this post was submitted on 22 May 2024
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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.
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.
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.
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)
Just like word documents are shit for papers and theses/dissertations it turns out. The formatting alone is a nightmare.
.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.
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.
idk it says
.docxin OP's imageOh sorry, I was too focused on calling out the silliness of the idea.
This is the way.
This is the way.
Still better than using file names.