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.
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.
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
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
.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.
Git is like shit for Word documents
But better for LaTeX
and then there are fucking PIs insisting on word files who never heard of tracked charges let alone of file naming conventions.
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.
Principal Investigator. It’s the lead scientist in charge of the project.
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.
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
yeah this is what i used for some projects, i.e. rmarkdown which also integrates the statistics part
That’s why we wrote our thesis in LaTeX: https://github.com/jonte/GGS-report/blob/a9d9d20bcc22a524629e371ce5984f131490b743/report.lyx#L362
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
Wait, I thought you guys did it manually…
Anyway, I should still learn it.
It’s a editor helping you writing it, you cat still go inside and change things manually if you need/want to do that.
Unzip the docx with a pre-commit hook
(This is not a serious suggestion)
.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.
Just like word documents are shit for papers and theses/dissertations it turns out. The formatting alone is a nightmare.
Still better than using file names.