[plug] LyX/LaTeX vs Word: the verdict

[Christian]

Peter Wright wrote:
> ... I went and had a look for this intriguing beast Christian mentions, to
> see if there are any confirmed sightings or if it is only a legend.

I was pretty sure it existed since there was a Debian package for it.
;-)

> After doing a search on "latex rtf converter" on www.google.com, I found my
> way to:

Freshmeat might also be a good place to look.

> > My advice would be to try and negotiate with the school because such a
> > policy is quite ridiculous.
> 
> I'd phrase it somewhat more strongly. Insane. Idiotic. Pathetic. Moronic.
> Quite a few other words ending in "ic", none of them flattering and some of
> them not in the dictionary. :)

I agree with you but I was, for some reason, showing uncharacteristic
restraint. ;-)

> There are quite few fundamental problems with restricting you to using a
> commercial product from one specific supplier. Let me see how long a list I
> can build:
> 
> 1. Price. I believe a shrink-wrapped copy of Word costs in the order of
>    several hundred dollars (please someone correct me if I'm wrong). It
>    also has to be used under a Win95/Mac-capable computer with Win9[58]/
>    NT/MacOS installed (another hundred or so dollars for the OS at least).

This is interesting actually because, at Murdoch anyway, computer
science honours students get provided with their own PC and a (shared)
office to work in.  This comes with Win95 and Office plus most other
software you need (assuming you can justify it) so cost is not an
issue.  In my case, however, the tech who gave me the machine
deliberately didn't install anything on it since he knew I was a Linux
user and he thought he'd just save himself the time installing Win95
only to have me fdisk it.

Unfortunately other members of the technical staff weren't so
comfortable with the idea of me using Linux.  An initial problem I had
was a network card that simply was not supported.  After trying all
sorts of drivers and eventually realising that this was probably close
to the only NIC Linux didn't support, I went back to the helpdesk and
asked if they had another NIC I could use.  I was told by the person on
duty that I wouldn't be getting another NIC because I was using an
"unsupported" operating system.  He also said that if I used Linux then
the helpdesk would not be giving me *any* technical support whatsoever
during the rest of the year.  I asked him what he meant by "unsupported"
and he said something along the lines of "Well, Linux is free, isn't
it?"  I said "yes."  He said "Well, you can't expect it to be any good
if its free."  I said, "What about Internet Explorer?  That's free,
isn't it?"  He said, "Well, that's from a huge multinational company." 
I was about to point out that Solaris is also from a multinational
company and doesn't support the range of hardware that Linux does when I
realised I was getting nowhere and simply went to the head of
department, made a formal request for a new NIC (much nicer than the
crap one they'd given me) and it worked straight out of the box when I
received it.

There's an interesting footnote to this, namely that I had no more
technical problems for the rest of the year and my Linux machine did not
crash once.  Also, my fellow honours students using their "supported",
"non-free" Windows operating systems had hundreds of system crashes and
lost countless hours of work.  One in paritcular installed some,
presumably *supported*, DirectX software and Windows completely died and
would not boot at all.  He made the nearly fatal mistake of giving his
machine to the IT Helpdesk to fix with the result that he didn't get it
back for two and a half weeks during which time he was almost unable to
do any work...  I was quite glad at this point that my operating system
was unsupported and that I was not eligible for their technical
"support"!

> Warren, I'd recommend the following, in increasing order of drasticity :-) :

[steps 1-3 snipped]

> Step 4.
>   Arrange as effectively as you can to humiliate the department in a public
>   way in front of the uni and in front of other universities for being
>   ignorant and unwilling to listen (not to mention Microsoft weenies).
>   Usenet postings and a witty web site are good ways to manage this.
>   This in itself may not accomplish much, but it will make you feel better.:)

I'm not entirely sure this would be a good idea given they will be
marking the thesis at the end of the year... :-)  Perhaps a better idea
would be to clarify as much as you can what the university guidelines
are on all matters connected with this.  I wouldn't be surprised if
there were some sort of guarantees made of students freedom in choosing
the tools used for work conducted (within reasonable restrictions). 
Restricting you to Windows 95 x86 boxes for an introductory course on
assembly language programming might be appropriate but for something
like honours, any real restrictions on presentation format seem
ludicrous (and all the other words Pete suggested...)

> Step 5.
>   Write your dissertation in LateX anyway. Submit it in electronic form
>   using one of the above conversion methods to RTF->Word. Submit it in
>   hardcopy printed as LaTeX output. After you've got the top mark (you
>   clever chap :) tell them you didn't use Word after all, ha ha,
>   nya-nya-nyanya-nya.

I can't really see the reason for them wanting it to be done in Word
unless they wouldn't want a hard copy to be submitted -- maybe it's part
of some initiative to save paper and thus Uni funds? (I know I've used
up thousands of pages in printing drafts and proofs of my thesis.)  In
this case maybe you can negotiate with them that you will provide the
thesis in PostScript format (or maybe even PDF -- I don't know how well
the ps2pdf converters work)?

Regards,

Christian.

-- 
Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
                				        - Henry Spencer