I’ve known PhDs in philosophy who can barely create slides in power point… while others (like OP) go and use latex, create open source software and use emacs. I’ve never seen such a drastic difference in any other field.
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.