Mine accepted rtf.
Mine accepted both. The professor read it from a web app anyway.
🤮
agreed
Everyone knows the only acceptable formats are .pdf and .tex, everything else should be shunned out of society.
- If it’s meant to be pretty, portable, and read-only: pdf
- If it’s text with no formatting: txt
- If it’s formatted and read-write: md
I used typst for my thesis and a couple of assignments and can absolutely recommend it. Easier syntax and ultra fast compilation.
.tex
Ha, lamers. A true wizard writes their assignments in roff.
roff? Ha poser! I use CTSS /s
Nah, I hand code my postscript on magnetic core memory with a geomag stud.
.pdf can contain malware
But the entire paper in a .jpeg would be hilariousAny format can really contain malware
good ol virus.txt
I wonder how people actually work with LaTeX.
Do you actually write all the headers and stuff manually through a TeX editor, or do you use tools that do it for you?
Because the former sounds incredibly tedious.
Do you actually write all the headers and stuff
I’ve used Latex as my go-to tool for writing anything that needs formatting for years, and I’m not quite sure I understand what you mean?
I start off my document with a
documentclassstatement, which is one line…? And then I will sometimesusepackagea couple things for further document-wide formatting, but we’re still talking about a small handful of lines (like 5-10 at most).The preamble can grow quite large for big documents with a lot of specific formatting, but I have some boilerplate preambles with the most common packages lying around that I can copy-paste in. Usually however, the preamble grows as you’re writing the document and you add things dynamically as you need them.
I would love to give you a better answer to your question, since my impression is that pretty much no one that swaps to Latex ever looks back, and I would love to help you learn. Feel free to expand on what you mean by “all the headers and stuff” and I’ll try to give a better answer :)
Oh, this is based on my first impression I had a while back when I noped out of it :D
This is less of a detailed problem description and more like a scream over perceived complexity of something that should be so simple, especially for someone who’s very far from programming or advanced computing overall.
Outside of documentclass, there are all the paragraph, section, title, there are all the packages introducing all sorts of things (like, why there’s a need for external PACKAGES inside a TEXT DOCUMENT?! Why are they required to do the very basics that are somehow not covered by the base kit?!) etc.
Tables are straight up scary to write in LaTeX, you insert all the parameters and then write it out like some sort of matrix but without any decent sctructure; and plotting - I didn’t even try to comprehend it.
Overall, it feels like some unnecessarily nerdy way to edit docs. Probably powerful, but same sort of powerful as editing configs to customize things. Please, make it any sort of user-friendly!
Ahh, now I understand! I’ll try my best to make it less scary :)
To start off
why is there a need for external packages for a text document?
There usually isn’t, as long as you only want a simple document. The most basic thinkable document would be
\documentclass{article} \begin{document} This is the text in my document \end{document}However, you’ll likely want a title and author, so you can start off with
\documentclass{article} \title{Fishes are nice} \author{Definitely not Jason Mamoa} \begin{document} \maketitle \section{Introduction} This is a text about why fishes are nice. \end{document}You have your “Super basic document”, with at title and author. You can make simple formatting changes by modifying the
documentclassstatement at the top. My recommendation with all the external packages (usepackage) is to look them up one-by-one as you need them. You’ll typically find a small handfull of packages that you need very often, and then you’ll probably end up copy-pasting those declarations over whenever you create a new document. For most basic documents I’m using like 2-5 packages at most (fancy math fonts, hyperlinks, pretty bibliography, etc.)Tables are straight up scary
They take a little getting used to, I agree. For someone working a lot with tables, I would recommend getting used to them, but if you only very rarely need them, there are “graphical editors” that let you build a table in a GUI and then give you the Latex code for it. Overleaf has an integrated “visual editing” mode that makes the barrier to entry lower. However I don’t really recommend it for someone that really wants to learn to use Latex, because I think it prevents people from progressing past the very basics.
plotting - I didn’t even try to comprehend it
I’ve used Latex for years, specifically writing documents with a lot of plots. I have yet to attempt to learn to plot directly in Latex. I know some people that will create figures and plots directly in Latex, and I respect them. I use inkscape for figures, and python for plotting, and can get stuff looking pretty awesome that way. Learning to draw/plot directly in Latex is by no means a must.
Please, make it any sort of user-friendly!
As with other powerful tools, I think people are often overwhelmed coming in because of the massive number of possibilities, and the fine-grained control that is possible. My recommendation is to start out with something like the above, and progressively add complexity as you need it. Most people don’t require more than basic section (and sub- subsub- etc.) headers, tables, figures, and equations. In that case, you’ll need like 3-5 external packages and 3-5 “commands” (stuff like
\begin{equation}). If you start out with the above example, you’ll probably learn the basics on your own in a couple hours :)I’ve held some latex-courses for beginners, so if you want, I could send you the “basic starting file” that the people taking the course have completed writing (with help) after about two hours :) I’ve been told that most of them feel pretty comfortable learning on their own once they have that.
The former, it becomes easy and “natural” fast, as you memorize the stuff, eventually you become so used to being able to specify how the document should be specifically that using WYSIWYG stuff like word is awful, you start to fight with the document editor…
But there is stuff like overleaf if you want something less direct, it is still LaTeX but it has tools and Whatnots to do it easier.
Thanks!
I do both, but usually I use markdown to write the texts because it features basic formatting like headers and bold text, but it’s faster and easier to write. Then I use pandoc to convert it into .tex and do the final editing and adjusting directly in Latex.
I believe Zettlr editor uses pandoc to convert MD to LaTeX.
Indeed needs some manual tinkering, as long as I remember, at least since MD is not so feature-rich :D
But thanks for the recommendation!
I used LyX when I authored some papers
Will take a look!
.tex is a source format, not a presentation format, and as such should not be valid in a submission field.
they should take .ps though.
Dvi file then.
Hmmm, a compress folder full of the .tex and the resources.
i’m not sending anything that can be edited. last time i did that as a consultant they stripped our company logo out of the documents.
Wait until you find out that absolutely anything can be edited
not by joe doofus
Okay, I just want to say I blame schools for Microsoft’s monopoly on personal computing. School sysadmins are always dazzled by the shiny looking gifts that Microsoft gives them, ensuring the next generation of Microsoft useds is ready.
Yes I really liked the “microsoft excel and spreadsheets” class everyone had to take for 1-2 whole years. The tools designed for us to learn basics within weeks and discover features naturally over time.
I mean imagine how many negative side effects on education there would be if we just spent one or two weeks learning KStars or Geogebra or Kalzium.
Don’t worry tho cause with microsoft backing openai I am sure every student will be given a set of chatgpt premium accounts to “help” them in their learning. Universities are already doing it en masse.
You lose some you lose some.
Schools could have used that time they were “teaching” the Office suite to give an introduction to unix, programming, and the basics of how the internet functions. I had to read and analyze Beowulf, Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Homer and memorize the names and formulas of 33 polyatomic ions. Computing education to the same depth should have been and should be required as it was required for the other subjects.
Knowledge is power.
We understand a very small subset of what we use every day, and that can only be catastrophic.
Really?
They’re almost universally Chromebooks and the Google suite for schools these days…
K-12 use Google, University use Microsoft
yeah but that’s fairly recent.
when i was in school in the late 90s it was all microsoft all the time. we had courses specifically on MicrosoftTM WordTM. that sort of indoctrination isn’t visible in the workplace until the people going through it are old enough to work.
I graduated in 2011, and same. My high school had a pretty janky mix of various Dell Inspiron towers, running mostly Windows XP but with a handful of Windows 2000 and ME machines that for some reason (prolly hardware too old) escaped their upgrades. We went through impressively comprehensive MS Office training and even Computer Tech classes (essentially an intro to an intro to computer science where we learned data concepts and built a PC).
A few years later, 90% of those machines had been scrapped, the mandatory courses were all gone and the kids all had cheap crappy Chromebooks. Now any tech courses are just electives and the students are expected to magically know how to use the software they’re required to use. (Because “they’re young, of course they know it!” Nevermind that they’ve only used iPads since birth).
Consequently, any class involving a computer, even if it’s just word processing for English essays and such, has the teacher taking time out of instruction to show the students how to use the stuff. Otherwise there are problems. It’s a sorry state of affairs and a lot more kids are getting left behind when it comes to tech. Google might be the worst thing happening to education now if it weren’t for the GOP.
i was a ta in uni in 2011-2015 and while ipad babies weren’t a thing yet we did definitely have to explain to some people what files were. as far as i understand from my contacts at the university it it’s way worse now.
Ohhh, I can sign off on this.
The amount of 20 year old university students that do not understand how to save a file to a specific location on their computer and then retrieve that file later has skyrocketed the last five years.
This is very obviously a consequence of them only ever having worked through tablet- or phone-type interfaces, where the file system is completely hidden to the user. I teach these people to program, and their eyes gloss over when I ask them where they put the data file they need to parse for the assignment. Once they understand the question they’ll typically open the file explorer, click on “recent files”, and ask me why their python script won’t open it, when the files are right there next to each other in “recent files”.
To be fair, that’s about all there was… Corels (?) WordPerfect was ass, for sure. Office 97 was freaking amazing.
Although, I was a product of the time as well.
I used Applix on Unix / Linux and it was fine.
sure, but computers are so much more than office suites.
I don’t believe you
/s
our lab computers ran novell netware, which definitely told me that microsoft wasn’t all there was. but yeah, it definitely conditioned an entire generation into only understanding windows.
To be fair, NetWare again was the product - microsoft didn’t have anything worthy of respect until much later (and I can’t remember if AD was any good in the early 2000s!)
NT4s Lanmanager was rubbish - NetWare was light years ahead as a directory service. I’d argue the institutions simply had the right tools for the job.
You are right about the hostile defaults / corpos getting into education to capture a generation, of course (and institutions want to be relevant to the market rather than to the principles or foundations, which is a shame)
A couple years ago I interned for computer support at an elementary school in NYC. Most students had Chromebooks and Gsuite, K-2nd grade had iPads. Teachers had Lenovo laptops with Windows 10 and Office365.
…and until very recently, the discount for m365 was pretty neat, I gather.
Huh, that’s interesting. I’m not aware of what my kids teachers have had to use for themselves (I think the highschool might be MS-based?), but the “client side” has always been in Gsuite for over a decade
Best thing I ever saw was an Italian cooking class that sent recipes as an ODT, and then 20 minutes later as a DOCX as an afterthought for the Americans.
Why not pdf?
Because the chef didn’t know how to do that? I dunno.
I once failed a uni assignment, because the teachers assistant wrote remarks on a pdf in a way that’s only viewable in adobe’s products.
She failed us because “we ignored her remarks”. Had no idea they were there.
Tbh it’s probably less of an Adobe problem and more due to the absolute mess that is PDF annotations.
Despite being a defined open standard, most free PDF viewers either don’t support them (zathura etc), or fuck them up (GNOME evince). Even some of the viewers that do support them like Okular need extra configuration.
Unironically Firefox as a PDF viewer actually has the best support for PDF annotations.
The state of PDF Readers on Linux - Discussion - It’s FOSS Community - https://itsfoss.community/t/the-state-of-pdf-readers-on-linux/12798
Ooh I would fucking LAY into her in the review if she did that, and cause a stink to the dean. That shit would’ve pissed me off so bad. I hate when people expect you to be telepathic like that.
To be honest she probably didn’t even know that the comments were only visible to Adobe product readers, but that’s still infuriating as hell
All pdfs must be flattened! You just never know what people will use so flatten.
Had the same in gymnasium, eventually got it overturned via bitching about it. Notes wouldnt even show up on their webapp : /
Do you remember when radicals were trying to cancel RMS because of him merely defending some accused person.
The whole feud was very sad to unfold.
Ok, he is not perfect, but we need him, now more than ever. Even if only as a symbol.
Wasn’t .docx also supposed to be an open standard but M$ kept fucking with the implementation so it would only work in Office?
So it’s an “open standard”, not in the sense that anybody can contribute to the development, but in the sense that the details of the standard are open and you can learn about them.
The format itself is an XML version of the existing Office document formats, and they grew organically over decades with random bugs, features, and bug compatibilities with other programs. e.g. There will be a random flag on an object that makes no sense but is necessary for interoperating with some Lotus 1-2-3 files that a company had, who then worked with Microsoft to support back it in the 90s. Things you can’t change, nobody really cares about, but get written down because the software already implements it (and will emit sometimes)
Yes, it technically is a standard, but because it’s an ISO standard you have to pay for I wouldn’t call it open. https://www.iso.org/standard/71691.html but people have different definitions of what an open standard is and I’m not trying to critique them.
Isn’t it open? It works with Dropbox and macOS Numbers opens .docx and saves as .docx.
So does LibreOffice, but they’ve been called out multiple times for purposefully making the format overly complex to make it as hard as possible to reliable read and write to it.
I genuinely think they’re just incompetent lol
You should see the windows xp source code
be careful with tainting yourself with proprietary crap though
You should see the windows xp source code
The rapidly dwindling sanity of windows programmers as expressed through code comments
Certified classic
Most of my professors prefer pdf
Haven’t used word in over 20 years and have no intention of ever using it again.
OpenOffice baby!
btw libreoffice is just a continuation of openoffice development
OpenOffice 💀 Dude that thing doesn’t get a proper update since 2014, the most they do today is code style changes!
Indeed the libreoffice team wrote them a letter in 2020 about this: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2020/10/12/open-letter-to-apache-openoffice/
Libreoffice is so nice. I also use onlyoffice on my phone, and have liked it so far.
Works great for any and all word processing and spreadsheet that I need.
I don’t do that much of it anyway so I don’t really need anything more than open office.
*libre office
Yes. I know, it’s more popular than open office but I’ve used open office for so long now I don’t want to switch.
Do you my guy but running an office suite that hasn’t been patched in 11 years is a major security risk. (This is assuming you aren’t exclusively creating and saving documents, but are also opening documents you recieve or download).
Actually now that you mention it I don’t think I downloaded an ODT documenting forever in a day I mean probably decades.
But you are right of course there is a security risk but fron what I understand it is being patched just not actively updated?
downloaded an ODT documenting
Doesn’t really matter what document format it is, I wouldn’t dare using OO anymore. Maybe they still patch critical CVEs, and maybe no one even attempts exploits because it’s basically just in maintenance mode, but you never know…
Change isn’t fun, but I don’t think that UI-wise Libreoffice is such a big leap?
It is not a leap at all. Was seamless for me.
most of them accept pdfs so if thats the case for you just write the assignment in typst or latex and compile to pdf
This is the way.
just rename the file and submit it as a .docx, it’s their fault
Could we perhaps not drag RMS out of whatever dark place we’re blessed not to hear about him from now?
We have enough pedo shit going on with the POTUS at the moment.
Also, LibreOffice saves in .docx format, if you want to be pragmatic rather than dogmatic.
I agree, I fixed it.
I kinda like using Doctorow for this:
- Similar facial expression
- Works with the EFF
- Cool shades
- is an all-around cool, intelligent person and unquestionably punk
For anyone who’s not aware:
https://stallman-report.org/Wow, he’s quite passionate. I just kept scrolling through the quotes and it never ends
Thanks. Sorry I should have linked to it. I kind of assumed it was common knowledge.
I had no idea. With all of the things I have to follow on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis some things are just going to fall through the cracks. “Minor public figure holds reprehensible views” won’t generally hit my radar. “Major public figure did something reprehensible” may not hit my radar depending on how busy or drunk I am in a given week, which will leave me wondering why people hate them years later.
I’m not saying this as a criticism of you. You brought it up which is super valuable. There’s just so much shit to keep up with that I always appreciate context because I have other things going on and rarely have any idea what reprehensible thing a particular person has said or done.
Hey no sweat 🙂 I just happen to be old enough to have known / read about / heard about RMS for decades. Given enough time, if you’re at all interested in the free software movement, his less-than-savory traits naturally end up coming to your attention.
I’ve been using free software (both free as in freedom and free as in beer) off and on since I discovered slackware in the 90s, but I’ll be the first to admit I’m not plugged into the scene. I’m not plugged into most scenes except possibly rock and Americana music, and I know all the gross shit that happened there. Rock music especially. And that may actually be why I tend to avoid getting plugged in.
But I went through the whole report. I’m sad to find out someone with such lofty ideals in one area is so scummy. A lot of that just sounds like typical neckbeard idiocy dialed up to maximum. And if he were just any neckbeard or incel on the street everyone could just dismiss him. But he’s a prominent figure that represents a movement spouting gross and harmful shit. It has nothing to do with the validity of the movement, nor does it remove the value of free software, but him being a keynote speaker everywhere and being so involved makes things feel dirty.
I don’t know. I didn’t take my medication today so I’m scattered. I just hate when people doing important or influential work are gross people, especially if they have harmful attitudes towards minors.
Well they have now, damn. Thanks for the info
Does using the computer just turn people into this?
For anyone who is not aware: https://stallmansupport.org/
To our collective social woe, disinformation succeeds because so many people care deeply about injustice but do not take the time to study the facts before passing along or acting on disinformation.
Something many of us should learn from, even more appropriate on lemmy.
Yeah, LibreOffice saves in docx. Which is fine as long as you don’t care what it looks like when they open it.
At least for school assignments this is easily fixed by just opening it yourself in the school library and adjusting format. It’s usually pretty minor.
Honestly most of my professors accepted papers saved as pdfs which was helpful too
deleted by creator
When I was in college and I needed extra time on a paper (because I procrastinated too hard), I would deliberately save the .odt as an incompatible .doc format and submit it. Which gave me at least as much time as it took for the professor to let me know they couldn’t open it and ask to resubmit.
What do we do ir we want to be automática?
Can’t OpenOffice export to .docx?
please do not use openoffice in 2025
Honestly I keep mixing up Openoffice and Libreoffice.
I mean it completely fucked my resume when I exported it but I was being fancy with grayscale
Nick Offerman after getting Jumanji’ed
