My phd supervisor wants me to use Word because they can't edit LaTeX. What to do?
I get pretty many people convinced to edit the PDF either with "PDFXchangeviewer", which you can download for free (but it isn't open source), or using "PDF Annotator", which is used widely in the academic area.
With both it is easy and can even be fun to annotate texts. And there is one large advantage to word & co: You can see at the first glance, whether something was added.
To reassure my readers that their respective annotations have been included, I either use the perlscript latexdiff to display the changes, or I use a version control system like git, and e.g. latexdiff-git (I'll provide the link later).
So there are two steps:
- Get your supervisor to annotate the PDF;
- Reassure him/her that the comments are not lost.
So if you are in the position to negotiate, argue to give it a try.
EDIT: According to the comment below, the supervisor seems to accept writing into a PDF. Regarding the second step, I found it very useful to have a version control system like git, which took some hours (no more) to learn the very low level it needs to control a book. The main advantage is that you can compare any version with the present version. About the necessary steps see here: https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/44092/4736
You need to talk to your supervisor to find out what he is willing to do. Then you need to modify your work flow to achieve that. If he is willing to read/edit raw/uncompiled LaTeX in MS Word, then that is easy. Just import your LaTeX files into MS Word.
If he is okay with the occasional bit of LaTeX markup, but not too much, then maybe you need to do citations and cross referencing by hand, but leave things like \section. This means having a really good preamble is important and thinking about each piece of markup you use.
If he wants to see the finished product complete with formating in MS Word, then it is probably best to use MS Word.
I tend to find that if I use good citation keys and keep the markup to a minimum people are willing to ignore the little bit of LaTeX. If they cannot ignore the LaTeX, then I either switch to Word or ask them to markup a hard copy.
This will likely get downvoted, but I think the best answer is to use Word. Making it so that your supervisor may feel frustrated dealing with your thesis is a very bad idea. Be glad your supervisor is willing to edit it, rather than just making notes on a hard copy that you are going to have to put into the file yourself. In my experience that is unusual.
I think if you do something that frustrates your supervisor and is likely going to be a continuing issue you are asking for trouble.