Hey,

This week seems to be taken over by Word and its glitches. Problems with footnotes and section breaks means that some of my pages look ridiculous!

The IT dept. have admitted defeat and say there is nothing they can do and I'm just sick of it! :-s

I know it is only a small problem, but I have a feeling it is going to be an annoyance right until the end - ARGH!!

Anyone else wanting to throw their computers out the window today?!

L x

IMO, the best medicine against Word-induced pain is switching to LaTeX (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX). And it's much easier to learn than one might think, it'll probably take you only one afternoon. You can also convert stuff that you have written in Word into LaTeX (the result will need some editing though, but that shouldn't take too much time).

It's free and if you run into specific problems there's loads of documentation on the net, also it's constantly developed further and additional packages for specific issues or styles can be downloaded too.

If you're using Windows, all you have to do is download and install MikTex (the actual LaTeX) and TexnicCenter (the editor, which you will use for writing your text.)

That's really interesting, I too have problems with Word - I like it and having used it for years know it, but sometimes its enough to make you want to scream! Is the other programme a general word processing programme or is it more suited to certain disciplines? (I'm in humanities). Also, say I prepare the doc in that and then have to send the papers over to my supervisors, would it be problematic for them as the uni operates a standard MS Office programme on all its computers?

======= Date Modified 11 Nov 2009 13:53:24 =======
The main difference between LaTeX and Word is perhaps that Word operates on the basis of "what you see is what you get" whereas LaTeX doesn't. Instead, you insert commands into your text, for example \bf for bold, \em for italics etc. After that, the document is compiled, and the output is produced as a pdf-document (or a ps- or dvi-document).

So if your supervisors are used to commenting on your text directly in the electronic document, they probably won't be too thrilled. If they usually comment separately, he won't mind as they shouldn't have any trouble opening the pdf document you send them.

LaTeX is very very common among natural scientists etc. because it's also much easier to handle mathematical formula with it. But even if you don't need much of that (I don't), it's simply looks much much better than Word, is so much easier to handle once you've understood the principle and a few core commands (which doesn't take long, and you can look up everything you need, so no need to learn a lot of stuff by heart), does not cost anything (so that also means you don't need any licence). So I have the feeling it's getting also more common in other fields. I've been using it for all my university life, and I'm in the social sciences / humanities.

If you know any one in the natural sciences, I'm sure they'll be familiar with it and perhaps can show you the core principles "live" in person. But in any case you could just try it out on your home computer and see how you feel about it.

I don't mind word most of the time, but then sometimes, like with table cell height it just goes crazy! and it ends up being something really unintuitive like the spacing of text throwing it all out, rather than anything on the table commands grrr!


However, the compatibility issues would scare me too much to use another programme, plus the ease of use with endnote.

There's of course something like Endnote for LaTeX (BibTeX with a reference manager like JabRef), and the good thing is that also all these programmes are for free and work perfectly.
If you look at the Wikipedia entry for LaTeX, I think there's an example how a page edited with LaTeX looks like, so you'll get an idea. It definitely looks a lot more "professional" than Word, in my opinion.

(Sorry to sound like such a missionary)

I'm in humanties and my supervisor does comment on my work directly so LaTex may not be best. The problem I have specifically is section breaks and footnotes. I have to use continuous section breaks so that I can use line numbering for my extracts, but this messes up the footnotes.... so i have a couple of pages that just look awful!!

My IT dept. have basically said that it is an acknowledged problem with word which microsoft aren't going to fix and they can only suggest that i turn footnotes into endnotes (and actually got quite arsey with me too!). In the 200-odd page thesis I don;t think endnotes are appropriate and endnotes at the end of the chapter won't work because of the continuous section breaks.... ARGH!!

I know it is a minor problem, but it is irritating me so much!

Glad I'm not the only one who has moments of hating word!!!

Could you do a really dodgy fix and just put in footnotes that aren't technically footnotes but just small writing - if you get what I mean?

apple - LaTex does look lovely :-x but the coding bit looks v confusing for me!!

i may be able to that at the end of the writing process sneaks - as i'm still writing the 'small text' could end up several pages away! I think i'm just going to have to crack on with writing and then figure it out at the end.... which doesn't sit well with my obsessive/perfectionist personality!! xx

LaTeX gets another vote from me.

Also discovered it mid-thesis after Word caused enormous stress with figure placement, etc.

Word can really cause problems with large documents + figures, tables, bibliography, footnotes, etc. LaTeX is much better for that and produces far more professional results. My supervisor remarked that my thesis was "very high quality" and I suspect he was mostly talking about the typesetting, true 'small caps', and fancy ligatures :P

what's a ligature - I thought that was a muscle or something :$

======= Date Modified 11 Nov 2009 16:50:34 =======
Mhm, footnotes and line numbers really are no problem in LaTeX. Perhaps you can try it out, and if it works for you, you could try asking your supervisor whether they can come up with a different way to comment on your work. I would assume that if there's actually line numbers in your text, it's fairly easy to write the comments in a separate document and refer to the relevant pages and line numbers of your text. Of course it's a bit of a threshold to change to another system, but if you're really having problems with word I'd say you could just give it a go and see how/whether LaTeX would be an option for you.

Ligaments make phd students feel queasy; ligatures make them go "ooh, ahh!"

See.. http://nitens.org/taraborelli/latex