• @drre@feddit.de
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        171 month ago

        and then there are fucking PIs insisting on word files who never heard of tracked charges let alone of file naming conventions.

        • Zagorath
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          111 month ago

          I dunno what a PI is, but my honours thesis supervisor was the person who first introduced me to TeX. And gods, I wish I had known about it earlier in uni, or even back in high school. It is so useful when writing any sort of papers with sections and diagrams and bibliography.

          • @Hundun@beehaw.org
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            21 month ago

            Check out Typst (a newer TeX-like layout engine) if you have time, I’m interested in your opinion. I find it a bit simpler to use than TeX.

            • Zagorath
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              21 month ago

              Un(?)fortunately I don’t have much cause these days for either TeX or some equivalent to it. Anything I’m writing today is simple enough that it doesn’t need anything more sophisticated than markdown for formatting.

        • @prashanthvsdvn@lemmy.world
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          41 month ago

          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

          • @drre@feddit.de
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            31 month ago

            yeah this is what i used for some projects, i.e. rmarkdown which also integrates the statistics part

      • Programmer Belch
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        81 month ago

        I also have my reports in latex inside a git repo, complete with a makefile to generate graphs from csv containing simulation results. However I am too ashamed to publish the entire version control to a public repo

        • Jeena
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          11 month ago

          It’s a editor helping you writing it, you cat still go inside and change things manually if you need/want to do that.

    • @vzq
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      271 month ago

      Unzip the docx with a pre-commit hook

      (This is not a serious suggestion)

    • @steventhedev@lemmy.world
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      261 month ago

      .gitattributes can invoke Word on windows to diff versions, and there are plenty of open source scripts that can do it if you don’t have a copy of Word (or Windows) lying around.

      But Word is like shit for papers. Use LaTeX instead.

    • @Hundun@beehaw.org
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      11
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      1 month ago

      Why on Earth would you curse yourself with MS Office anyway, especially if writing docs is your professional responsibility?

      Why not use Git+Markdown+Pandoc, have your copy, data and layout separate?

      I understand that a lot of istitutions/companies impose stylistic/technical requirements for docs and publications, - still doesn’t mean you gotta stay married to the worst tooling.