Hacker News Reader

Comment by named-user | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't bother. Fire up MS Word and use your journal's provided template.

Slightly extended, learn whatever your field / journal uses.

Many A.I. or maths conferences won't provide a Word template, only LaTeX. Other conferences and journals I've been involved with are Word only. Trying to fight against the default generally isn't worth the pain.

And then spend twice the time formatting equations correctly and dealing with things that require workarounds because Word only handles a tiny subset of what LaTeX and LaTeX packages can do? No thanks.

Could you provide an example where you need to spend twice the time to correctly format equations in MS Word?

There is no easy way to get Word to automatically right align equation numbers and number equations you have to fiddle with invisible tables and shove a reference in the right side, there's no equivalent to the "bm" LaTeX package available so instead of just typing "\bm{\phi}" I have to type the whole equation go back and then bold and italicize the phi.

I know, I've had these issues with Word too. But Latex also has some problems. For example, inserting equations and referencing them requires you to _label_ them. I find it unnecessarily difficult to keep track of equation labels in my text. Wish there was a way to assign automatic labels to equations in a Latex document, in a way that they all get updated if you add or remove equations. I can do that in Word and it saves me lots of time.

The relevant difference here is that LaTeX is open source, unlike Word, so any desired functionality can be added much more easily and naturally.

Even if you don't want to do it personally, you can ask the maintainer of the relevant package to add a certain feature and if you're lucky he agrees and does it, or you can pay someone to do it.

It's easy to forget, but you do have the total freedom to make it work for you, unlike proprietary office programs.

for some people it makes things easier. Otherwise they would not use it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com