Comment on Laboratory note book for my new research group
Scrath@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 days agoOh yes definitely. I currently have to write the technical documentation for a project I am working on in MS Word because that’s the format my supervisor wants (since everyone in the organisation already has word installed by default and knows how to use it at least somewhat). Probably a quarter of the time I spend writing is lost to fighting the formatting in word. I managed to have stuff happen that my coworkers have never seen word do before like taking the content of all my textfields (which I use for pasting code snippets) and having it duplicated inside each textfield…
I wished I could use LaTeX for it but I understand the argument that some people after me may have to work on the project who don’t know LaTeX.
illusionist@lemmy.zip 6 days ago
I feel you. Using word is like going backwards.
Especially technical docs should never be in word. Converting markdown to html is so easy but I get where you are.
Scrath@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 days ago
The code snippets are the worst part. God forbid I ever have to update them because I have to manually indent every line in them correctly
illusionist@lemmy.zip 6 days ago
Oh shit. I’d try pandoc md to docx conversion. No idea if it works for your case
Scrath@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 days ago
Unfortunately not because the word document is meant to be the “master” document. We aren’t even supposed to export PDF versions because in the future people may see the PDF in the folder and use that as a reference instead of the main word document even though the word doc was updated and the PDF wasn’t. Also I tried pandoc md conversion to docx in the past for another document and it didn’t go very well. The formatting of the headers was all over the place which made it impossible to generate the Table of Contents in word