The highly involved build process for my doctoral dissertation
spwhitton.name
spwhitton.name
Oh man, purist side quests like this are exactly how I would procrastinate a philosophy dissertation. But building a complex process for _reproducibly_ handling the once-in-a-lifetime event of accepting your dissertation examiners' signatures is taking it to a whole other level.
Edit: .zsh_history had it:
> pdftk A=thesis.pdf B=approval.pdf cat A1-5 B1 A7-end output signed_thesis.pdf
/edit not cleared but filled up so that it gets rotated out
Nowadays I run a mac at work, and I use "atuin" which stores zsh history in an SQLite database. No fear of losing anything, and it really can save you in a lot of ways.
Furthermore, outside of my dissertation work, the classes I took often required you to produce other research works which also had to be created with LaTex. Overleaf (a SaaS platform for Latex collaboration and sharing) was essentially the operating system of my PhD. I spent 75% of my time in there.
I feel like it would be impossible to get a Doctoral degree without LaTex knowledge. Maybe it depends on the university?
Doctor.
For example, Nature is so kind as to accept final submissions in latex, but they'll convert it to Word. So it's completely pointless.
Frankly people using latex-beamer make me roll my eyes too. It's a sign you care about tools more than outcome. If you're making a presentation, your goal should be to produce the ideal design to convey your message to the audience. Latex always gets in the way of this. (Some latex wizards are going to disagree obviously, but for the vast majority of users it's true.)
It's a sign that I care about outcome and efficiency. I want the minimum effort on my part to have the maximum clarity and impact. Beamer is that tool.
I do roughly zero formatting, and in exchange I get something that looks good, is very clear and simple for the audience to understand, and has impact.
The beauty of LaTeX is that it gets out of the way. I don't need to think about formatting, I can think about content.
There is large gulf between submitting a paper (typically limited to a few journal pages) to a well-equipped organization like Springer Nature, and submitting a manuscript hundreds of even thousands of pages in length to a university dissertation office, when that document must adhere scrupulously to various formatting requirements in terms of tables, figures, pagination, citation, appendices, cross-referencing, etc. Word is fine for memos, briefs, letters, and other fairly short documents. But its capabilities for creating complex documents that must include cross-referencing, strict placement of tables, figures, and other floats, citations, referencing, etc. frankly suck. Students can't afford expensive typesetting software: TeX and friends are high quality, stable, have a large and knowledgeable user community, and most importantly, are free. You can bet that publishing houses aren't using Word and PowerPoint to produce anything beyond email. They accept Word documents because of Microsoft's market dominance, which is unrelated to the quality of software they publish.
Yes, float placement in Word can be tricky. It can be tricky in latex too.
I'm not saying it's the ultimate tool for the job. I'm just saying it's fine. There are some things to look out for, particularly with figure placement. As there are with latex.
On the upside, you can use EndNote which is quite good, you can use comments and tracked changes, and wysiwyg is ultimately just the superior paradigm.
If you're telling some unsuspecting grad student that they need to write their thesis in latex, and they don't yet have experience in it and they don't have a massive amount of formulas to write, you're doing them a massive disservice.
I used to support MS products way back when, when they were largely a language company. No more. Life is short, and my patience with their products has come to an end. Sure, LaTeX can be a bear, a supremely frustrating one whose learning curve is more like a wall, but at least it's a bear that sits still, and for which there are authoritative sources when you get into a real bind. With Word, PowerPoint, or Windows itself, there are few such resources, relegating you to spend hours wading through the post swamp of self-declared Microsoft MVP “experts”, where your only comfort is that “3332 also have this problem”. No thanks.
Moreover, there’s a more fundamental point being neglected: the PhD thesis should be the worst thing one ever will write as no one is ever going to read it. The published papers based on it will be read instead, and if there are no published papers based on the thesis, it’s because your PhD work was shit.
Taking the time to beautifully format a thesis is at best a waste of time and at worst an exercise in vanity.
So many things get shouted down because "people will think you're weird".
Caring about good tools doesn't have to come at the cost of productivity. But just using what everyone else uses just because they use it is intellectually lazy.
In the life sciences, practically no one knows how to use LaTeX, or has even heard of it.
I have a fairly complex Pandoc pipeline so that I can send my supervisor Microsoft Word documents and create LaTeX documents all at the same time.
Which is to say that I am swimming upstream to get a PhD in the modern era using LaTeX. It would be far easier if I just used M$ Word.
I only hopped on this thread to say this so that I could add to the evidence against using latex in case any grad students are reading this and considering using latex. It is absolutely NOT necessary and is in NO WAY helpful. Please leave the type-setting to the publishers and focus on knowledge and content creation.
(ok, I guess I still often have a Makefile that calls latexmk and sometimes produces some figures from scripts)
True story: While writing my philosophy dissertation, I dropped out of grad school to become a Mac developer, and a key factor was the open source Mac bibliography app BibDesk. https://bibdesk.sourceforge.io/
This appears to be your résumé, according to which you spent five years total in the doctoral program. I'm pretty sure you didn't start writing your dissertation on day one, since there are years of coursework and other requirements before you start writing your dissertation. https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielmdrucker
I actually remember the day I did “mkdir thesis” and then said “WELP that’s enough work for today!”
Ph.D. Philosophy, University of Arizona (expected 2023)
MMathPhil, Mathematics and Philosophy, University of Oxford (2013)
But the format and syntax for these can be tricky, and tools and documentation can be hard to find.
Still does!
I assume that within the file structure are things that enable an internal integrity check, such as maybe checksums or CRC's, which would necessarily be different if the file contents are different.
People create some kind of life achievement monument where they seek to summarize the world knowledge and yet nobody is going to read the document. Same for MSc thesis.
What matters (to a point) are your papers and it should be enough to just gather the in a file, add a conclusion and call it a day. We have this in France and some people use the opportunity.
My PhD thesis (physics) was 45 pages long. The expected number of pages was about 200 or 300, a friend of mine wrote two tomes.
The introduction was basically "if you do not know about the topic you should probably to read this thesis anyway but if you really want to, here are some books you can use". 2 lines, introduction done.
The main part was mostly copy/paste from my articles.
The conclusion was that the results were great and groundbreaking.
I added a special section called (I think) "Is this thesis really useful, a discussion with the author" - where I pointed out everything wrong with what I did and where to go further. 75% of the reviewers loved it (less work for them) and 25% were wrong :)
Finally, the acknowledgments were thanking my thesis director profusely (he did not help me much in the research part but eased considerably (considerably) my life and helped me to navigate the muddy waters of Academia), a fried who during a dinner gave me an idea that changed the whole thesis, my wife, my parents and my dog.
The defense was epic (3 hours instead o the expected 45 minutes) because some people decided to manage their political battles there. I was switching between grabbing the popcorn and mopping my forehead when some questions out of the end of the universe were asked (one of them was asked by the dept asshole in residence (AIR) and I understood all the words, but not put together in one sentence (nothing to do with my topic). The president of the jury waited for me to answer, I mumbled something, he said that this was disappointing and asked the AIR to answer. He said that he has no idea but thought I may.)
I will go one day to my dept (I left academia in the meantime) and ask if someone has ever borrowed the thesis (it exists only in one copy).
I did not need that because most of what I was writing about was hardly documented (neural networks and genetic algorithms in the '90s) but I can imagine (having done my thesis at CERN) that having all accelerator and detector information in one place is useful.