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Comment by 2cynykyl | Hacker News Reader

Good point, sigh...this is so true. I have created a 45 minute tutorial of 'how to use word properly' to address this exact pain point. I send a link to my students if their first draft commits any 'sins'.

BTW, when I said tech people, I was thinking mostly about the computer savvy academics who use Latex for everything.

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People use things like LaTeX exactly because of this problem. Word processing software brought the problem of inconsistent formatting and layout within the grasp of everyone and boy! ...did they grab it with both hands. Systems based on plain text allow the author to concentrate on content only, without the need to format.

Personally I find LaTeX misses the mark. Too much markup is needed and it detracts. I'm a fan of asciidoc though. I just wish the templating was a little better though.

TeX documents have a distinctive look because of their typography. Back when printed resumes were a thing, whenever I saw one done in TeX, I would recognize the CM font right away. I'd then look at the resume early, since I knew that it came from a nerd. Mine was of course also done that way.

It's ideal for hiring - you immediately know which resumes to read and which one to dump into the trash.

I wouldn't dump a non-TeX one in the trash. It's just that a TeX one tends to draw my interest right away.

So CVs from folks who know LaTeX good enough to change Computer Modern to something else will be dumped into the trash…

Unless you’re looking for Haskell nerds, in which case you should prioritize Comic Sans.

There is also Coq's documentation system, which has its own distinctive look:

https://softwarefoundations.cis.upenn.edu/lf-current/Basics....

Simon PJ glares :)

For those not in the know, Simon Peyton Jones is one of the originators of Haskell, and sort-of-but-not-quite BDFL of Haskell... and he uses Comic Sans for all his presentations because it filters out people who will complain about font choice for a presentation.

I write code in Comic Sans, so I'm not one to judge :)

My personal sweet-spot for writing technical documents these days is Asciidoctor with semantic line breaks [1]. There are some warts in the asciidoc syntax but it covers a lot more of the features I need for the types of documents I'm writing compared to Markdown.

[1] https://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2012/one-sentence-per-line/

> I was thinking mostly about the computer savvy academics who use Latex for everything.

To be fair, for a significant number of things LaTeX is the better environment, even with it's own issues.

Would you mind sharing that link? I completely understand if you’d rather not for privacy reasons though! If not could you recommend a different tutorial?

I come from a trades background and am now in the academic field (teaching and admin for my trade) and I would really like to do some professional development in this area. Also excel! I know I’m lacking and it would help my long suffering director haha.

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