I could not know for certain, but from my experience converting document formats, such as pdf to doc or html or what have you, I suspect that the converted document will be quite different and include quite a lot of inscrutable noise compared to a document originally created in LaTeX, even if the output appears similar or the same.
I've always been in awe of users of LaTeX because they almost always have another discipline, usually academic and with years if not decades behind them, yet in order to publish they effectively need to become a typesetter, which is an entirely separate discipline in itself. Everyone else just hires the professional typesetter or page designer (probably provided by a commercial printer, marketing or design firm), but academics don't seem to have that convenience available to them. Imagine if in order to drive anywhere you had to design and build your own car for every trip.
The rest of academia is like that too. Depending on the day, I’m some combination of an embedded developer, zoo keeper, surgeon, (data) scientist, manager, writer/illustrator, accountant, and carnival barker.
For articles, LaTeX is not even that bad: most journals want you to stick close to their own article class. Posters and talks are the real timesuck.
> TeX's creator Donald Knuth promotes a pronunciation of /tɛx/ (tekh) (that is, with a voiceless velar fricative as in Modern Greek, similar to the ch in loch).
Lamport says that either pronunciation is acceptable, and back when he gave talks about LaTeX, he would carefully switch back and forth between "ay" and "ah" each time he uttered "LaTeX". Or so he claims.
I am extremely proficient in LaTeX, but at one point I had to turn in a group project typeset in LaTeX with three others who had no knowledge of how LaTeX worked.
This was my solution exactly. Force everyone to follow Microsoft's build styling tools and use equation editor. Then the day before we turned it in, I installed the LaTeX fonts and updated the styles and our professor had no idea.
I'm somewhat ashamed to admit I stopped using LaTeX (and LyX) after that for projects... especially once I realized equation editor had a built in LaTeX mode.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 43.0 ms ] threadThis is a template for MS Word letting you “simulate” the look of a LaTeX document. Use pandoc to convert to actual LaTeX source.
I've always been in awe of users of LaTeX because they almost always have another discipline, usually academic and with years if not decades behind them, yet in order to publish they effectively need to become a typesetter, which is an entirely separate discipline in itself. Everyone else just hires the professional typesetter or page designer (probably provided by a commercial printer, marketing or design firm), but academics don't seem to have that convenience available to them. Imagine if in order to drive anywhere you had to design and build your own car for every trip.
For articles, LaTeX is not even that bad: most journals want you to stick close to their own article class. Posters and talks are the real timesuck.
So, LAH-tekh.
This fits what Knuth said about the issue in 2006: “[…] lah-tek, lay-tek, the author never has decided how to pronounce it […].” [1]
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HuwiBPLV3A&t=41s
This was my solution exactly. Force everyone to follow Microsoft's build styling tools and use equation editor. Then the day before we turned it in, I installed the LaTeX fonts and updated the styles and our professor had no idea.
I'm somewhat ashamed to admit I stopped using LaTeX (and LyX) after that for projects... especially once I realized equation editor had a built in LaTeX mode.
It’s a sad humor that is usually true in sciences.