If you patiently and systematically try to figure out all the layout options and settings in word, you start to understand what will and will not happen when you do any of these things. It’s still a deterministic piece of computer code? I certainly spent less time figuring out word than latex at least.

> If you patiently and systematically try to figure out all the layout options and settings in word, you start to understand what will and will not happen when you do any of these things

Well, this is exactly what I don’t want to do in a wyswyg editor, but glad that it worked out for you

I wrote my thesis in Word (graduated last friday, vivad last march). The key to stop things moving around in word is to use the "in line with text" option for images. And treat images like text. If you want it centred then justify it to the centre, dont try to place things manually.

Previous documents ive written with word i would do things like tight layouts on images, maybe with anchors, but that's a recipe for things moving around.

When i came to compile my chapters to a final document i used master document-subdocument to pull everything together. I only had a few issues with blank pages being added when exporting to pdf and that was due to my use of page breaks and section breaks.

> dont try to place things manually

Ah, so the solution is to use Word as if it was a worse LaTeX, I see :^)

Jokes aside, the precise manual positioning of figures and such (e.g. figures at a certain height of a paragraph, with text flowing around it) was the only potential attractiveness of Word.

If that’s still broken I really don’t see the reason for switching to a program with worse typesetting (and not only) capabilities, given my use case and the fact that I’m quite comfortable with LaTeX by now

> Has this recently become better?

You should try TeXmacs; it is not recent, but it has become smooth and it is superior to both LaTeX and Word under every point of view.