I have an issue with my supervisor: he likes to write papers in MS Word and I like to write in LaTeX. We have had issues with editing and formatting, since it is difficult to do it, while working on different platforms.
Does anyone have any advice on how to resolve this situation?
In the end, once the paper is published, nobody will worry about what software was used to generate it. The software is just a means to an end.
So, if your advisor has a strong preference for Microsoft Word then - regardless how you feel about that preference - if you can't easily convince your advisor to use LaTeX you should switch to Word. There are much more important things to worry about, and there is no reason to make life difficult for your advisor for something so unimportant.
Converting your paper from LaTeX to Word is not likely to produce ideal results, as you have noticed. By the time you go through and fix things, you might as well simply work in Word from the beginning. In other words, the "efficient" way to do this is to convert the content in your head as you are writing it in Word, rather than trying to convert the content to Word after it is written.
I think you have two options:
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I faced this situation the other way round when I was a PhD student. I had been using MS Office as long as it had existed. I had no trouble at all editing equations, incorporating charts from spreadsheets, formatting text etc.
My advisor preferred LaTeX, so I learned LaTeX for smoother collaboration.
For my PhD studies (in medical physics, YMMV) I used lyx as a happy medium. Lyx has a LaTeX engine but exports as Word, albeit imperfectly. In my experience one can open a LaTeX document in Lyx, spend less than ten minutes reformatting the tables, and export to a Prof as MS Word. The Prof can then mark it up with sticky notes or track changes, which can then be applied by the researcher to the original LaTeX.
I have my students use both: Word and LaTeX. In the early stage of paper writing, I prefer MS Word because of its commenting tool, and allows me to teach my students academic writing. I have my students paste the latex source code, and any rendered figures and tables into MS Word. The resulting Word doc then looks pretty standard, except for the occasional LaTeX commands. I assume your supervisor could simply be taught to ignore all LaTeX commands and be asked to focus on the contents. In the later stages of paper writing, I then ask my students to supply the .pdf (rendered version) as well. Once the paper is relatively stable, I edit the .tex only. In your case, I assume once your supervisor is happy with the contents, he/she can then work off the .pdf.
I use the above process with my collaborator, who is a MS Word person. I basically asked him to 'stay away' from the backslash text. Thus far, it has worked out fine.
Overleaf allows simultaneous editing in RTF and latex. It's ideal for collaborations https://www.overleaf.com/
Generally, the advisor rules. Yet, the advisor may learn from the student, especially if the student is wise often to show the benefits. And the issue depends on the purpose: to write paper, to prepare slides and posters, for a thesis? The amount of collaborative work varies with the topic.
Some benefits of LaTeX are nice-looking formulas, great non-standard or forein characters, macros, easiness of collaboration with versioning systems (svn, cvs). So, depending on your field, you might first check whether LaTeX is of help in your domain.
Now with recent pdf editors, it is becoming much easier to comment on a document, and the text editing is quite simple. So now, when I collaborate with non-LaTeX users, I take charge of the editing, offer "input-like" spaces for their parts written in Word. I generally convince them with the quality of the reference section.
Recently, I have been using interesting LaTeX packages, like \usepackage[draft]{changes} or todonotes. The first one is great at showing edits, replacements, additions. And just by changing it to \usepackage[final]{changes}, you get your final text. The second one is fantastic to show, in the document, what is left to do, what is done, and is great for an advisor who see the work in progress. Such packages can convince others that you definitely know what your are doing, with method, and leave you in charge.
So, if you have some free space, my advice would be to stickk to LaTeX, and if you can share the directory with your advisor, he can comment on the .tex and on the .pdf
latexdiff to show changes (especially if paired with a revision control program.) The package changes seems very unwieldy.
Commented
Feb 29, 2016 at 19:13
Maybe it is possible to make your advisor use a wysiwyg latex editor. I think http://www.bakoma-tex.com/ could be an intermediate solution.
I've used Microsoft Word since 1989 and Word for Windows 1.1c! (1.1a shipped, but was not functional.) I've observed several things over the years, including that the even number version of Word for Windows are the good ones: 2, 4, 6, 8 & 10!
I always sent people the output in a PDF file, so the editing issue never comes up. Otherwise, how would you know if you were editing at the same time somebody else was editing?
I've tried a number of conversion programs from various editors with very limited success. Might as well say it doesn't work. Even if you got it to work for one version of Word, Microsoft changes the format slightly, so the conversion won't work with the next version of Word.
Therefore, the less said, the better: We've got the master copy. We publish in PDF format for portability. All changes go through us!
You should simply stick with using LaTeX and not bother about any problems this gives with formatting. The last thing you want to do is learn using MS Word just to get this paper finished, as working with MS Word can be extremely awkward if you are dealing with technical mathematical text. Formatting issues are very minor issues and should be given low priority. Stick to the subject and stick to any requirements of the IEEE journal by using the correct LaTeX templates for the journal and forget about your advisor's preference.
This then means that you have your LaTeX version and your advisor has a Word version that may look slightly differently, but content-wise are equivalent. That's not a problem worth worrying about, it's a massive waste of time to do so.
