What it takes to write a scientific paper

During my time in university I had to write papers. I didn’t really have the chance to get great examples of scientific writing in real world, however I leveraged the internet to see what top universities like Stanford and MIT did and how they did it. When I was tasked to write something I tried to mimic the way how best of the best did it, by simply mimicking it. Bold text to highlight imports values in a table, footnotes, overall general structure of the paper. But the hardest part was to do the layout. I had to do all of the papers in MS Word — because that was the de-facto standard. Using Word, you have to do most of the things that you would suppose an editor would do: paragraph identification of exact number of inches, font size, punctuation, references, alignment, and so on… It was like I was building a web page, except for HTML and CSS I was using a convoluted GUI to manipulate a proprietary modification of XML. Then I found about LaTeX. Those who know what that is might…