Word is fine if you really, really, know what you're doing with it. By that I mean understanding how to use styles for formatting, how to properly insert footnotes/figures/tables etc, and what the implications are if you don't.

When my wife wrote her doctorate she did none of those things, and I ended up spending the best part of two days laboriously going through the entire document to make it conform to the university's style guide for thesis being submitted. Thankfully she uses Scrivener for writing now which as near as possible enforces doing things the right way the first time.

Agreed. I am a power user of Word. All of my formatting is painstakingly performed by applying styles rather than manually formatting things. Headings, subheadings, captions, etc. are all tagged as such. Everything appears in the table of contents, table of figures, etc as it should, and styles can all be updated in one easy sweep.

But if you have even one collaborator who goes in and hammers something by applying manual formatting, the whole thing can be ruined. Actual images can end up showing up along with its caption in the Table of Figures. Entries can go missing from tables. Lone paragraphs can randomly end up with a different style.

Word can successfully manage large, complex documents, but it requires discipline. (as does LaTeX)

> Word is fine if you really, really, know what you're doing with it.

I would submit that the same is true for LaTeX.

Maybe the advantage of LaTeX is that people who don't know what they're doing will be scared off by the interface.

You mean that it will be perceived as so difficult to use that people will ignore it in favor of anything else? Calling that an advantage is a rather unique perspective. General document creation is not exactly something only a few specialists need to do.

I was a little tongue in cheek with that comment, but there could be a filter effect where people who aren't prepared to do it properly run away screaming from TeX and its many shells to the loving embrace of Microsoft Word, where they then do a terrible job and give Word a bad reputation.

I've done plenty of work where the customer insists that the final deliverable be in Word format, because that's what they're comfortable with. You can do proper formatting in Word once you learn the tools, and it's not even all that hard, although it can be somewhat unforgiving of screwups. The one thing I wouldn't attempt is to convert a TeX document to Word. In theory that shouldn't be entirely possible, but in practice there are about a million ways it could blow up in your face.

There was a civilized time when universities hired typesetters to do this job properly.

There was also a time when we paid people to operate an elevator. Then we improved the technology enough to make it simple enough for everyone to do it themselves. It has many benefits, and have the user more control over what they got and when they could do things.

I don't know about you, but I really appreciate being able to instantly get the results of a calculation rather than having to submit it to be worked out by a human calculator.

> Word is fine if you really, really, know what you're doing with it. By that I mean understanding how to use styles for formatting, how to properly insert footnotes/figures/tables etc, and what the implications are if you don't.

And I've yet to find a guide which instructs on how to set it up properly, how to share styles across documents etc. Do you know of one?

20 years of writing HTML and CSS has spoiled me; many times I'm using Word and thinking "I could do this with one rule in CSS" (often some crazy positioning nonsense with images/tables). If only!

Personally I've never found a single guide that you could hand to someone, but if you're coming from a background of HTML and CSS then you should pick up formatting rules pretty quickly - they're essentially the same, but implemented via a GUI rather than explicitly specified selectors and tags. The key for me is to just pretend that none of the explicit styling options exist - so no use of Bold/Italic/Centered/Whatever buttons, and instead turn on the styles pane and apply all formatting from there.

I wrote one thesis in LaTeX and one in Word. There were some challenges each way, but all in all, doing it in Word was easier. WYSIWYG helped a lot, Word had good documentation, and LaTeX was hard to customize to meet the university's formatting rules.

I will admit, however, that LaTeX run on default settings looks good. Whoever designed that bit had taste.

The math department didn't have a package for that? I taught my middle school teacher latex so his quizes would look nicer.

I don't remember being offered a package or template or anything like that. This was in 1995; I expect things have improved.

I first became aware of TeX generally when towards the end of writing my comp exam responses, I came across @kjhealy's templates. While this looked interesting, I didn't have the time to dive in (I was on deadline for revisions, and borrowing a family member's MacBook as the 8600M in my 15" died).

With that said, I wonder if the people who actually did write a thesis/dissertation in LaTeX had to do all that customization themselves.

For example, I'm in NJ and although I didn't go there, I could imagine Rutgers OIT telling people, 'If you want to use TeX, just download our package, it will install everything you need and will output the correct format for submission'

I wrote a book in Word. It was a nightmare, but a useful one: a version conflict across users or something in the copyediting phase glitch-deleted all the math from a chapter ... but in laboriously reconstructing them I found and fixed an error in the original. So thanks Microsoft?

On my old 486, I wrote about 80 page document about signal processing in Word, full of painstakingly created equations, until one day, all equations basically disappeared or became uneditable. I learned my lesson there about wysiwyg.

Things have improved since 1989. Give it a shot again, you might be surprised!

1999 and it doesn't seem like, from other answers.

The thing is that time invested in learning superior alternatives is already spent, and there's no point taking the risks just to try for no reason.

Just like I will not create another website in FrontPage.

They did completely overhaul the equation system in Office 2007 so that you edit them with unicode text instead of the proprietary OLE editor from previous versions. The document [1] describing how they use unicode characters to structure mathematical expressions is pretty interesting, even if you never touch MS Word again.

[1] https://www.unicode.org/notes/tn28/UTN28-PlainTextMath.pdf

Word also supports LaTeX for equations! https://support.office.com/en-us/article/linear-format-equat...

The compilable C++ snippet certainly looks interesting. It answers the question I always had, about why some languages added unicode identifiers.

It doesn't look all that bad.

I wrote mine before word was really a thing. I used LaTex, and had to create my own style setup. It wasn't too difficult. I had programs generate EPS documents for inclusion of figures, resize jpg/png images, run the multiple pass latex compilation.

I am pleased to report that the makefile for my thesis still works, and generates close to the original doc, 20 something years later. I can barely open a 10+ year old office doc thanks to incompatibilities within the product.

Back in those days, word processors would not do complicated multi-line equations very well; type setting for print, display, etc. This was a problem for me.

To each their own though. I wound up writing some user manuals for products I developed in the late 90's in LaTeX as well. I've not used it much since.

True story:

E. Allen Emerson once came knocking at the unix cave door, complaining that his older papers, written in LaTeX, were formatting differently.

Upon examination, the only difference, literally, was that we had replaced the ancient 300dpi printers with less ancient 600dpi printers. And yes, CMR is a spindley little font.

I'm glad it worked out for you. I would have gone mad if I'd tried to write my dissertation in Word. (As it is, I'm, nearly a decade later, still a bit touched after trying to do much minor work involving lambda calculus in Word.)