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.
back | 2024-10-04
When I started university two years ago, I struggled to find a reliable tool for academic writing. LibreOffice Writer lacked suitable templates, and Microsoft Word—running on a Windows 10 VM—proved cumbersome. Despite their capabilities, both tools had quirks that caused frustration, particularly with maintaining consistent formatting in academic documents.
Then, a few months ago, I wrote about using Linux in academic work. After a year of battling Word, I revisited my approach to Writer, creating a custom template. While this improved things, issues with page numbers, section breaks, and overall consistency persisted. Then, a lecturer introduced me to LaTeX—a document preparation system that handles formatting and typesetting precisely.
Initially, one obstacle held me back: my institution required a niche referencing style unsupported by Biblatex, the LaTeX bibliography tool. Creating my own style seemed daunting, but I eventually developed a Biblatex style that adhered to the required format, now available on GitHub.
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.
As much as my mates joke (oooooh LaTeX), it did make a big difference to the quality of my work. I learnt about professional typesetting, writing BibLaTeX drivers, and managed to produce something that my institution didn't actually have. Now I can't prove it, but I think my grades benefited too, and the peace of mind from version-controlled backups was worth it alone.
Doing things right goes a long way, even when it takes some investment before results.