My brother wrote his master thesis in LaTex. Being a non-techie (he's an archeologist) I had to do all the 'fixing'.
We switched to LaTex after both Word and OpenOffice Writer made working with the document a non-option.
I also used git to manage changes.
This was 2009.
He could not have done it without my help with this setup. But he could also not have done it without me in Word/Writer because these apps just behave 'funny' once you reach certain complexity in your document.
Fast forward to today.
My partner is writing her PhD thesis (she's an anthropologist and hates anything that has a keyboard).
Not in LaTex but in Markdown.
It lives in a GitHub repo. She is using VSCode with some extension that translates Markdown to LaTex and then to PDF so she can have a preview (inside VSCode no less) any time.
It took me half a day to research the options, settle on that one and to set it up on her laptop (she could have never done that still though).
I spent about two hours to teach her the workflows after.
Thanks to VSCode's built-in git support she manages that also from within the app. Including branches and merges.
After the initial two hours she never needed any help from me.
I think there is a business opportunity here.
Particular people in the humanities seem to dread writing stuff for one because modern word processors are just monstrous and instable as f*ck once you reach a certain document size/complexity.
I think you if you use something like pandoc it allows to at markups for centering and citation refs, which I'm guessing was used for .md => .tex to .pdf. But they will be rendered plain text in makrdown preview
MD => .tex to .pdf works with citations, but when I last used it I still had to write the tables in pure latex. With any even vaguely complex figures or subfigures, I had to resort to latex. The bulk of the text could be in MD, but I had to write non-trivial portions in latex.
- It is a what you see is what you mean editor
- It supports some markdown annotations to support your writing flow
- it exports in LaTeX, Markdown
- It creates a PDF based on LaTeX and allows to choose a template with some configurations
I was using md for nearly all of my works in college. But beyond that, something complex like PhD thesis I cannot even imagine the workflow. Really interested to know more details.
When she is unsure about a re-structuring of part of the thesis she makes a branch. It happened twice so far.
Same reasoning for branching when your are single author of a repo. containing code, I guess. A major refactor or structural code change or trying sth. "crazy".
My partner wrote her Social Science dissertation in LaTeX and also used branches. They are particularly helpful when you hand out a version to others for feedback or proof reading while still working on the document yourself.
My brother wrote his master thesis in LaTex. Being a non-techie (he's an archeologist) I had to do all the 'fixing'.
We switched to LaTex after both Word and OpenOffice Writer made working with the document a non-option.
I also used git to manage changes.
This was 2009.
He could not have done it without my help with this setup. But he could also not have done it without me in Word/Writer because these apps just behave 'funny' once you reach certain complexity in your document.
Fast forward to today.
My partner is writing her PhD thesis (she's an anthropologist and hates anything that has a keyboard).
Not in LaTex but in Markdown.
It lives in a GitHub repo. She is using VSCode with some extension that translates Markdown to LaTex and then to PDF so she can have a preview (inside VSCode no less) any time.
It took me half a day to research the options, settle on that one and to set it up on her laptop (she could have never done that still though).
I spent about two hours to teach her the workflows after.
Thanks to VSCode's built-in git support she manages that also from within the app. Including branches and merges.
After the initial two hours she never needed any help from me.
I think there is a business opportunity here.
Particular people in the humanities seem to dread writing stuff for one because modern word processors are just monstrous and instable as f*ck once you reach a certain document size/complexity.