Dear LaTeX,
You look so pretty. In grad school, all the cool kids were using you. You know, the kids that had backgrounds in differential calculus and ran R even when they didn’t have to? Those kids. I wanted to be like them and have groundbreaking papers. So, instead of working on my arguments and methods, I downloaded you and set out to write my dissertation with your wonderful program. I mean, if the paper looks like it was written by someone who has their stuff together, it must be a well-done paper, right?
Now, 4 years later, I realize the error of my ways. You didn’t make my papers any better. You just made them look like they were written by a high-tech wannabe. I learned all your intricacies; I poured countless hours into reading blogs and wikis for your program that was supposed to help
Maybe you do that for some people. For me, however, it was exactly the opposite. Many, many times, I’d have to scour the internet to find why my file wasn’t compiling into a pdf correctly or why my tables looked so funny. Instead of your purported WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean), I was typically getting WYSIWYDMBWTSTFO (What You See Is What You Didn’t Mean But Were Too Stupid To Figure Out). I persevered anyway and stayed in my relationship with you even though Word’s WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) seemed so tempting. I just wanted my papers to look like they were made by someone smart!
My biggest problem with you, LaTeX, came when my papers finally started getting accepted. No one would accept our relationship! They just wanted Word documents. I’ve had to spend research monies on various programs to convert my pretty LaTeX documents into Word. Sometimes – gasp! – I even had to make such conversions by hand. It was too much – I was stuck at home on Friday nights because of you.
It wasn’t all bad. You taught me to use reference management software. That was nice. You made my job talk slides look like they were made by someone who has it all figured out. I’ll always appreciate the times we shared. I’m going back to Word, though. I hope you understand.
Love Always,
Amanda
I sure don’t blame you, Latex is (literally) a work of art !!
I’ve always thought it would be fun to write my papers in word, but use the default latex font so everyone would think I was cool without learning all the mumbo jumbo. :)
Doesn’t work. There’s more going on that just the shape of the letters. The spacing – kerning – is different in Word.
Oh, sure, I support you all through graduate school and then you leave me once you’re a big time professor. I see how it is.
Fine, take your hussy Word and just leave. She’ll never do for you the things for you that I did for you! Remember that little thing we used to do together, with the subscripts? Well, Word’s too much of a prude for that.
And one day, when your document formatting falls apart and all your MathType disappears for no reason right before a paper is due, you’ll look back on this day and wish you’d stuck with me.
I don’t know what to say. Except that a) it is easy to convert to word from a PDF, if you have to (just use acrobat), b) word documents look worse and give you less control, c) those nasty publishers (for whom you are working for free) convert into a markup language after you give the the word document (you are just doing more work for them, for free), d) and mostly, your argument lacks much structure. I conclude you just gave up. Publishers don’t always get what they want, and an errant team (we know which one) is a blip in the long run. Now they will have (at least) one fewer telling them they are wrong to force word on the community.
With Git, even change tracking is not the problem it once was with TeX.
Oh, don’t expect me to download Mathtype fonts to read your stuff, please at least post it in PDFs.
Thanks, Mike. You’re right, of course, that most of my breakup has to do with publishers, that we should be advocating to accept LaTeX.
actually much of it is a few stubborn editors who don’t want to deal with it. But they are short-timers, I believe.
Have you tried one of the online LaTeX editors, e.g. writeLaTeX (https://www.writelatex.com)? They’re making it much easier to get started with LaTeX — might be worth a try when you get frustrated with Word! :-)
Thanks! Hadn’t tried it.
I’m not pro, but the feature that keeps me coming back is tables. I’d pull my hair out if I had to make them manually. Much easier to add a line or two to a stata script and get instant, professional-looking tables. If you have to change the model – no problem. Tables are fixed automatically.
Writing my dissertation in Latex was amazing. I fell in love with her then and never left. While others complained about margins and the formatting nazis, I breezily emailed my doc to the compliance officer and danced.
This is a great post, and goes halfway to answering a question I’ve always wondered, why do people bother using LaTex?
I agree it looks nice, and for certain things (CV’s, letters, warning signs etc) it could be useful but it seems completely impractical, particularly professionally, such as when writing up book manuscripts or articles (Im assuming, as Im not an academic, but if the norm is still Word then why not go with the norm?)
Is it all stylistic? Or is it actually better (when taking into consideration the negatives outlined above) in performing certain tasks, such as incorporating data analysis (or what ever)?