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WordTeX - A WYSIPCTWOTCG Typesetting Tool

3 videos recommended on HN
YouTube
3 HN users recommended this demo3 months2018–2025 score 3.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

HN people recommend it as an entertaining example of great effort on a trivial problem, and cite the template in LaTeX-versus-Word discussions.

Tom Wildenhain's SIGBOVIK 2018 presentation of WordTeX, a Microsoft Word template that mimics LaTeX typesetting output. It is a joke research project executed with serious effort.

“this one on WordTeX is excellent” (HN, 2023)

1 strong recommendations · 2 recommendations · 2 citations · Demos

5 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@UncleMeat Jul 2023 Strongly recommends
on HN thread C89 compiler produces printable executables from C code [pdf]
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Sigbovik is a joke conference put on by CMU students. About 80%-90% of the papers each year are pure jokes, but about 10-20% of them are jokes that have a nontrivial amount of work backing them up. These papers are awesome. Tom publishes at least one every year (sometimes 3-4) and his papers are among the best but there are others that are also awesome. It hits a very fun combination of hard work on trivial problems that is fascinating. They publish a proceedings every year and they are fun reads. Not a lot of people do accompanying videos like Tom does, but this one on WordTeX is excellent: [this video]
Excellent SIGBOVIK video of hard work on a trivial problem

Citations, criticism and jokes

@bobbiechen Jun 2019 Cites it
on HN thread Word processors are ditching equation editors in favour of LaTeX
>Could you use a standard word processor to approximate LaTeX, while obtaining an arguably better experience? Introducing the WordTeX template [for Microsoft Word] . From the SIGBOVIK 2018 presentation, "WordTeX - a WYSIPCTWOTCG Typesetting Tool" : [this video]
Source presentation for the WordTeX template
@senkora Jun 2025 Cites it
on HN thread I wrote my PhD Thesis in Typst
There’s always the WordTex template if you want to create documents that look like LaTeX output from within Word: [this video]
WordTeX template for LaTeX-looking documents in Word

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