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Comment by wesleywt | Hacker News Reader

Having written my thesis in LaTex, I can say it is wonderful and a wonderful waste of time.

Having written a report in Word that was about 1/4 of the size of my dissertation, but had some of the same content, and then the dissertation in LaTeX, I can say that as much as LaTeX wastes your time, it's by far the least wasteful option.

Strong agree. My fiance and I wrote our thesis simultaneously, she in Word, while I used LaTeX. The amount of stupid figure- and page- rearrangements she suffered because she removed half a sentence from the middle, while LaTeX generated sane output with basically any text seriously made me much more productive.

Word has had automatic reference numbering for a while now (see for instance [0]). Not denying that it's not very known (nor pleasant to use), and I'm not even talking about bibliography.

I made my partner switch to Latex thanks to the bibliography. Writing tables almost made her switch back to Word.

[0]: https://www.sfu.ca/~ljilja/cnl/info/UseCrossReference/index....

> Word has had automatic reference numbering for a while now

It also breaks regularly. I know a student in the middle of a thesis writing up marathon, and the time he wastes with this is unbelievable. For example, there are the references that just end up garbled, with Word putting in an error message instead, the references that somehow don't get updated despite having been entered exactly like all the others that do. It adds at least two passes every time he wants to send a chapter to proofread.

Tables in LaTeX are bad. References, notes, and bibliography in Word are horrendous.

I meant it more in terms of bad figure placement. LaTeX tries to place the figure relatively close to the source, it has a sane fallback policy, like grouping them together at the end of the section.

With word one can get from a decently formatted text to multiple quarter-filled pages with a single additional sentence, because it has comparatively bad algorithm for text-block reflow.

I've written two thesis in Latex and a small 100 page book in Word.

Word 2000 performed wonderfully. I had no problems with references or images shifting around, no strange errors, nothing. Bibliography sucked, but in general it was a pleasure to work with.

Word 365, on the other hand, is something I have to force to do what I want again and again. It is built in such a way that doing things cleanly and error-free is difficult and much less obvious than in Word 2000. Even standard tools like image anchors, which worked nicely in 2k, are not reliable anymore. I got the feeling that this is due to automatisms aimed at casual users.

Among fellow students countless hours were lost playing with spaces, line breaks, font sizes just to get tables/figures stay or move to the next page. This did look like an endless task: adding few chars in a chapter could have messed up positioning of bunch of figs.

I did typesetting in Lyx/LaTeX of two PhD theses: my own (eng) and my GF's (esp) a decade+ later. In both cases the adventure started with admitted a vanilla Word doc without all the bells and whistles (= no templates, no version control).

Once you enter the area of strange formatting, chars typed by who knows either a cat walking on the keyboard or sleep deprived student typing madly, fixing these in a binary format is a real PITA. Lyx/LaTex text formats are trivial to grep, diff, etc.

Today I would probably start and try to stay as long as possible in Markdown, then reformat it at the very end.

Same, I just did my resume in LaTeX, it's such an obtuse and painful tool, yet nothing even comes close to the control it gives you.

Hey btw, I'm looking for contract work! https://github.com/1player/resume/blob/master/resume.pdf

I always wonder with comments like this what LaTeX allows that Adobe Indesign is incapable of.

Plaintext source file; hence source control and portability. Also it's free in both senses.

* Free (as in freedom) and open source

* Cross-platform

* Industry standard in the sciences

Surely plain old html does?

For several years (a decade maybe?) I authored my resume in LaTeX. Then a few years ago I wanted to restructure it radically, and make an interactive version that showed off some simple subset of my full-stack skillset (from design to implementation). This goal led me to authoring it in HTML with CSS. I never actually got around to implementing my full vision because I had an unexpected opportunity land in my lap before I'd officially started looking. I had the design and static mockup completed, so I just exported that to PDF and used it. In hindsight, I spent a lot less time getting the look I wanted in HTML than I did in LaTeX.

I still tend to use LaTeX for some long-form documentation, but I'll probably stick to HTML for my resume and I'm finding myself using HTML + Markdown a lot more for other authoring tasks too.

It's not the right tool for the job, in this case perfectly laying out text on a A4 sheet of paper. HTML is made for variable-sized screens, and can be repurposed to be printed, but it's still trying to screw a nail in when all you need is a hammer.

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