First of all, I'm not attempting to put the knife in anybody’s (perhaps I would like to put in Rjb203, but I won't). Secondly, sorry about “cloudy sky” but I said it because I've already knew you lived in England ;-). I got to admit that you are absolutely right Sleepyhead: It is not a problem at all and of course is incomparable to any of the other problems exposed in this forum. My situation was that I wasn't able to take control over the paper manuscript even after the second hard copy was returned to me with corrections. I could've written it in word, in latex, etc. but my team coworkers required it in the e-version because it was not good enough.

I live in France and my Ph D is in physical-chemistry. Plotting and treating experimental data is our daily bread but this time the analysis of such data was beyond my capabilities and that's why I looked for an excuse, in this case the incompatibility of the software. Anyway, that's over.. One day I'll return to Latex.

Sleepyhead I liked very much what you wrote and I thank you for that. If I may give and advise about the “lonely and isolating experience of writing up”, well I felt the same about it but here is my advise. Try not to be alone when writing, i.e. do it in cafes (here we love cafes), in places were there are people around and where once in a while they say “good day”. Nowadays you can carry all the information you need in your lap and you can be 3G online connected all the time. It worked for me, it's been working for writers and poets, why not for researchers?

About the PDF converters, they are a pain in the a.. especially when the documents contain tables, equations, chemical reactions, and references. Useless.

The “hard copy” solution didn't work. I did like that and after the third corrected paper draft I went into desperation and I said: “The paper was is too difficult for me (especially because of my lack of experience in publishing)” and he replied “well.. If I could modify the electronic version...”. That was when I got in shock.

I've already made a decision after reading your replies. I love very much this team group and my co-workers (a postdoc word user is also co-working with me in the paper) and the way the work and their publishing rate. I didn't got on this PhD business to “work differently” but to learn how to publish. So I can only say “thank God it exists Word and EndNote for Mac” (for the time being). I've already said to my supervisor that further modifications on the paper I would do them in Word and EndNote and he kindly replied to me “Thanks. Sorry but I’m too old to learn new software” (He recognizes the superiority of Latex). So I will have to wait until he dies... or until I become Boss... to come back to Latex.

Thanks everybody for their replies.

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Hi,

I’m a Ph D student (first 6 months) and I’ve been working pretty well with my supervisor and my team group.. up to now.

I’m writing a publication and serious difficulties have started to come out because of incompatibility. I use Latex to write publications and they use Word and EndNote. I can not use them because Latex is far a way better for this purpose than the aforementioned, and it’s free, the others are not. Also, I’m a mac user, they are PC, therefore I use freeware software for plotting, they use Originlab. I tried to convinced them to try what I use, but it was useless.

I was happy with the “think differently” slogan but now I’m worry because paper production efficiency has been slowed down because of this issue. Yesterday I almost cried because I realized that my team and the publications are more important for me than the tools I use, so I'd better speak my team language. But yet I love latex and macs (I hate Word and PCs).

What do you suggest I do? Thanks a lot.
:-(

Thanks driven2insanity... I though I was the only one who did that