It was only after all the hassle I had with layout in my third year literature review on The detection and characterisation of Super-Earth Exoplanets (which you can read here) that i realised Microsoft Word isnt great when it comes to long documents. Minor changes to the text mean figures no longer fit, EndNote (for references) effectively rids you of your undo button and not matter how you rework it you always seem to have a heading as the last line on a page.
It’s not surprising then that when I started my Masters thesis I decided I’d make the switch to LaTex.
The learning curve was a bit steeper than id expected but the befits are obvious – no more worrying about layout! Despite this there was something missing in LaTeX that id come to love in Microsoft Word – the ability to add comments to text. Yes i know you can comment in TeX but using % isnt really suitable here as it blends into the text and doesn’t show up in the pdf. Heres what i like in word
In laTeX since your dealing with a raw files its not really possible to do this. i tried making my own command /com{comment here} which is better than % as you can end it on the same line but still not great as it cant be seen in the pdf.
The Solution – use footnotes, theyre out the way, appear in the pdf and reference the part you want to comment on. It’s not a great solution if your already using them in your document but if that’s the case, maybe you should spend the time looking for a macro to do the job.
