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LPT Do it. (mander.xyz)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 126 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (14 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 33 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 5 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

This is exactly it. My advisor wanted a word doc to edit, not a PDF. I wasn't quite snooty enough to think that he should learn latex. Though, if he ever took the time to learn (what time?), I'm sure the writing process would be unbearable for other reasons not entirely related.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Adding comments to PDFs is actually very easy, is it not? Even that Adobe PDF crapware can do it, you don't even need a good pdf reader (like Okular from KDE).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

With the Todo package you can easily make online comments what needs to change.

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