Hah, I formatted by girlfriend's thesis in Latex, I was so annoyed at the whole process that I did mine in MS Word.

Isn't that the default? I don't think I've ever done a paper that wasn't in LaTeX...

It makes rendering mathematical notation very easy, also automatically tracks indices, references, labels, etc. I can even embed csv data to display as a table with a few lines of code!

It's also pretty straightforward to break down the paper into various folders and documents and import them all in a master .tex file, keeping your figures and data in their own folders too.

Can't imagine doing all of that in a bunched up in a word doc...

I mean, you can even do all the building in a container, so I often check in my work, push, and the CI builds the paper and makes a release depending on tag/branch.

Not in many technical fields. When I was publishing in physics about a third to a half of my colleagues were using Word - all the top journals accepted it.

This was over 15 years ago.

CS and math are outliers.

With IEEE Word was even more common.

Currently a med student, and interestingly, some of the most renowned researchers in the world, not surprisingly, use Word. I know it strays from most of the users' fields of interest/research, but this is pretty funny, at least in my head..

For most people, LaTeX is pretty funny. Most disciplines did not use LaTeX. I'm sure there are plenty of big journals that never supported it. LaTeX became en vogue mostly in disciplines that involve a lot of math. Even in economics, a lot of journals were always majority Word.

It's not the default everywhere- in fact the journal Science actually prefers docx, to the point of asking latex submitters to convert to docx before submitting!

https://www.science.org/content/page/science-information-aut...

That's an interesting prior. Can you expand on it?

If it's because of managing latex's complexity indicating some kind of ability, I can guarantee you that most people just copy paste and tweak stuff till it works.

How am I supposed to know? I am sure there are excellent works from the STEM field written in word. But someone using latex has to at least some understanding of IT which is a good thing. Latex gives just a good first impression.

Based on former fellow students, I knew many would just stick to what they are fed and never get the idea to acquire knowledge on their own. And Latex could be just one of the things that shows curiosity and independent knowledge acquisition.

I think the refrain: “Never judge a book by it’s cover” applies here.

Our brains tend to associate good looking with well-researched when this isn’t always the case, hence the refrain quoted above.

So, if someone goes through the trouble of using a cumbersome typesetting tool like Latex to format a paper, perhaps they have made an important contribution that is worth setting aside 15-30 mins of your time to digest the thesis in its entirety.

In 2023, there's a good chance it was written in markdown and converted to latex anyway, so there's not even copy/paste going on.