Comment by lautreamont | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lautreamont | Hacker News Reader

The problem with word processors is that you can't properly do distributed work with them. No one I work with uses the exact same version of the same word processor I do; actually people in the real world don't even have consistent versions on their multiple machines. Every version switch fucks over fonts, formatting, comments... everything except the bare text. Most of my workflows are at follows:

1. Send LibreOffice text to collaborator 2. Get changes/comments back from collaborator 3. Start addressing them 4. Realize that collaborator has fucked up the formatting by using MS Word 5. Fix formatting 6. Address comments 7. Go home for the day 8. Telecommute the next day, fire up result of 6 on your old machine at home 9. Realize it won't even load comment notes 10. Ask the wife if you can borrow her Win7 machine for the job 11. Give up on formatting, do the editing job first on MS Word 12. Go back to office the day after, fix the formatting which is now an unholy mess of LibreOffice and MS Word 13. Swear at LibreOffice because it somehow spontaneously returns to MS Word formatting but not consistently 14. Get some resemblance of working formatting in order 15. goto 1

Yeah... I'm afraid LaTeX is the lesser evil there.

(None of this applies to cloud-based work using e.g. Google Documents. If you want to entrust your drafts to Google, feel free to do so. I don't consider this an option for anything under NDA.)

Not only that. How many times has my one machine, with one single version of ms word installed, broken the formatting of my hundreds of pages document...

In the point where you learn how to create all the custom formats needed, and then you make sure to always mark all paragraphs/words/stuff you need to be in such custom formats without any indication other than the dropdown on the top (what is really hard and awkward) and then all you do is going into every single one of the custom formats to fake-edit them and reapply... that's hours wasted... possibly multiple times every week...

Latex is hard, and a piece of crap, but after the learning curve you don't have that kind of problem. The tech doesn't generates rework all by itself just because you went to bed and turned off the computer.

Do I think Latex is good? No; but it's definitely a better solution than word processors for this type of work. It is a bad solution to a hard problem. While word processors is a trivial solution to the same hard problem, one that doesn't really solve it in the end.

Honestly though, I'd love to see something more like Markdown in use here, but no flavor I know currently cuts it. Or maybe a word processor that -actually- supported paper|article|thesis|book|w/e templates and complex constructs...

It sounds like your issue isn't with word processors, it's with you using a different word processor than all your colleagues.

With LaTeX, you can track your changes in git, collaborate in online platforms, use your favorite editor, perform diffs/merges with your favorite editor. With word processors, you are stuck with 1 editor and few live collaboration options like google docs and word online which have a reduced feature set.

I have had the exact same experience as the OP and if you can convince several PI's with better things to do than reinstall a new version of Word, people at other institutions without MS Office licenses using Libre Office and others who don't use either and convert it back and forth to a Google Doc (thereby breaking all the hyperlinking), I would honestly be baffled.

Now, in collaborative work I use Overleaf so there is no configuration problems with installing LaTeX (Google Docs for LaTeX), and give everyone write access if they want it, I sync it with my Dropbox and have a working LaTeX distribution if I want to edit without access to the network. Those who don't know LaTeX (which is a small number, especially if they don't want to learn the basics to edit the .tex file in the appropriate place) I can convert a version to Word for their edits, which I then incorporate, or they can just markup a PDF. The Overleaf document then has a complete history of edits, Overleaf supports Word-style comments and track changes, and I can be happy in that the other authors aren't going to break something in the Word "backend".

I guess if you trust DropBox and Overleaf with sensitive data but not Google Docs or Microsoft Office 365, that works. (If Overleaf is self-hosted, please disregard that part.)

I also find offline word processors frustrating to collaborate on, but I am worried that OP is rationalizing their personal preferences post-hoc, rather than looking for the best option for everyone.

Thanks for the pointer to Overleaf, I will definitely check it out.

Edit: sorry, I thought you were the OP at first.

Yeah, not the OP, but if I had sensitive information I don't know what I would do. I know this sounds shill-like, but I absolutely love Overleaf for Latex. It has every package you need, decent templates that you can then customize, and the Dropbox and GitHub integration are great - uploading an image is as simple as saving it in the right Dropbox folder - very useful for when trying to upload a bunch of images or update a figure in Illustrator. I end up using MikTex like 2-3 times a year when I'm on a plane, and then everything syncs once I'm back online. Being able to see who changed what is also great, and much less overhead than trying to convince non-programmers to use git or something like that for the Latex files.

>None of this applies to cloud-based work using e.g. Google Documents

I think the more important issue there is that Google Docs is bad. It doesn't even support copy and paste properly!

It's fine for what most people use a word processor for. If you're a student writing a paper in 12-pt Times New Roman with one-inch margins, double spacing, no footnotes, etc., it will do that just fine. It falls to pieces when you want any sophisticated formatting or version control.

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