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Comment by jacurtis | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure how its possible to get a PhD in the modern era without learning LaTex. It is the required markup and publishing tool for any respected research publication. Since PhDs require (at least mine did) multiple published works in respected journals and conferences, I feel like LaTex is table-stakes for doctoral research and degrees.

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?

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This is all completely untrue in general. There are many fields in which you'll be the annoying weirdo who tries to force their tools on others if you insist on using latex.

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.)

> 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.

> 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.

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.

Yeah, I don't know about that. Most people for whom I know that, myself included, wrote their dissertations in Word. It's fine.

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.

If you read the manual for Word on setting up large documents, and use styles it’s not bad. Of course that Word 6. I’m sure things are worse.

My experience is that Word (and Office products in general) have worsened over decades, favoring and indulging the least adroit user to maximize their user base, cloying the product with showy gimmicks of marginal utility or worse, whose primary purpose seems to be to keep you glued to the machine for as long as possible.

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.

This is untrue. It’s almost all done in Word.

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.

Why should we favor inertia from social mores instead of advocating better tools?

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.

Microsoft Word still reigns supreme in many fields. Some journals still require it as the format for submission.

Yeah, my experience is that philosophy journals typically expect word documents.

What do you call someone who typed their dissertation in Word?

Doctor.

I need to disagree with this strongly (I'm an engineering professor of 15 years). I am so "anti-latex" that I border on zealot. I'll save you my sermon, but I can't help but point out that saying "I spent 75% of my time in there" (ie Overleaf) is a pretty obvious "red flag". Did you ever consider that using Overleaf may have hindered your phd productivity? Shouldn't you have spent 75% of your time in the lab, or your IDE, or the field? Does this statement not make you pause and reflect that maybe using an archaic and arcane typesetting language as a "word processing tool" was a trap? The time people need to spend with the formatting and markup in latex rather than the actual creative process is at the top of my many complaints about latex.

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.

I wish I heard this advice at the time I was working on my dissertation: everyone just insisted that the right way was to use LaTeX and I just bought into it. At some point so much so that I made my slides with beamers and the animations in TikZ. Clearly I only started being productive when I had real data to present and I decided to switch to Inkscape for graphics and PowerPoint for slides. Leaving academia and being able to write all my documents in word or markdown has been a huge relief.

> I'm not sure how its possible to get a PhD in the modern era without learning LaTex.

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.

How many graduate students in other disciplines did you talk to?

In my experience most grad students mostly just end up doing whatever their advisor is most familiar with.

Maybe in CS?

In the life sciences, practically no one knows how to use LaTeX, or has even heard of it.

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