Having written a report in Word that was about 1/4 of the size of my dissertation, but had some of the same content, and then the dissertation in LaTeX, I can say that as much as LaTeX wastes your time, it's by far the least wasteful option.
Strong agree. My fiance and I wrote our thesis simultaneously, she in Word, while I used LaTeX. The amount of stupid figure- and page- rearrangements she suffered because she removed half a sentence from the middle, while LaTeX generated sane output with basically any text seriously made me much more productive.
Word has had automatic reference numbering for a while now (see for instance [0]). Not denying that it's not very known (nor pleasant to use), and I'm not even talking about bibliography.
I made my partner switch to Latex thanks to the bibliography. Writing tables almost made her switch back to Word.
> Word has had automatic reference numbering for a while now
It also breaks regularly. I know a student in the middle of a thesis writing up marathon, and the time he wastes with this is unbelievable. For example, there are the references that just end up garbled, with Word putting in an error message instead, the references that somehow don't get updated despite having been entered exactly like all the others that do. It adds at least two passes every time he wants to send a chapter to proofread.
Tables in LaTeX are bad. References, notes, and bibliography in Word are horrendous.
I meant it more in terms of bad figure placement. LaTeX tries to place the figure relatively close to the source, it has a sane fallback policy, like grouping them together at the end of the section.
With word one can get from a decently formatted text to multiple quarter-filled pages with a single additional sentence, because it has comparatively bad algorithm for text-block reflow.
I've written two thesis in Latex and a small 100 page book in Word.
Word 2000 performed wonderfully. I had no problems with references or images shifting around, no strange errors, nothing. Bibliography sucked, but in general it was a pleasure to work with.
Word 365, on the other hand, is something I have to force to do what I want again and again. It is built in such a way that doing things cleanly and error-free is difficult and much less obvious than in Word 2000. Even standard tools like image anchors, which worked nicely in 2k, are not reliable anymore. I got the feeling that this is due to automatisms aimed at casual users.
Among fellow students countless hours were lost playing with spaces, line breaks, font sizes just to get tables/figures stay or move to the next page.
This did look like an endless task: adding few chars in a chapter could have messed up positioning of bunch of figs.
I did typesetting in Lyx/LaTeX of two PhD theses: my own (eng) and my GF's (esp) a decade+ later. In both cases the adventure started with admitted a vanilla Word doc without all the bells and whistles (= no templates, no version control).
Once you enter the area of strange formatting, chars typed by who knows either a cat walking on the keyboard or sleep deprived student typing madly, fixing these in a binary format is a real PITA. Lyx/LaTex text formats are trivial to grep, diff, etc.
Today I would probably start and try to stay as long as possible in Markdown, then reformat it at the very end.
