Working as an intern in 1999, I was tasked with writing a standards document for VoIP telephones for the TIA working group working on this space. The standards organization had a Word template that everyone used, but as an engineering student, I had been working with and loving LaTex for some time and so naturally I thought… “why not just use LaTex? The final output will be in PDF anyway and the formatting will be better.”<p>The LaTex output was indeed better. My boss loved my work and had no idea that I wasn’t using Word. Feedback from the working group members was also positive. Wow, this kid has real talent! As a startup, making a positive impression on the giant companies represented in the working group was extremely important for the future of the company, if not its survival.<p>Unfortunately for me, one day my boss said, “could you send that Word doc over to big-whig so-and-so at massive-company-we-might-be-acquired-by? They want to use it as a template for a new document they’re writing.”<p>I got that sinking feeling similar to when my mom found out my friend and I had peed in my closet as an experiment at age four.<p>I then hired a friend to work all weekend painstakingly rewriting it in Word. Boss man got the document. Company was acquired for $100M 18 months later.<p>Either way, LaTex still looks 1,000x better than Word.