When I started university just over two years ago, I tried using LibreOffice Writer for my assignments. Frustrated with a lack of suitable academic templates, I switched to Microsoft Word, which I was inconveniently running in a Windows 10 VM.
After battling Word for a year, I gave Writer another shot, and after making a custom template, I was able to produce some reasonably good quality submissions.
Then, a few months ago, I wrote about using Linux in academic work. I briefly discussed LaTeX (which I'd come across thanks to a lecturer) as a viable alternative to—or improvement on—traditional document editors.
At the time I'd written that article, I was still getting by with my trusty Writer template from earlier. You could say it worked, but documents had a life of their own; for example, page numbers, breaks, and more would change for no apparent reason. I was acutely aware that LaTeX trivialises these issues and so was eager to transition, but one thing held me back: my institution's need for a Biblatex bibliography style.
If you use a popular referencing style (APA, MLA, Harvard, etc.), there's no problem—Biblatex has them built-in. However, if you must use a niche or obscure format, you'll have to create your own, and that's where things get a bit more complicated.
The Biblatex style I made for my institution's specific format is on GitHub. Now, I can leverage all the benefits of using LaTeX, including professional-quality typesetting, consistent formatting, bibliography management, version control, portability, and more.
Figure 1: Year 1 (Word), year 2 (Writer), and year 3 (LaTeX) submissions respectively. Year 1 and 2 submissions have been censored to protect integrity.
What I'm getting at here is that it pays off to do things properly. Sure, I could have carried on using Word or Writer—but there's a reason people choose LaTeX for their PhD theses. When those reasons became apparent to me, I found a better solution and learnt it.
This ideology doesn't just apply to document preparation. There's a reason researchers choose specialised software for data analysis, like Python over Excel, and there's a reason engineers depend on CAD software instead of drawing tools.
Investing the time, researching solutions, and learning how to do it properly makes all the difference.
Figure 1: Year 1 (Word), year 2 (Writer), and year 3 (LaTeX) submissions respectively. Year 1 and 2 submissions have been censored to protect integrity.