Big day...
Jun. 20th, 2003 07:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
compilerbitch... during which I am hoping to finalise all the contracts related to my PhD funding.
I stayed up really late last night bashing them into a reasonable shape. I started out in Word, but (as usual) couldn't stomach the way it all looked so I chucked everything into a LaTeX file and redid it all. So, after a bit of macro hacking I now have a nice set of styles that make legal documents really easy to format. Mmmm. Nice.
(Brief anti-MS Word typograpical rant follows)
I can never quite figure out just why documents look so, well, wrong in Word. It doesn't do anything all that wrong, but drop the text into LaTeX and set it again and the difference is just enormous. Word looks, well, word-processed. LaTeX looks typeset. I've occasionally managed to make Word documents look OK (albeit not quite as good as LaTeX, but reasonably close), but it has taken considerable pain. Yes, LaTeX does need some arcane hacking sometimes, but when you've hacked it, it stays hacked, and you can always keep churning out text that looks great using those macros. Word always feels like it shoud</> be really easy to make do what you want, but it never quite works out like that in practice.
Phew. I feel better for that now.
Why am I posting at 7.10 am?
You might well ask...
Bat set the time on the alarm clock wrong, so I ended up getting up at 5:45AM (a whole HOUR early!). So she's been dozing, and I've been LiveJournalling. Anyway, time to leg it, or we'll both be late anyway.
I stayed up really late last night bashing them into a reasonable shape. I started out in Word, but (as usual) couldn't stomach the way it all looked so I chucked everything into a LaTeX file and redid it all. So, after a bit of macro hacking I now have a nice set of styles that make legal documents really easy to format. Mmmm. Nice.
(Brief anti-MS Word typograpical rant follows)
I can never quite figure out just why documents look so, well, wrong in Word. It doesn't do anything all that wrong, but drop the text into LaTeX and set it again and the difference is just enormous. Word looks, well, word-processed. LaTeX looks typeset. I've occasionally managed to make Word documents look OK (albeit not quite as good as LaTeX, but reasonably close), but it has taken considerable pain. Yes, LaTeX does need some arcane hacking sometimes, but when you've hacked it, it stays hacked, and you can always keep churning out text that looks great using those macros. Word always feels like it shoud</> be really easy to make do what you want, but it never quite works out like that in practice.
Phew. I feel better for that now.
Why am I posting at 7.10 am?
You might well ask...
Bat set the time on the alarm clock wrong, so I ended up getting up at 5:45AM (a whole HOUR early!). So she's been dozing, and I've been LiveJournalling. Anyway, time to leg it, or we'll both be late anyway.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2003-06-20 02:14 am (UTC)Re:
Date: 2003-06-20 02:21 am (UTC)I often find myself hacking LaTeX's defaults -- this is usually hard work and a bit of a pain at times. However, what comes out just looks so gorgeous when you get it right. I can't resist it.
And, like I said, once you've hacked it, those macros are really easy to reuse. Try stealing styles from existing word documents peacemeal -- it's OK if you want to just take all the styles in one go, but woe betide you if you just want one or two...
I hate word anyway at the best of times! I only ever use it for CVs, because recruitment consultants usually refuse to accept any other format (presumably so they can hack my contact details out before passing it on to clients).