If you were writing a dissertation in the present, what would you use?

[ibuys]

@DrJJWMac

The lesson is, with LaTeX, you have to write a perfect dissertation the first time or be prepared to spend time adding in the feedback comments.

One of the great things about LaTeX is that it’s all just plain text, which lends itself beautifully to version control with git. If your colleagues can get on board with it, managing feedback and comments with Github or Bitbucket works really well.

If you can get past the initial learning curve leveraging the tooling built around distributed development models can be powerful. Of course, this depends quite a lot on the willingness of the people you work with to tolerate your eccentricities.

I wrote a lot of documentation and policy at work in Markdown for review, and run it through a pipeline to automatically build a pdf with pandoc and LaTeX for distribution.

[JohnAtl]

I appreciate everyone’s input on this. It’s great to be part of this hive mind.

I think the difficulty with LaTeX’s markup is that it is made up of words, or is visually word-like.
The aforementioned

Sentence with a \textbf{bold} word. 

As opposed to

Sentence with a **bold** word.

It is wxkl kpdsn thdt pdrhxe cxn rktd a swgxbque by udqng ojry tje fosbt ahd ldgt lcbqvds of tpe wsxgs.

Thus, LaTeX’s markup would interfere with that by changing at least the beginning of the word. In the above example, we might see \tkvbxg{sebd} and have no recognizable “t 8 letters d” pattern, whereas with markdown, ** is non-letter punctuation, which we are adept at ignoring.

I think based on this (and thanks again to everyone for helping me think through this), I’ll look into thesisdown and how I might adapt it.
I don’t really (i.e. really don’t) want to write my diss in R Studio, but perhaps I could use Texpad (which supports markdown), or Typora, etc. as my editor.

Hm. I could also augment markdown with my own syntax. I can write code, no reason to be constrained to what exists now.

E.g.

FIG#eegpower ‘./media/eegpower.png’ Mean alpha-band spectral power across trials for all subjects. Theta-band increase from 50–250ms, alpha-band power decrease from 200–400ms.

Likewise, heretofore, etc. EEG power changed significantly, the p was so smol, (see FIG#eegpower).
Which suggests something, but we’re hedging a bit, as one does.

[ibuys]

Just saw this article in Nature linked over in the DT forums, seems relevant: Cut the tyranny of copy-and-paste with these coding tools

[svsmailus]

MS Word, it’s worked for me for the last 30 years. Simple to use and outputs great looking documents.

[DrJJWMac]

@JohnAtl

I think the difficulty with LaTeX’s markup is that it is made up of words, or is visually word-like.
The aforementioned

\newcommand*{\tbf}[1]{\textbf{#1}}

Sentence that has a \tbf{bold} word.

In any case, the ease you gain when you avoid direct LaTeX syntax by using some other syntax to go through converters will bite back at you when you want to do something “easy” akin to recompiling your document to update from your .bib file after adding in a few more citations in the middle of your dissertation. You also loose the power from packages that provide [draft] mode variations (e.g. so as to show only placeholders for figures).

@JohnAtl

I can write code, no reason to be constrained to what exists now.

The strength (and weakness) in LaTeX is that is a robust document styling tool, not a coding tool (albeit version 3 has improved the potential to “code” in LaTeX). By specific example, I marvel at the questions on StackExchange about how to make certain graphs purely with LaTeX. But then I fire up Igor Pro and create the same plot in about five minutes with higher publication quality, export the graph as a PDF, and \includegraphics. Gosh, we can even make something in the free GeoGeobra tool (or python) that is about as good in far less time than mucking about with “coding” in LaTeX to create a graph.

Borrowing loosely from many years ago … pick your tools wisely, Grasshopper.

–
JJW

[tomalmy]

I left college in the pre-personal computer era, so it would have been my electric Smith-Corona back then.

Now for sure it would be Scrivener.

I had very bad experiences with Microsoft Word and any long document back in the 1990’s. Maybe it’s OK now, but I would tend to doubt it as it’s done nothing but become more bloated over the years.

[dfay]

RPN calculator

[nationalinterest]

@tomalmy

would tend to doubt it as it’s done nothing but become more bloated over the years.

I would disagree that it has done nothing but become more bloated. It has added functionality for sure, most of which I never use, but others may do. (I can hide the toolbars if I like.) Some I do rely on, like improved styles, version control and referencing.

The biggest change has been to move from a binary file format to an XML based one.

Compatibility issues are hardly limited to Word. Trying to read Logseq markdown files in Obsidian mostly works but embeds don’t because they’re different standards. (I dare say someone has written a plug-in to translate.) Different flavours of markdown have different approaches even for things as simple as highlighting and tables.

[iPersuade]

@derekvan

One of the challenges with Scrivener is in the feedback cycle. I’m curious how others have dealt with that

My method is to export Scrivener to Word, take snapshots of all the documents in my draft, and send the compiled Word version to my collaborators/reviewers. When I receive the revisions, I have Scrivener and Word doc open side-by-side and manually input the revisions that I want make. Then I run another set of snapshots. I do save the clean version of the reviewer Word doc inside my Scrivener project and sometimes a PDF of the redline.

It sounds like a lot of effort, but it isn’t. I’ve timed myself doing my “revision processing” work all in Word versus using this Scrivener method and there is not a significant difference in the time it takes to process the revisions. Also, the key to this step is having a reliable compile process. I spent a good deal of time setting up corresponding Scrivener and Word templates so that my compile cycles are very easy and require almost zero clean up from the Word side post-compile.

[beck]

@iPersuade

I spent a good deal of time setting up corresponding Scrivener and Word templates so that my compile cycles are very easy and require almost zero clean up from the Word side post-compile.

Would love to see a video tutorial on this process of yours!

[iPersuade]

Happily. I can do that.

[TudorEynon]

Thanks for that, I didn’t know about Overleaf. I use Mellel sometimes and find it works well and links with Bookends if you want bibliography. I am an admirer of Donald Knuth and his attitude towards copyright and so on has influenced me deeply. I consider LaTeX a work of Art really and it is basically what it always was; just a great piece of work.
I am more than happy by the way to pay a developer but on the other hand I have more and more misgivings about intellectual property as it stands now. Bit of a digression but a lot of LaTeX users I think feel something similar to me.

[JohnAtl]

Thanks @RosemaryOrchard . I’ve been using Texpad for quite some time now, and like to have things local, in case I need to sed them into shape

[Katie]

I’d use Cliff Notes!

[tenbobnote]

I’m in the middle of Uni right now. I’m using a combination of Word and LaTeX (Texpad) for assignments. For the dissertation I will compile the final document in LaTeX but I must use Word for the draft chapters so that lecturers can add comments. I have Scrivener but I prefer to use it for creative stuff and I also use Markdown editors for that. If you are comfortable with LaTeX that’s the one I’d recommend. If you are inexperienced then this may not be the best time to learn . Perhaps try it with a few short assignments first. If you wish I can share my preamble with you and some output samples.

Something to consider (which I didn’t appreciate until I started) is that writing the manuscript is only about 10% of the work. Reading, making notes and forming ideas is the other 90%, and I highly recommend DEVONthink for this. I even stopped annotating PDFs in a reference manager (and just keep the ref files there) as DEVONthink is so much better for almost anything you need to do with documents.

[ldebritto]

@nationalinterest

I use Word. Using styles it’s absolutely fine.

That and setting keyboard shortcuts to your most used styles helps a lot!

And for really long documents, such as a dissertation, activating Word’s navigation pane is a must.

Outline view will also help moving sections across the whole document and seeing the text in a Bird’s eye view.

I guess my final tip is to open a new window to see different sections of the same document. That can help when reviewing or deciding on wether some idea fits better in section A or B.

Word gets a lot of bad vibes in tech blogging community, but in reality it is still the lingua franca for many other industries and academic fields.

[JohnAtl]

Thanks for the input everyone!
(This is long, but perhaps useful to Future People™.)

I’ve decided to use LaTeX and Texpad.
Thanks to @DrJJWMac for assisting with subcaptions and providing examples of his own work. I also tweaked the gatechthesis class so it doesn’t break subref.

Once I’ve gotten into it, copying and pasting from my upcoming article, the LaTeX markup to text ratio is much better, so everything is legible. Taking a bit of my own medicine here - when people post a knee jerk reaction to some piece of software, I sometimes chime in with, “this is when you learn to use the software” or words to that effect. So I’m relearning after a hiatus.

I’m using Texpad’s snippets capabilities to add markup around numbers, units of measure, italicizing variables like p, F, and Q, using SI units markup, (5 cm becomes \qty{5}{\cm}, etc. Also using TextSoap to do some of this semi-automatically, replacing $, _, and & with \$, \_, and \&.

Biggest challenge so far has been Word’s use of the Unicode character U+2006 (SIX-PER-EM) as a space between numbers and their units of measure (and it’s not even a thin space as it should be).

Also making extensive use of Typinator’s autocorrect and expansions features to cut down on typing the same phrases over and over.
tr␣ = transport
ve␣ = velocity
rtg = reach to grasp
etc. this should speed things up, and help save my hands.

[acertree]

I wrote mine by hand…and paid a nice lady to type it up for me !

[jemostrom]

If I were to do it again, a combination of Ulysses, BBEdit, Bibdesk. Format: markdown in the beginning, latex at the end.

Would not touch Word for this.

[shandy]

Have you considered Nisus Writer Pro?

I routinely use it for writing reports of 10 - 30,000 words for clients. These include plenty of tables, images, diagrams, footnotes etc.

NWP is stable, fast and light on resource usage. As an example, I’m working on 60+ page doc today. RAM usage is <600mb (on a machine with 64GB RAM) and CPU usage is negligible.

Its TOC navigator (shown in a left pane) is invaluable for long documents, and it allows me to re-order docs simply by dragging the titles around.

The main downside is the lack of an iOS app. There are third party apps which can edit NWP’s RTF files (assuming the files are stored in Dropbox or similar) but it’s really not like, say, Ulysses’ native iOS counterpart to its MacOS app.