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by jlgreco 4870 days ago
If someone makes it to graduate school without knowing LaTeX, I would suspect chances are high they don't really have any interest in changing their routine then. They're busy, and hey, word has been working in university for several years already!

If I wanted to increase LaTeX adoption, I would get undergrads hooked on it. I bailed to LaTeX my second year of undergrad and never looked back. Even with papers for the english department it was great, if only because it just looked that much better than all the Word formatted papers from my peers. The fact that it made bibliographies dead simple was just icing on the cake, it practically felt like cheating. Get undergraduates to understand those "sly" benefits and they'll be willing to take a night off from binge drinking to learn it. At least more willing than a grad student anyway.
2 comments
saryant 4870 days ago
My CS department (undergrad) pushed LaTeX heavily. It was required for all senior thesis projects and we had this one Unix guru of a professor who seemed to know every there is to know about LaTeX.

Some of us even became proficient enough to take notes real-time during discrete math and numerical calculus lectures.

> Even with papers for the english department it was great, if only because it just looked that much better than all the Word formatted papers from my peers.

Back in college I used to get compliments on how good my papers looked from humanities professors just because it was typeset in LaTeX. Fun times.

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twog 4870 days ago
If you dont mind me asking, where did you go to school?
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anders0 4870 days ago
I'm not saryant, but the school of CS at St Andrews (UK) briefly teaches us LaTeX in second(?) year, and encourages us to use it to write all our reports, essays, etc.

(OT: I also got complimented in high school for my physics coursework being typeset nicely. :D None of the other teachers seemed to really notice, though.)

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saryant 4870 days ago
Trinity University, San Antonio.

http://cs.trinity.edu/

(Yes, their website is ancient)

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pseut 4870 days ago
I've used plain TeX for my christmas letters for years because it looks so much better than word. LaTeX feels like overkill if I don't need to number equations and floats.
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