LaTeX is only useful for poor countries

LaTeX is only useful for poor countries

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tablesgenerator.com/
journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0115069
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

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and mathematicians? Why the fuck did you make this thread you retard

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Read the article, nub

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Any tips with help on the LaTex learning curve?

Yes, use Microsoft Word.

The /sci/ guide has a latex guide, look at their wiki. If you run into issues, use the latex stackexchange to ask questions. Be as specific as possible because the autistic nerds will have a coniption if you're asking too vague a question. Many universities have guides too, all of my math/physics work is done using latex because our professors can't jerk the gherk to anything else.

My university is most likely better than yours and it doesn't use LaTeX. There is a LaTeX guide in the university's web archive from 2002, though. All theses, reports, and dissertations are written in Word nao. Finished works are then submitted in PDF

i dont use latex in class because it sucks/cant make maps and figures for discribing things

The study is flawed because they did not control for the text editor used. One of the greatest benefit of using LaTeX is that you can use it with proper text editors such as vim or emacs. The paper curiously mentions neither.

Not sure if serious

>My university is most likely better than yours
if it's small enough that all faculties use the same tools, it probably isn't. if it doesn't give you the freedom of letting you choose by providing templates for both, it probably isn't. if it accepts theses and dissertations in PDF only (i.e. doesn't required a printed copy), it probably isn't.

this. with vim or emacs, you have access to realms of latex automation scripts that basically free you from remembering the majority of simple macros. not even speaking about the obvious fact that they are superior in terms of editing any text.

the study is also flawed in that "LaTeX experts" are deemed as such based on the time they have been using LaTeX for, which is essentially equivalent to saying "You have been riding a bike all your life, you must be an expert at it". I'm sorry, but the greatest differences in amount of text written vs error efficiency lies in the user's capability of writing and using a spell checker, not what editing system he uses. As such, I'm not sure I would even consider this scientific.

to end on the unavoidable anecdotal evidence: i write scripts for theoretical physics lectures, live during class. my professor, whom the paper would consider a "LaTeX expert", is in constant awe that i'm capable of doing this. the "Word expert" users who have seen me do this have told me that this would be impossible in word for the simple reason that you have to use the mouse to access special characters, thus slowing you down too much to keep up. however, my capability of doing this does not stem from the fact that i'm such a pro or genius but simply from the fact that i have preloaded my vim with a dozen macros that let me produce anything from simple integral compositions to recurring parts of formulae with two keystrokes and also add new macros as i go along (ultisnips).

LaTeX is powerful because it separates content from styling, so it's easy to make a paper conform to a journal's style guidelines. Or for another example, PhD dissertations usually have very strict formatting guides, but I wrote mine in LaTeX and never had to think about formatting. So if you're writing a paper for undergraduate English and you've already had six shots of tequila and it's due in five hours, then yes, use Word.
To put this in perspective, you're arguing that HTML is better without CSS because it has a shallower learning curve, and anyway you can use WYSIWYG editors, why would anyone ever use CSS? People just make mistakes having to deal with more systems.

Any good alternative to tikz? It takes a fucking long time to draw anything.

It's actually a very large university (size and student body count). Everyone has to submit a printed and bound copy, and also the PDF.

You could always learn PostScript, which I hear is a pretty neat language. I make figures separately in Inkscape.

I've only had to use it once and I hope I never have to again, it's total shit

Whoever decided this should be the starndard should kill themselves

I'm no expert on the inner workings of .docx, but isn't this how most of the recent versions of Word do it beneath the surface.
I feel like a lot of word fuckups come from people not properly using headings/quick styles

I wouldn't know; the incredible shittiness of previous versions of Word have made me a LaTeX wizard, so now there's no reason to find out.

>post yfw when LaTeX's good looks is 99% down to the font

>Mathematics at ETH
>Everyone uses LaTeX

>My university is most likely better than yours and it doesn't use LaTeX.

I highly doubt that, but seeing as how you're an entitled little prick I assume daddy's money is paying your way through some backwards, middle of nowhere piece of shit meme degree factory.

That being said, if you're boasting about using word you're probably not studying anything too intensively challenging, enjoy the poverty gap.

>My university is most likely better than yours and it doesn't use LaTeX.
not him, but we use LaTeX. before we proceed, what criteria are you using here? CS department ranking? which ranking do you want to use?

latex is painful to use at first and the guidance to just copy other people's templates is unbelievably unsatisfying and disjointed to me - in every endeavor to learn programming languages, i've learned to really grok something rather than just copy/paste, so when i got to latex and all the same people were suddenly telling me not to do that it was hard to get through.

but, unfortunately, that's the best approach. don't bother trying to learn the ins and outs of everything. just get to a template you're comfortable with so that you can google very tightly constrained questions rather than the nebulous shit like "how to get started with latex".

also, i don't know that i care about the study where they asked people to copy an existing paper's structure. like i don't disagree with those exact findings, but for me it's not purely about formatting; it's also about being able to save changes in git, and perhaps most importantly it's about reference management that's not highly proprietary.

>this thread was sponsored by Microsoft™

Just ignore it and it will go away guys.

It's possible to do whatever you want in either suite. Well, in Word it's much harder to make equations, but that's beside the point.

LaTeX makes it easier to start with a document that looks good.
Word makes it easier to start with a document that looks like shit.

It's really easy to tell when a document has been made in one or the other since they always have that "Word quality", or that ``LaTeX quality" to them.

ITT: people who never actually tried Word with styles, hotkeys and its equation editor (which btw supports typing in latex commands such as \sum and \infinity).

>you have to use the mouse to access special characters

Blatantly false

Can some1 create such table in LaTeX and post the code here? i wonder how much work it would take, since im too retarded for this and there is no hope for me.
>inb4 not doing your homework
yes my college requires me to create tables with the word dick in it.

sigh.
this is easy as fuck user.

if its as easy as writting hello world in python than do it instead of telling me how easy it is. i took my time to make this table in libreoffice , it took like 30 secs.

>word is better than latex
>just look at how it copies latex for equations

I'm on my phone atm so I'm not gonna type it out.
Just read the manuals for cline, multiline, and multirow.

this

everytime i try doing shit with multirow it takes me 30 minutes to do even simpler tables and usually one some lines are missing, also its not fitting to page width or the cells mess up their width. Thats why i wonder how someone smart would do it since im not.

tablesgenerator.com/

>Word """experts"""

I used that for quite a while, but what turned me of, was how annoying it is to correct small things.

The editor is ok for writing a new text, but when going over old stuff or fixing things it's really subpar.

Also words makes it wary harder to integrade some text generated somewhere else.
It's ok to do once, but having to update the text later on is annoying, latex is way better for automation.

ITT: everyone says is
easy but no one takes away few minutes of watching desktop or amd vs nvdiia threads to proove it to a retard like me
I thought you people can write it without use of the internet. I mean its "easy as fuck" aint it?

The one above is ass-backwards.

Add some data to the empty field.
There is multiple ways to do this in latex, but they all behave somewhat differently with more data.

i'd help you if I could rn
libreoffice is compiling and my system is basically unusable for the next half hour at least
i can try it after that

>I thought you people can write it without use of the internet. I mean its "easy as fuck" aint it?
I don't care who said what or the competition about word and latex. You asked your something and I gave you a tool to do it.

If you have problems using latex, you should leave your job or study and become a manual labourer. We don't need idiots.

you shouldn't need to have a separate tool for something that can be done in a couple clicks in word.

You don't need it. I gave it to yo so you can easily make your table and see what you would need to type in LaTeX to do it.

well wasnt the "me" me , but i wanted to make similar point , yet to thank you for the link.

journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0115069
The study in question.

>pure typing speed is all that matters
You can't put a word document into git and see meaningful differences between versions.
You can't generate a word document with a simple shell script

>Needing git to track changes

>Typing scripts to do something that takes less that five clicks in Word

>report.tex
>report.1.text
>report.rewrite_abstract.tex
>report.rewrite_abstract.2.tex~
>report.final.tex
>report.final.1.tex

By every measure it's most likely better than yours

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>not using a cvs to track changes

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>I'm gay and please rape my face

LaTeX is an ancient piece of crap that was written decades ago in idiosyncratic macro language that everybody is too afraid of to fix. It doesn't conform to modern terminal ui conventions (no exit by ctrl-c, multiple pass, need for user input when something goes wrong).
The only good part of it is the typesetting core, written half a century ago by Donald Knuth in Pascal, then rewritten in C.
You should use SILE anyway.

>Needing git to track changes

So what do you use to track changes?
And why is it better?

I would like to become a Word Expert and receive something suitable for framing and hanging on a wall in a study/den with many leather and mahogany.

How do?

Makes sense when you have to spend half the time figuring why the fucking non-standarized syntax piece of shit with the most ambiguous error messages won´t compile.

There's literally an option in Word called "Track Changes". With two clicks, you can view changes and comments which show up in a different color for each reviewer. There are several viewing options available, too, so that you can view the changes however you would like. This includes which version of the document you would like to view, and showing changes and comments from only one person. You can also accept or reject changes. All of these features were in Word even before git was created

>I'm too stupid to keep my own code neat

Word is an interactive editor.
LaTeX is a batch typesetter.
These are two completely different things, stop comparing them.

On that note, LibreOffice > Word.

LibreOffice is better than LaTeX, too

That can't be used with other files made in other applications.

Don't be poor. Buy Office. You can use LibreOffice instead if you prefer FOSS

why do people still respect don knuth, he litterally made the worst language in existance

Pretty stupid, honestly.

Efficiency is only one reason people prefer LaTeX. The bigger reason is that Word makes shitty output. You may be able to get your work done faster, but it will look worse and will be more difficult to reformat.

I haven't read the article (nor can I since you didn't give a link), but the "continuous text" is also a big red flag. LaTeX is most useful for complicated formulas and formatting. Word is optimized for things like writing letters and essays while LaTeX is designed for scientists. "Continuous text" does not sound representative of what scientists write.

And even if both of the things I said are wrong, that does not prove Word is good. Perhaps WYSIWYG beats LaTeX for some tasks, but Word is a terrible WYSIWYG editor. I would expect a decent program like Abiword to be far more efficient.

>I make shitty output with Word
>Must be Word's fault

There are different comparisons in the article

If you work with math Word can't even compete with Latex.

Obviously never even tried

Jm user you answered. Just ame back from /sci/ an i am just disappoint. as a recent pure math/CS major i can only vomit from the digust i acheved there. Never found the guide either

Update: The wiki it terible :(

Look at how short the sample texts are. Of course word is going to be somewhat more efficient. Also look at the sample, if one call that one...