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Comment by wenc | Hacker News Reader

It's because LaTeX gives us a sense of legitimacy. (it's also why people go overboard with math notation in LaTeX documents, even when prose is more appropriate).

It produces documents that look like those produced by professors, and luminaries in the field. If you write equations in Word Equation Editor, your work just doesn't look very serious.

It's the same joy I felt when I laser-printed my first newsletter designed in Aldus PageMaker. I was only in my teens but I felt like a "professional".

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> If you write equations in Word Equation Editor, your work just doesn't look very serious.

Haven't tried it in a while, but, last I checked, Word Equation Editor output didn't look serious because it looked janky and look like it wasn't really done in a "professional" tool. Part of that is a self-fulfilling prophecy of course, LaTeX output looks right in part because it's what people have been reading for decades, but TeX's formulas just look plain good.

Yet Word is leagues ahead of Google docs... (shudders)

There are add-ons for Gdocs. This is apparently pretty good. https://workspace.google.com/marketplace/app/autolatex_equat...

I don't know if this is still the case or not but equations in Word can be upgraded to MathType. IIRC the Word equations were a basic version of MathType (i.e. developed by the same people). MathType included latex syntax and much better layout and formatting. It was the only way to stay sane when working on journal articles with collaborators who gave less than zero interest in latex (i.e. physicians).

The equation editor in Word straight up supports LaTeX now days. It also supports UnicodeMath, which is an actual standard and a pretty cool one at that. Sadly it has almost no adoption outside of Word.

Last time I checked, Word was also basically untenable for math-heavy writing because there was too much procedure involved in setting a formula. This is fine if you need one here and there, but if you have lots of formulas (including many tiny ones, like just using the name of a variable), switching to a dedicated formula mode in the interface is just not pleasant. In LaTeX (or Typst), I just type $, and off I go.

Alt + = will put you in the equation editor fairly easily, and from there you can pretty much use LaTeX notation.

Even with a keyboard shortcut, I never found it to be truly satisfying. I cannot quite recall what was annoying, though. Maybe you cannot space back into the formula after closing it? (I certainly recall having the experience of typing a formula, closing it, noticing a mistake, hitting backspace, and deleting the entire formula.) Maybe there was just a slight delay for the formula editor to open? Also, $ is still more pleasant to type than Alt+=.

I would be willing to try again, but I'm not buying Word for the privilege.

I remember when I submitted a paper written in LaTeX to my math prof in college, alone in the class (nobody even mentioned it to us so it wasn't exactly surprising, but I was one of those guys running Gentoo as their desktop back then so...).

She not only instantly recognized it, but, judging by the look and the platitudes she gave me on the spot, it probably earned me an extra point on the overall grade.

When in Rome...

I did this once in undergrad. Used Word to make my term paper two columns and all formatted like a journal article. Felt cool. Felt legitimate. But I then felt kinda embarrassed and never really shared it with anyone.

> If you write equations in Word Equation Editor

The experience is also awful. It's much better to write \in or \frac{}{} rather than to go to a dropdown menu and figure out which button to click.

You can use its own syntax for Word equation editor. They have even added Latex syntax support now. When was the last time you used Word. Latex support in equation editor has been there for ~5 years.

Most universities don’t formally train their STEM students in technical writing. At the graduate level, one is basically at the mercy of one’s advisor’s taste, for better or (usually) for worse.

Having tutored CS undergrads on writing, the lack of training (or care, or perceived relevance) was painfully obvious. Many were semi-literate wrt to English prose.

That may be true in US universities, but in Europe students have to write technical reports in almost every course.

That’s a pretty sweeping generalization. In the European university that I went to, CS students definitely didn’t have to write anything longer than long-form exam questions until the bachelor’s thesis.

But less sweeping than the parent who generalized to "most universities". I think it was a long time since you went to university and times have changed.

That's probably true. It was definitely very unoptimal for students to not have practiced writing scientific text much if at all, and suddenly having to write twenty pages worth of it for their BSc. (More recently I did study another STEM subject for a bit and noticed that there was definitely more essay writing involved!)

Not really for me in Poland - thesis was the only thing we had to write in a technical way.

The first thing that my PhD advisor did, when I first met him as a foreign student, was to give me this book: https://archive.org/details/technicalwriting0000huck. And I am forever grateful for it.

For the record, at UIUC we had a bunch of seminar classes (and I think a regular class?) on LaTeX and technical document creation, ran by A.J. Hildebrand; it was a fantastic course and I learned a lot of folklore "secrets" that the manuals will not tell you, as well as technical writing tips that were far from obvious.

> If you write equations in Word Equation Editor, your work just doesn't look very serious.

Sez you. MS Word 4.0 for Mac was perfectly alright, putting in less elbow grease than fiddling with LaTex.

And you could get a PDF out of it, via the PostScript print driver.

Never liked those spindly CM Tex fonts, anyway.

There’s always the WordTex template if you want to create documents that look like LaTeX output from within Word: https://youtu.be/jlX_pThh7z8

Given that LLMs can or soon will be able to turn markdown or word into LaTeX this filter won’t last long.

It’s a dumb filter anyway.

Markdown and Word don’t have the tools to express what LaTeX can. Not even your deity of choice will ever be able to turn the former into the latter, let alone an LLM.

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