InDesign.

And for actual publications and the like, latex is indeed awesome and there is a strong argument for superiority.

But the ``problem'' is people who insist on using it for everything. Have a memo? Better set up a repo. Writing a report for a manger? Latex!

With the simpler things where you won't be cross referencing constantly and any figures that you have you want absolute control over placement, Word is the way to go. And pretty much the moment you are done your dissertation, that is the majority of what you'll write. Even in academia you'll likely spend more time writing grants and memos than papers. And, with at least the former, what matters most is having the figure easily seen and fitting the format requirements (specifically page count).

Use the best tool for any given job.

20 years ago I wrote my dissertation using LaTeX. Two years ago I found it in old backups and immediately stuck it into a git repo, build a LaTeX hosting docker container and built the whole ~120 page doc using the makefile I made at the time. I then proceeded to marvel at the ingenuity of people, the hubris of a young man and the futility of it all. I then quenched the rising tide of existential angst with a few craft beers I purchased using proceeds from my day job building silly web-apps in JavaScript for a big multinational mining company.

Had I written it in word I would have tossed the disk into the trash, and watched a movie.

LaTeX, the gift that keeps on giving.

Writing slides for a scientific talk too. Or a bullet-text-heavy slides for that matter.

OTOH: for many business cases where text is kept sparse and randomly placed PowerPoint excels. And new versions have somewhat taken Tufte's criticism to heart -- the smart, make-a-diagram-for-text enable a lot of conceptual collaboration across a widely multidisciplinar organization. I mean, sometimes you're writing documentation for your fellow nerds (i.e. the equations behind some code you wrote) and sometimes you're explaining economic concepts to lawyers.

(I think (we) nerds tend to undervalue the work and insights of people like lawyers and accountants; and the importance of clear communication. But I digress on a digression...)

Also, the usual rebuttal to that article. http://tex.stackexchange.com/a/219581. Anything that did not perfectly reproduce the typesetting of a reference document, they counted as a typesetting error. Any word placement at the end of one line as opposed to the start of the next, for example. The sort of thing that LaTeX handles automatically, and better than humans.

Murphy's law in action, there was a correction made to the paper you quote, so I clicked through to see what was corrected:

Notice of Republication

This article was republished on March 30, 2015, to correct the sizing and placement of the figures; none of the article content was changed. The publisher apologizes for the original layout errors. Please download this article again to view the corrected version. The originally published, uncorrected article and the republished, corrected article are provided here for reference.

> made more typesetting

Agh, I keep on making the mistake of doing homework directly to LaTeX. It seems that you're able to think directly from the page but it ultimately slows you down. I know way too much about mathematical typesetting as it is -- before I start making up rules about how Expectation should be \mathsf{E} and writing huge custom command files.

This one exam I started doing all the exercises in the book into LaTeX. As an aspiring mathematician, I need to learn to better appreciate pencil and paper.

Search online for "xelatex". It's latex for the 21st century.

Now Dropbox tells you when others have the document open and so on, so it is easier. But still orders of magnitude worse than working with plain text files.

OTOH try Google Docs for anything larger than an article. It will blow your browser.

It will rot your mind. I'll take LaTeX + git, thank you.

Try Etherpad.

put it in a directory with a Makefile, that usually solves a lot of the problem of "knowing what to do with it."

For me it is less about it being better at collaboration, and more that the popular alternatives are so bloody awful.

It is frustrating, because the popular choices all make better demos. But recovery is often so painful that you start living in fear of formatting mistakes.

Yes, we used Microsoft's solution for our master's thesis.

<rant> We had to constantly clear cookies, restart the computer, delete our local OneDrive copies and do other quirky work-arounds to be able to do anything. Not to mention the constant crashing and general bugs that plagued the process.

As an example: during the final reading of the paper (a three hour session), I had restarted my computer 8 times and created about 15 local copies of the word document "just in case".

I have heard similar horror stories from other students as well.

It is genuinely shocking to me that Microsoft is getting away with this horrendous performance. </rant>

Yes, used it for a university group project and it was unstable.

I've been using Overleaf to great effect, mainly because it's free version isn't limited to one collaborator.

I bet you guys sit alone on Jabber while everyone else are having conversations on Skype and Slack.

> Do you do all your development in closed/isolated environment because of your coworkers posing threats? That sounds a bit paranoid.

Not because of my coworkers posing threats. And this wouldn't have to come from a coworker. Though that's what the author suggests the issue isn't limited to that which unfortunately seems to have taken the upper hand in the discussions around this.

But I do most of my development in isolated environments. Not because I don't trust my coworkers but because people can fuck up, things sneak in and can break my system or leave it vulnerable.

On the other hand, isn't pwning coworkers the basis of sound security awareness training?

This is being a bit paranoid, but do your colleagues pgp sign their messages? How do you know it is really coming from them?

Malware writers might take advantage of your trust for your coworkers and spread their viruses as email attachments from trusted (infected) sources.

It's like Office macro viruses but for nerds.

At this point there are really only the two distributions, TeX Live (the basis for the distribution for many other platforms, including the Mac) and MikTeX on Windows.