Following some discussion... [Matthew's Journal]

Yes, but in a good and wholesome way.

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I am not a geek. I am writing my thesis using LaTex. QED!

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I am a geek, and I wrote my thesis using DSR.

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It seems to be an incredibly practical thing to do.

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LaTeX is so like 20 years ago.

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What the heck else would anyone use?

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Several people in my group are using Word. I pity the fools.

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I say maybe because if you have any kind of equation-ish stuff in there then you'd be a loon to use anything else, but if you're just trying to produce text then it's more of a lifestyle choice than a necessity.

But then I write letters to the bank in LaTeX, which is definitely geeky.

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Yep, that's what I'd say, too.

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I say maybe because if you have any kind of equation-ish stuff in there then you'd be a loon to use anything else, but if you're just trying to produce text then it's more of a lifestyle choice than a necessity.

Linguistic examples can be treated as equations (at least by using the theorem enivironment) which I think has made my life much happier.

But then I write letters to the bank in LaTeX, which is definitely geeky.

Why? Once you are already using LaTeX, given how easy it is to produce a well-laid out letter using the letter class, it would seem incredibly silly not to use it for your formal letters. If you start using LaTeX purely to write letters to the bank, that might be geeky.

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Yes. But having written mine in Word, I recommend anything-but-Word.

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> Word

Why?!

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It's what I know, and interacts reasonably well with various other bits that I know (like ChemDraw).

It's quite disturbing - I seem to have a reasonably affinity for Micros~1 products, aren't too bad at flowing around the problems they raise, and dislike man pages. OTOH I keep forgetting that Word is especially bad, and has many amusing brokennesses.

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Even allowing for the fact that I learned an awful lot about LaTeX in the process, it probably took me less time and was a lot less hassle than doing it in Word.

I'd agree with that. I used Word for my MPhil and it drove me up the wall at some points. It was supposed to do subdocuments and main documents but I found that the styles all went horribly wrong when I tried to use that. I carried on using Word during the first year of my PhD but then a friend told me about LaTeX and its advantages (which included BiBTeX) and persuaded me to try it. I haven't looked back even if I did spend quite a lot of time in the Michaelmas term of my second year hacking BibTeX stylesheets because I'm an arts student and have to do it differently.

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Sorry for butting in, but I just wanted to point out that your icon is gorgeous.

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what the hell else would one use?

-m-

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It's a sensible thing to do (and IMO a necessary thing to do if you have any thing even slightly equation-like in it).

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Yes, but in a good way and you're not the first person I know to do it.

Well done and/or good luck, since I know it's not easy!

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I wrote mine in LaTeX. I also used it for my resignation letter, the subsequent acceptance letter and a complaint letter I had cause to write a few months ago.

(Actually, I think I used LyX for the complaint letter, but it amounts to the same)

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I wonder whether the perception of its geekiness is related to the geekiness of the one perceiving? If one is not a geek or a LaTeX user, using LaTeX might well seem to be a sign of geekiness. But if one is a geek then merely using LaTeX is probably not a major indicator of geekiness.

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I also wrote my thesis in Latex. it really is the best option, not just for equations but also for automatic section numbering, bibliographies etc. etc.

One hint though: get Lyx and write it using that. It's so much less hassle than doing it as raw text.

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What is Lyx? Using WinEdt has made my life much simpler than writing everything in notepad!

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LyX is an attempt to put a WYSIWYG editor on top of LaTeX. I can't stand it, but YMMV.

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I'd like something like that for dealing with pictures, actually. LaTeX seems to cope very badly when you have too many diagrams on a page

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Why? That seems to move away from what is good about LaTeX. I do remember my brother saying that he'd used something which produced LaTeX without having to learn it for his (maths) degree, but I recall him saying 'scientific word' or somesuch.

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"no" because "what you write is what you get" is much closer to "what you wanted is what you get" than WYSIWYG, therefore something like LaTeX is necessary for serious documents.

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And it doesn't try to guess what it is you might have wanted (and consistently get it wrong!)

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I started mine in HTML but was converted to LaTeX when I needed to print stuff out.

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Matthew's Journal

Following some discussion...

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October