That’s assuming they are competent enough to even use a PDF.

If you think this process involves enough mindpower to check the time, let alone figure out where the dashes are in whatever language keyboard setup I’m using at the time, you are wildly overestimating how much care goes into doing this.

I generally do this on my NAS, combined with nightly and bi-weekly backups, plus a 6-mo safety backup, to a backup drive. Also, basic off-site nightly backups for important stuff. If I worked on really important stuff that required lots of versioning, though, I’d probably go with a versioning system instead of inserting the date.

HTML. Some it people have their CV on their personal website.

(And CSS and JS, I guess)

Makefile in other comments. You’ll need something like this on the title page (this assumes you use my Makefile which puts the version in VERSION.tex [that’s the literal name of the file, not a placeholder]):

{\bf{\color{red}DOCUMENT REVISION:}} {\color{blue}\input{VERSION}}

Sure thing. This also includes the beamer bit which I used for my defense. It’s all pretty hacky but hope it’s useful!

#
# Errors aren't handled gracefully (tex doesn't write to stderr, it seems)
# If you encounter errors, use "make verbose"
#
# For small changes (probably those without references), use "make quick"
#
# Thanks to https://gist.github.com/Miliox/4035649 for dependency outline

TEX = pdflatex
BTEX = biber
MAKE = make -s
TEXFLAGS = -halt-on-error
# $(MAIN).log is dumb if we have multiple targets!
SILENT = > /dev/null || cat $(MAIN).log
SILENT_NOER = 2>/dev/null 1>/dev/null
EDITOR = vim -p
PDFVIEW = evince
MAIN = main
PRES = presentation
ALL = $(MAIN).pdf
RECURS = media/ manuscripts/
VERSION := $(shell git rev-parse --short HEAD | cut -c 1-4)$(shell git diff-index --quiet HEAD && (echo -n ' ';git log -1 --format=[%cd]) || (echo -n '* '; date -u '+[%c]'))

all: recurs $(ALL)
pres: $(PRES).pdf
scratch: scratch.pdf

scratch.pdf: scratch.tex
	@echo "TEX	(final)	$<"
	@$(TEX) $(TEXFLAGS) $< $(SILENT)

verbose: SILENT = ''
verbose: $(ALL)

recurs: $(RECURS)
	@$(foreach DIR, $(RECURS), \
		echo "MAKE	(CD)	$(CURDIR)/$(DIR)"; \
		$(MAKE) -C $(DIR) $(MAKECMDGOALS);)
	@echo "MAKE	(CD)	./"

clean:
	@echo "SH	(RM)	Not recursing; 'make allclean' to clear generated files."
	@rm -f *.aux *.log *.out *.pdf *.bbl *.blg *.toc *.lof *.lot *.bcf *.run.xml

allclean: recurs
	@echo "SH	(RM)	A clean directory is a happy directory"
	@rm -f *.aux *.log *.out *.pdf *.bbl *.blg *.toc *.lof *.lot *.bcf *.run.xml
version:
	@echo "SH      (ver) $(VERSION)"
	@echo $(VERSION) > VERSION.tex

nixpages: main.pdf
	@echo "PDF     (pdftk)"
	@pdftk main.pdf cat 1 4-end output final.pdf

quick: $(MAIN).tex version
	@echo "TEX	(final)	$<"
	@$(TEX) $(TEXFLAGS) $< $(SILENT)

$(MAIN).pdf: $(MAIN).tex $(MAIN).bbl all.tex tex/abstract.tex tex/intro.tex tex/appendix.tex tex/some_section.tex tex/some_other_section.tex
	@echo "TEX	(draft)	$<"
	@$(TEX) $(TEXFLAGS) --draftmode  $< $(SILENT)
	@echo "TEX	(final)	$<"
	@$(TEX) $(TEXFLAGS) $< $(SILENT)

$(MAIN).bbl: $(MAIN).aux
	@echo "BIB	(bib)	$(MAIN)"
	@$(BTEX) $(MAIN) > /dev/null
	
$(MAIN).aux: $(MAIN).tex $(MAIN).bib version
	@echo "TEX	(draft)	$<"
	@$(TEX) $(TEXFLAGS) --draftmode  $< $(SILENT)

$(PRES).pdf: $(PRES).tex $(PRES).bbl tex/beamer*.tex tex/slides/*.tex
	@echo "TEX	(draft)	$<"
	@$(TEX) $(TEXFLAGS) --draftmode  $< $(SILENT)
	@echo "TEX	(final)	$<"
	@$(TEX) $(TEXFLAGS) $< $(SILENT)
$(PRES).bbl: $(PRES).aux
	@echo "BIB	(bib)	$(PRES)"
	@$(BTEX) $(PRES) > /dev/null
$(PRES).aux: $(PRES).tex $(MAIN).bib
	@echo "TEX	(draft)	$<"
	@$(TEX) $(TEXFLAGS) --draftmode  $< $(SILENT)

edit:
	@echo "EDIT	(fork)	$(EDITOR)"
	@$(EDITOR) ./tex/*.tex *.tex

view:
	@echo "VIEW	(fork)	$(PDFVIEW)"
	@$(PDFVIEW) $(ALL) $(SILENT_NOER) &

and then there are fucking PIs insisting on word files who never heard of tracked charges let alone of file naming conventions.

I also have my reports in latex inside a git repo, complete with a makefile to generate graphs from csv containing simulation results. However I am too ashamed to publish the entire version control to a public repo

#LyX 2.0 created this file. For more info see http://www.lyx.org/

Wait, I thought you guys did it manually…

Anyway, I should still learn it.

Why on Earth would you curse yourself with MS Office anyway

idk it says .docx in OP’s image

This is the way.

This is the way.

I mean yes you can use beamer to make slides, but it is a lot less flexible than ppt/LibreOffice Present.

Yes, I also mde my. Thesis slides in LaTeX which was nice as I coukd reuse the figures.

Me with Jupyter Notebooks

They are generally large, uncompressable and replaced instead of updated like text files. All files stay in the repo history forever, they make repos big and slow compared to text files with no advantages provided (e.g. as you said, diffing etc is useless).

If a binary file needs to be stored in git, it’s usually more appropriate to use git LFS for that file. Git LFS stores the binary outside of the repo in the same way that database engines store binary outside of the respective table.

In this case, it would be much smarter to use version control on the text in the document, not tte binary file, which is a feature of essentially every document writer program.