When you write your academic papers in Word

During my studies I worked at the faculty, „typesetting“ the following for my professor: https://www.amazon.de/Evangelische-Akademie-DDR-Bildungsstätten-Widerstand/dp/3374024653

>700 pages in Microsoft Word in 2006. I knew about LaTeX, but was not familiar enough to convert everything to LaTeX and integrate last minute changes on top. The authors of course only knew word and the professor did editing and typesetting in parallel.

Afterwards all my academic text were written in LaTeX with Bibtex and I never looked back.

At this point I'm curious: WTF is Microsoft Word even good for? It's like the worst-in-class tool for all things word processing, page layout, typesetting, embedding other stuff into the document, and more. Why are people still torturing themselves with this garbage? Just because it's there? I mean, Wordpad is there too (though maybe not for much longer) but nobody uses that. It's also garbage but still...

It's the most reachable thing. Markdown feels like a toy for many (not me) and people outside of academia look at you kinkily if you suggest latex and bibtex.
- It's the most reachable thing. Markdown feels like a toy for many (not me)
  
  Oh yeah. Markdown. While it does have a place, the limitations on top of my head as to why I wouldn't use it in bigger projects:
  
  There is no standard in that sense, but multiple dialects / flavors
  
  No support for stuff you might want, e.g. alphabetical ordered lists.
  
  It's fine for when you know what output you produce, like for Lemmy or in a wiki or whatever. But once you want more control, you lack options or need to rely on non-"standard" (is there was one) solutions to somehow achieve it.
  
  I think, as an easy, yet powerful solution, AsciiDoc is better-suited.
skill issue

word is fine if you know how to use it

none of its direct competitors have the same feature set, and a word processor that can give me compile time errors is not one i'm going to use with much enthusiasm
- word is fine if you know how to use it
  
  But most don't.
  I had to rewrite the CV my job coach gave me from scratch. She's a professional and used line breaks for spacing and texts blocks for grouping. Because she didn't know about some key concepts (like frames or line height) you learn from web editing.
  
  and a word processor that can give me compile time errors is not one i'm going to use with much enthusiasm.
  
  That's what happened after i saved her mess (written in MS Office .docx) once in Libre Office and loaded it again. To be fair, this was the document formats fault.
- Nobody knows how to use Word. It's unlearnable.
  
  But hell, it's good in pretending to work the way people think it works. All the way until it blows and destroys all the work.
Word is not horrible as a word processor. The issue is that people try to use it to do typesetting, reference management, and all kinds of non word processor shit. And Microsoft encourages this. If you understand what the tool does it’s really a decent tool.
- If you understand what the tool does it’s really a decent tool.
  
  But most don't. Which makes it a bad tool.
It's the best in convincing people they know how to use it.
People use what they know. Are there better (free) alternatives?
- Yes. LibreOffice is better in every way.
  
  And don't reply with "but it has problems opening Word files". That's cause the Word format doesn't follow any standards. Nothing but Word can correctly open Word files (and even that only works well if they were made with the same version of Word).
It is the easiest way to let other people participate via comments and annotated changes.
- Have you ever used Google Docs for that? Vastly superior. You don't even have to send your updated version to anyone... They can see it and work on it with you in real time.
  
  SharePoint promised to make this same functionality work but never got it right. Same for the web version of office. They're horrible compared to Google Docs and there's supposedly even better collab word processing tools.

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This post brought to you by the open source Zotero committee.

LibreOffice FTW!!!

Needs collab features somehow 🥲
- Agreed.

Anyone who collaborates with more than five people on articles but doesn't use automatic reference&citation management is just insane(ly inefficient). I collaborate with lab people who cant use latex and can only use google docs. My absolute requirement was using a citation management extension (like paperpile). Now I also require that we use crossref for figure numbering and referring otherwise I am out.

I use Google Docs for anything simple (1-3 pages), and if it has no citations or more than 2 figures. After that I upgrade to LaTeX.

I had a conference demand a docx file for the paper submission. I figured "fine it can't be that bad to use word for a simple 8 page publication" but boy was I wrong! It was torture trying to get it formatted and arranged properly. Every part of the word tool is weird and clumsy.

Oh, and they've completely broken the original GUI WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) premise of a GUI style editor. The PDF it creates often doesn't look anything like what the document looks like on the screen.

I dropped a note on the conference organizers about the docx requirement. I don't have that many hours to fuck around with bad tools so I can attend your venue. I'll just go to a conference that doesn't torture us to participate.

I wrote my thesis in LaTeX, which is very unusual for my discipline. Now that I’m done with that, everything we’re doing it’s collaborative Word docs. Collaboration features in 365 have been transformative. (Remembering the dark old days of emailing the Word doc around like a hot potato.)

I’m very used to Word and can get it to do some great stuff that most people don’t even know about, but I wouldn’t touch it for something over 20,000 words.

As for LaTeX, I was fine once I got a good template going. Writing one sentence per line is a fantastic way to draft. But there are some fine tuning things that I remember took up a lot of time that I would have had no problem fixing in Word. I distinctly remember trying to get tables to look right when you had paragraphs or dot points in cells.

Oh, and that one reference whose URL refused to break in the line and instead just went off the page. I never found a fix for that.

For LaTeX tables, use https://www.tablesgenerator.com/. It's a lifesaver. For URLs, I sometimes used footnotes and sometimes used embedded links.
- Talking about tables, if you're not using tabularray in 2024, you're doing yourself a disservice IMHO. I almost use it exclusively except for text formatting as only tabularx supports page footnotes easily.
  
  It has turned LaTeX tables from absolutely annoying to something that actually makes sense and looks nice and comes with most tools you want from tables. Except booktabs which it supports with an option. For example, it supports cells with line breaks, variable width columns, multiline and multi row cells - and even manages to align the text in them correctly. I don't know how Jianrui Lyu did this, but he did.
  
  So yeah. Tables in LaTeX don't have to be pain.

As someone who dislikes M$ word, but begrudgingly uses it for lab reports. Can someone tell me what LaTeX for citations is? I know latex as that math protocol for my personal markdown notes.

Also what other software is useful for writing formatted papers?

Math formatting is a very small piece of what LaTeX does.

The common tool for managing citation in a LaTeX document is called BibTeX. You enter details about your sources, and BibTeX will create your bibliography and will also make it easier to cite things in your paper.
Also what other software is useful for writing formatted papers?

Nothing is better than LaTeX/XeTeX + BiBTeX to my knowledge.

Also I advocate against using overleaf as someone would suggest. I used texlive before switching to overleaf and we wrote a few papers via overleaf free tier. Sadly enough, now these papers can't be compiled because there is not enough computational resources on a free tier. Moreover, the documents are neither versioned nor blamed which makes me difficult to go back and reflect on the papers.

I'm back to writing papers now and we're using GitHub private repository + LaTeX+ BiBTeX which allows us to overcome all possible limitations of overleaf.
- Nothing is better than LaTeX/XeTeX + BiBTeX to my knowledge.
  
  LuaLaTeX + Biber
Go to overleaf.com and say goodbye to a chunk of your weekend. 😉

typeset my thesis using latex, biber and zotero. Very painless, the only slightly painful part was configuring the character encoding

Let me introduce Typst: https://github.com/typst/typst.

Just started using it today and it's pretty neat
- I'm using it for a year and it came a long way. Though still in beta and still have some major bummers (which require hacking). But it only came out in 2023. The next update should add a ton of QoL things, so this will be pretty exciting.

i just copy the links to a text file as i write and when i'm done with the paper i just paste it at the end and format it correctly

Btw, https://asciidoctor.org/docs/asciidoc-writers-guide/

Pretty partial to Mendeley but shame it's close to dead at this point.