compilerbitch (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
compilerbitch) wrote2003-06-20 07:13 am
compilerbitch) wrote2003-06-20 07:13 am
Big day...
... 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.
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