Counterpoint: advisor said no.
“Just use Word, everyone else does. I have never heard of this latex thing, so must be just some trendy useless overengineered software that does Word’s job but worse. Word can track changes just fine, and you can leave comments.” proceeds to strikethrough, highlight, and inline comment everything instead of using either of those features “I want to read what you wrote, not fight technology” proceeds to email you three separate times after forgetting to attach v28 about how a graphic looks wrong because Word ate it
While correct in the sense of word and versioning via mail being a nightmare, I really don’t think you can expect anyone to learn latex just so they can comment in your document. I would have offered to send a pdf. Shoot me.
I would have offered to send a pdf
I would have never considered doing anything but sending a PDF. Even if they do know LaTeX. Unless they’re offering to help edit the code for me, what good is it? It’s objectively harder to read than the formatted PDF.
That said, marking up a PDF is much more difficult and does require more specialised software and know-how than editing plain text or even editing a Word document. So there are some advantages to it.
With the Todo package you can easily make online comments what needs to change.
Git is like shit for Word documents
Still better than using file names.
But better for LaTeX
and then there are fucking PIs insisting on word files who never heard of tracked charges let alone of file naming conventions.
Then start writing in Markdown. Markdown is easier in syntax, supports LaTeX equations, has metadata and is in plain text so you can use git. And the killer feature is you can use pandoc to convert the markdown file into word, pptx, LaTeX pdfs, html etc. you can also setup a make file that runs pandoc when you ask like this
yeah this is what i used for some projects, i.e. rmarkdown which also integrates the statistics part
I’m dumb, can someone explain this joke to me? Wtf is a git repo?
Git is a tool that makes it convenient and lightweight to keep past snapshots of a directory of text files (called a repository) and compare them. It also makes it easy to have multiple people work in parallel on the content of the directory, see the differences and merge everything into a common version. It is essential in programming, it’s called versioning or version control.
Although it is not easy to access for non programmers because it’s based on slightly obscure command lines. So it’s a bit of an over-engineering to use it for a single file edited by a single person. Especially because you can now put those on the cloud and have some form of version control that allows to easily compare and go back to previous versions graphically.
It may be worth it if it’s a long document that you work upon for a long time, such as a PhD thesis.
git tag "FINAL FINAL FINAL DRAFT - v20"
