If you’re just joining us, it’s probably best to start out with my first two posts:

Review

So, I’ve already tried to make it clear that I really hate Word for creating academic documents. The biggest reason is that it frequently screws things up. So I use LaTeX, and I think you should too. Admittedly, it’s not always possible. Some journals, conferences, or other venues require submission in Word. Sometimes you have collaborators who absolutely will not go through the effort of learning LaTeX. But if you have the opportunity, I absolutely recommend that you use LaTeX.

As most everyone who works with me knows, I’m a huge advocate of LaTeX. If not for LaTeX, at least a huge opponent of Word. Word is sometimes okay if you’re doing a simple document without a lot of formatting, but once I start dealing with formatting a large document according to some specification, things always seem to go downhill. I’ll press enter in the wrong place and all of a sudden my entire paragraph is formatted as a section header. Or a number list will decide to continue from previously, or not continue, depending on Word’s temperament that day.

I have been trying for a few years to get my coworkers to work on projects together using Git repositories for version control, and usually to varying levels of success. I finally took the time to hammer out a beginner’s guide to collaborating with git, using Github for Windows as the software interface and Bitbucket as the online repo host.