Martin Geisler Online

I’ve just finished my final written exam! I’ve spend five hours trying to write a Danish essay, and I think the result was pretty good.

I used my dads notebook with Windows and Word. I did this, just to remind myself of why it is, that I’ve spend countless hours reading manuals and books for LaTeX. Why have I spend entire evenings trying to achieve a particular effect in LaTeX? Now that I’ve started to use Metapost, I’ve also had to read the manual for that — it’s large but really good. The question remains: why do I do it.

The answer just occurred to me today: Word is full of bugs! It’s a faulty, PITA-program! It crashed on my today, even though I didn’t do anything fancy. I wasn’t playing with a lot of OLE-objects, nor was I trying to do anything else. I was just writing an essay with perhaps three different fontsizes. But when I tried to change the size of the skip after paragraphs, it just died. And it did this several times.

So, luckily there won’t be a next time, but if I ever have to write something important on a computer, I’ll use LaTeX. It’s the only program that I know of, that if reliable. It might be a little difficult to do some of the more advanced things, but if you’re just writing a plain essay, then it’ll never let you down. It was only because it was easier for me to transport the notebook that I used it instead of my normal machine.

I’ve been at work today — nine hours straight. Computers are fun to play with, but when you have been putting them together for nine hours, they tend to get a little irritating :-)

More exams are coming up. Tomorrow I have to sit and write a Danish essay. There has been put five hours aside for the task, but I doesn’t expect it take that long.

The only thing that could be a problem, would be if my computer crash in the middle of everything :-( I’m writing on my fathers notebook, a fine HP Omnibook 4150, but there is only installed Win98 SE and Word on it.

But, as this is just a Danish essay, I wont have to insert any of those nasty Equation Editor-objects. In my experience — and I have written many reports for both physics and chemistry in Word — those objects seem to crash Word every time you insert more that about 10 or so. It’s sad, but true.