2026-02-13 13:18 UTC
@yaxu also though, I think the badness of LaTeX/Word is just the tip of the iceberg — the idea that research needs to look a particular way is fundamentally gatekeepy (and *even within* the already narrow community of academic computer science, the specific format is exclusionary — ACM formatting reqs are hellish if you produce image-heavy work) but of course why stop there, since the whole existence of conference paper acceptances as the arbiter of careers is deeply rotten.
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@yaxu@post.lurk.org 2026-02-13 15:09
@lea Yep agree fully on all that including the false choice of latex vs word ! As a linux person I don't have access to word.. I was ranting but did use LaTeX for my thesis and a lot of papers, but do find it painful to return to when I don't use it very often. I generally get a long way with writing in markdown and converting to tex with pandoc but didn't appreciate hitting walls of errors lost in a million spurious messages on a last minute deadline.. pubpub.org shows one way forward I think although is a bit unreliable and has funding/sustainability issues