this post was submitted on 22 May 2024
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Science Memes

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LPT Do it. (mander.xyz)
submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] lowleveldata 53 points 6 months ago (7 children)

Git is like shit for Word documents

[–] [email protected] 63 points 6 months ago (1 children)

But better for LaTeX

[–] [email protected] 16 points 6 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 10 points 6 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Principal Investigator. It's the lead scientist in charge of the project.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Aka, old fucks who don't even know how to save a PDF. Also the only reason I can't work with modern tools, including sending a OneDrive link for a manuscript in Word. We get to pass around a million copies of the same Word file like animals.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months 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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 38 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months 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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

#LyX 2.0 created this file. For more info see http://www.lyx.org/

Wait, I thought you guys did it manually...

Anyway, I should still learn it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months 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.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 6 months ago

Unzip the docx with a pre-commit hook

(This is not a serious suggestion)

[–] [email protected] 26 points 6 months ago

Just like word documents are shit for papers and theses/dissertations it turns out. The formatting alone is a nightmare.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 6 months 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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] lowleveldata 6 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Why on Earth would you curse yourself with MS Office anyway

idk it says .docx in OP's image

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Oh sorry, I was too focused on calling out the silliness of the idea.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

This is the way.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

This is the way.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago

Still better than using file names.