Wot Cheeses Me Off

[MarkBastard]

fi yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid too. Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can.

i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dsenot mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt too!

​

I've seen that before but it still amazes me.

I can read that at the same speed I'd read a book for example. There was about 3 words in the whole passage I didn't pick up in order but my brain somehow worked them out with a tiny bit of lag and then put them back in the right spot so things made sense. Weird.

 

[Dave70]

fi yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid too. Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can.

i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno't mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt too!

​

Well I'll be fcuekd..

 

[manticle]

I've seen that before but it still amazes me.

I can read that at the same speed I'd read a book for example. There was about 3 words in the whole passage I didn't pick up in order but my brain somehow worked them out with a tiny bit of lag and then put them back in the right spot so things made sense. Weird.

I, on the other hand find it incredibly time consuming and frustrating to interpret.

 

[leiothrix]

Okay , are you being ironic , or just.using.puntuation.weird whiel complaining , about puntuation? English (double) spacing between sentences was wrong 40 years ago. Spacing both sides of a comma was never right.

[Yes, I'm a nerd; I spent quite some time carefully hard-coding hair-spaces and em-dashes correctly into my 160 page thesis. I'm still certain no-one has read it since.]

What did you use to write it? Hopefully something related to Tex, please don't say Word.

 

[jonocarroll]

What did you use to write it? Hopefully something related to Tex, please don't say Word.

of course. Is there any other way to typeset [M$ Word just pretends you're in control and then screws stuff around when you look away]? You can pick the nutters on the arXiv because their paper isn't TeX'd.

 

[leiothrix]

That's kinda what I was hoping for.

I've used 'raw' LaTeX before, but quite like LyX because it's easier and I'm lazy.

I wrote up about 80 pages of chemistry notes using it, pretty easy to use. It also allows you to insert LaTeX code into your document, so you can get around any of the limitations of the editor.

I've seen plenty of people using Word for 200+ page documents. For some reason they get quite upset when they try to do something like insert a UL in the middle of the document and it stuffs up the formatting of the entire thing. Even better when you can't fix it, and the recovery is copy & paste the text into notepad then back into a new Word document.

 

[manticle]

That's kinda what I was hoping for.

I've used 'raw' LaTeX before, but quite like LyX because it's easier and I'm lazy.

I wrote up about 80 pages of chemistry notes using it, pretty easy to use. It also allows you to insert LaTeX code into your document, so you can get around any of the limitations of the editor.

I've seen plenty of people using Word for 200+ page documents. For some reason they get quite upset when they try to do something like insert a UL in the middle of the document and it stuffs up the formatting of the entire thing. Even better when you can't fix it, and the recovery is copy & paste the text into notepad then back into a new Word document.

Please shut up now because I am writing a thesis that is currently sitting on 90 pages and has tons of images and I'm using word. Last thing I need is formatting to stuff up so don't jinx me. I've been paranoid about it since I first got anything of substance down and will now go and break it up into three documents for backup. Already have back-ups of each night's progress on 3 different drives in case of incident. What's the bet I'll take the wrong one to the printers?

No, I am not a word formatting nerdy type person and I don't know what latex is (besides the rubber based thingy but obviously that's different)

 

[leiothrix]

Please shut up now because I am writing a thesis that is currently sitting on 90 pages and has tons of images and I'm using word. Last thing I need is formatting images so don't jinx me. I've been paranoid about it since I first got anything of substance down and will now go and break it up into three documents for backup.

No, I am not a word formatting nerdy type person and I don't know what latex is (besides the rubber based thingy but obviously that's different)

LaTeX is a typesetting language. It's kinda like programming a document. It has support for images, tables, bibliographies, and anything you need to do a book/journal article/thesis/whatever.

Have a look at LyX. LyX is a graphical front-end to LaTex, and it's not something you need to be too technical to use. And I liked JabRef for a reference manager.

My advice for Word is to do all the writing and apply the formatting (or as much as possible) when you've finished the text.

Also by applying the formatting at the end you're also likely to get a more consistent result.

As an aside, I really don't know how someone could write that much in Word without pulling their hair out. Plain text tends to go ok, but adding headings, tables, lists etc tends to get both really messy and really difficult to maintain pretty quickly.

 

[manticle]

I agree. I hate it - I've just never looked into alternatives. Nearly completed and overdue so I'll saving learning software till another (hopefully never again) time but good to know.

Tables in word are an absolute nightmare. Formatting for me is just italics, font type and size and bold and there's only one table in the whole thing so far. Just really image heavy and I've had corrupted documents before. Would kill me at this stage.

Might clear all formatting and save as a back up copy for safety.

 

[jonocarroll]

I agree. I hate it - I've just never looked into alternatives. Nearly completed and overdue so I'll saving learning software till another (hopefully never again) time but good to know.

Tables in word are an absolute nightmare. Formatting for me is just italics, font type and size and bold and there's only one table in the whole thing so far. Just really image heavy and I've had corrupted documents before. Would kill me at this stage.

Might clear all formatting and save as a back up copy for safety.

If it weren't overdue, and I weren't so busy, I'd offer to typeset it for cash.

My thesis; 160 pages, 60 figures, 10 tables, 450 equations, 85 references.... 2.77MB PDF. All references/equations/tables/figures/footnotes perfectly cross-referenced automatically, and not an unsightly gap to be seen. Word can bite my perfectly kerned arse.

TeXnicCentre was a good windows front-end that I used to get people started on. Of course, purists like me use emacs... in a shell.

 

[Zizzle]

+1 to OP.

Punctuation a capitalisation makes a bit difference.

Commas save lives.

 

[Eater]

Capitalisation is the difference between
"I had to help my uncle Jack off a horse.."

and

"I had to help my uncle jack off a horse.."

 

[argon]

As an aside, I really don't know how someone could write that much in Word without pulling their hair out. Plain text tends to go ok, but adding headings, tables, lists etc tends to get both really messy and really difficult to maintain pretty quickly.

Not a MS Word Fan boy by any means... but i compiled and mostly wrote an 1800 page, 500 000 word. Schematic Design Report for a Major Government Hospital Redevelopment using Word. The secret is getting your formatting sorted out from the start, using styles, splitting files and utilizing the parametric options.

Not as good as Adobe InDesign for reports, with images etc... but it can be done

 

[leiothrix]

Well, apart from the pain of using it, you're quite lucky that the document didn't just decide to die on you for no reason.

Seen it happen plenty of times (I do IT support in a large hospital network).


The problems with styles is that they don't really enforce anything. Sure your headings/body text will be the same font and size, but the spacing will come down to you being consistent on the number of times that you've pressed enter.

And something to manage bibliographies is a must. BibTeX will format everything to the correct style automatically. You can always tell when someone has attempted to do that by hand as they've always missed bolding or italicising something. There are programs like OneNote for Word, but that's as much of a pain in the arse to use as Word is.

 

[Cocko]

Capitalisation is the difference between
"I had to help my uncle Jack off a horse.."

and

"I had to help my uncle jack off a horse.."

Classic! I did actually help my uncle jack off a horse... his arms got tired.


h34r:

 

[Ducatiboy stu]

I knew a bloke in the upper Hunter Valley, and his job was as a profesional bull puller......

 

[Maxt]

It seems to me that everyone is focussing on only a small part of ferg's complaint ... Threads are staying more on topic these days than I have seen in recent times but when you consider the average quality - goats and boobies in every thread would probably be less of a waste of time.

Sorry if I offend Bum, but I also find irony in someone who has made over 5000 posts in under 2 years (that's 7.9 posts a day, every day!) Are they all high quality?

 

[bum]

I assure you that they're all superb.

 

[Ducatiboy stu]

OK... who is offended by my goat... speak up..

 

[bum]

Too small.