[plug] LyX/LaTeX vs Word: the verdict

[Christian]

A few months ago, before I started writing my thesis, I made a post to
this list asking for suggestions on what I should use, having not been
particularly satisfied with Word Perfect 8 when I wrote the original
research proposal.  The (nearly) unanimous response was to use LaTeX
with a couple of people also suggesting LyX as a GUI front-end.  Well, I
submitted the final thesis yesterday and I thought the list might be
interested in the final verdict on it (LaTeX that is, not the thesis
itself... ;-)

In the end I went and played with LyX (following through the tutorial
and then browsing the user's guide) -- easily the most worthwhile couple
of hours I spent during the year.  I also got hold of a very basic intro
document to LaTeX and read that too.  I seriously recommend anyone who
needs to write a reasonably long document, especially an academic one,
to take the time to learn LyX and some basic LaTeX.  The final result
looked fantastic (all credit due to LaTeX, none to me) and, despite
being very far from a LaTeX guru, I had very few problems.

In contrast, my fellow honours students who wrote their theses in MS
Word had untold problems and frustrations.  Two of them had a problem
where, after inserting a landscape table/diagram, Word helpfully inserts
a blank page that shows in the print preview but cannot be accessed in
any way.  This page completely mucks up all page numbering.  One
solution used was to copy and paste the entire document after the blank
page and put it in a new document after inserting the appropriate number
of blank pages.  This of course screws up the table of contents rather
badly.  The other person's solution was to manually re-number all of his
100+ pages; which he was doing last night while I printed my thesis...

Another two had similar problems with diagrams.  In several cases, Word
only printed half of some of their diagrams -- one had to to spend hours
reformatting the diagrams (very painful on an old Pentium with 32MB --
especially since Windows helpfully crashed half a dozen times while
doing it).  The other was less fortune: he only discovered the
half-printed diagrams after receiving back two fully bound copies from
the library printers.

In contrast, I had almost no problems with my LyX/LaTeX combination --
and I never lost a single second of work all semester.  I wanted a more
sophisticated page numbering scheme with each appendix numbered
individually and huge thanks to Greg Gamble from this list who patiently
helped me out time after time with these bits of LaTeX coding -- I
definitely owe you one (or several).  Furthermore, when my colleagues
found bugs in the software they were using, they were forced to
implement painful, awkward and time-consuming workarounds.  When I found
a bug in one of the LaTeX packages I was using, I just emailed the
author and asked him about it.  He had replied by the next day
explaining the bug and providing a fixed package!  I can't imagine even
people with the highest level support contracts with Microsoft get
anything close to this level of service!  Needless to say virtually
every one of my fellow honours students who saw my experiences in
contrast to theirs have said they're going to try to convert over to
Linux and LaTeX for when they write their Ph.Ds next year.

Regards,

Christian.

-- 
Life is like an analogy.