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Comment by Vegenoid | Hacker News Reader

If you want to use Word, then that's great, but when you start saying what other people 'should' be doing then they're going to speak up.

> writing should happen in "word processing software"

Writing should happen where you are comfortable editing text. I am comfortable in same editor where I write code.

> To people who say "Word sux", I say "That just means you don't know how to use Word properly". Writing any markup or markdown syntax in an IDE is a disaster for the creative process.

To all the people who say "Writing markup in an IDE sux", I say "That just means you don't know how to use it properly". I can write in a flow and apply/change formatting easily. I can jump around and rearrange documents with ease. And it is in a format that can be opened and read by native software on almost any computer.

If you think that Jack Kerouac would prefer MS Word over a much simpler plain text editor, I don't agree.

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> Writing should happen where you are comfortable editing text.

For that particular context of text.

I write my code, notes, text and emails in vim. Some in markdown. But to this day, I still miss the incredible usability of LyX 1.x when writing pure long-form text.[ß] I could force all writing to occur within central 60% of the editable screen height [doable with vim but not as cleanly]. No whitespace or formatting issues, ever - set the document defaults according to my liking and it would feel "just right".

Proper rendering and visually correct editing of math formulas as part of text. Oh my. Fond memories of being able to type '<raw latex hotkey>\frac' and continue fitting in the values...

If it had had vim's search-powered navigation, it would have been nearly perfect. LyX 2.x was a step up in visual appeal and two steps down in raw usability. I've since picked up writing raw latex where I need good formatting, just because I could not make LyX 2.x bend to my taste anymore.

ß: Back on early 2000's, I wrote a book in LyX. As well as all my university course papers, including the master's thesis.

> but when you start saying what other people 'should' be doing then they're going to speak up.

That's not a prerequisite for the Latex folks, in my experience :D

(I'm also in the "wrote my masters thesis in word, including the fair number of equations" group)

Of course you can choose what you use for your personal pipeline.

But Word for collaborative work is a nightmare. Sometimes fastest way to work with the science text or documentation in a Word document is to hire a freelancer to retype all the text in LaTeX or something else.

It's a kind of Trolley problem: sometimes Word fanboys, unfortunately, _should_ suffer to let all the team get the job done.

> But Word for collaborative work is a nightmare

Why? It has comments, tracking etc. Concurrent edition i impossible, though (even when MS says it is possible). For that Google Docs is great (or some self-hosted systems)

> Why? It has comments, tracking etc. Concurrent edition i impossible, though (even when MS says it is possible). For that Google Docs is great (or some self-hosted systems)

It doesn't scale. At all.

I used to work at a university lab group where all 30 of us would need to concurrently write, edit and review 150+-page, heavily technical reports with lots of diagrams and tables spanning pages. To be clear, most of the time all of us were working on the exact same huge document.

Word's version tracking stood no chance. Formatting was regularly off, tables were breaking apart, diagrams misplaced. Syncing was extremely bad, often with entire paragraphs in changes going missing, other times deleted portion were reappearing, all that jazz.

LaTeX on an online collaborative environment (well-known, not naming it -this post isnt an ad) on the other hand, despite its archaic way of working, never showed any of those problems. If a table was placed somewhere, we could be sure it would never get moved to random places, and changes/rewrites would be always synced correctly (as LaTeX source is plain text, merging algorithms/CRDTs have a much easier time).

> all 30 of us would need to concurrently write, edit and review 150+-page

As I wrote, it does not work at all for concurrent access - I mentioned Google Docs & Co for this.

> LaTeX on an online collaborative environment (well-known, not naming it -this post isnt an ad)

I wrote my MSc and PhD thesis in LaTeX (physics) so I know how fantastic it is. You write content without caring for the container - and since changing anything is black magic you give up and do not try (which is a VERY good thing - it just works).

I never used Overleaf though (I guess that this is the product you refer to). I guess that having a concurrent system (such as etertab or something - or Overleaf if it supports truly concurrent editing) is the graal.

The drawback is that you need to know the language to cooperate. In a university setting this is not complicated, in a company - not so much.

> As I wrote, it does not work at all for concurrent access - I mentioned Google Docs & Co for this.

Indeed Google Docs is much better - we also used that - but it's still a WYSIWYG editor, which IMHO it translates to 'extremely hard to enforce style'.

> I never used Overleaf though (I guess that this is the product you refer to). I guess that having a concurrent system (such as etertab or something - or Overleaf if it supports truly concurrent editing) is the graal.

Yep, Overleaf was what we used. Its paid version was very much like Google Docs but on a plaintext editor wrt. to concurrent access. It could even do change tracking, comments, all the jazz, even Git synching (which we used for backups and CI)

> The drawback is that you need to know the language to cooperate. In a university setting this is not complicated, in a company - not so much.

I'm curious as to why. If the company is new and built on LaTeX from the very beginning why not? When I joined, I didn't know the language at all, but that wasn't a problem-one would learn on the job.

> If the company is new and built on LaTeX from the very beginning why not?

It really depends on the company. I worked (and work) in large high-tech companies and whenever I tried to introduce something like Markdown I quickly hit he wall of non-technical people who did not want to try a new system. They new Word, were suffering with Word but did not have the mindset to give a try to something different.

For the ones on Google Docs it was even more difficult because, arguably, Google Docs is a really neat product for collaboration.

My teams use Markdown for all text (either Obsidian or internal wikis) but this is because they are good in what they do and that they fear their management line :) :) (just kidding)

Google Docs are incompatible with complex formatting (LibreOffice and even Office365 are too). Moreover, even the Word itself is kinda incompatible with complex formatting: sooner or later one of your collaborators will copy/paste some text with a formatting you will be just unable to change/clear.

Anyway, Word «collaborative» features are so much worse than git repository and pull requests! And even you need to collaborate with some extremely non-technical folks, in the case of LaTeX they still use add comments to the PDF file — and this workflow is still way more productive than editing the same Word document.

Other reasons to not to use Word in collaborative pipelines are already mentioned in neighbor threads.

See? I didn't even tell anyone what they should do, and here's a Latex guy spouting off :)

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