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Modern LaTeX Replacement?
javierzinho writes "For many years I have been using LaTeX to compose scientific documents, but truly I am getting tired of its complexity. You have to install new packages for new features, compatibility issues are everywhere, you need to know commands for everything, table composition is torture, image insertion is an odyssey if you don't have the 'right' format, and you need to be a LaTeX Jedi master to create a new document class. I'm looking for a document processor (not a word processor) that is a viable replacement for LaTeX, possessing all of its advantages — consistency between text and math text, automated cross references, direct PDF creation, etc. — but that is not stuck in the 1980s with the compiler metaphor and weird font technology. An application with visual interface and so on. I've tried Scientific Word and Lyx but both are front-ends for LaTeX. Publicon only produces PDF files by exporting to LaTeX and subsequently using pdflatex. Add-ons for MS-Word are a joke, and webEq is intended for web publishing, not for PDF production. Does anybody know of a decent, scientific-structured document processor that is a modern application?"
If you have any reasonably recent version of Word, it actually has all the things you want, and it is easier to use and create publishable content than almost any other modern word/document processor for documents of the type that you seem to be interested in generating. It's not QuarkExpress or InDesign, but that type of publishing isn't what you seem to be talking about.
I suppose that referring to the product as "MS-Word" shows how far in the past you are since it hasn't been MS-Word for several years. Try the latest version and see how it suits you.
Like any tool, it takes a little while to get up to speed on all the useful features, but I think you'd be surprised at the progress has been made. Yes, you like all the power that a primitive typesetting program like LaTeX can give you, but to eschew new technology because it hides complexity behind a friendly interface is Luddism. Don't fall prey to the belief that simpler is better. As you have said yourself, you are finding dealing with the raw metal distracting and difficult. Let the program handle all that for you. Try Word again.
I can't help but question the complaints on the complexity. I generally have a repertoire of packages that I use frequently like the ams packages, pstricks for image drawing, beamer for powerpoint-like presentations, and the external program image magic to make pictures the correct format.
Using other packages periodically tends to not have too many conflicts, except when trying to conform to required document classes of certain journals. But the workarounds generally don't take too much time.
I have yet to find something as robust as LaTeX, yet relatively user-friendly. Then again, I've never tried to create my own document class, merely modified what is already there. That always seemed to be the domain of the nuts-and-bolts programmers rather than the people who just want a typsetting language. So my idea of "user-friendly" may be a little skewed.
Having used LaTeX to typeset my dissertation, I share these concerns about LaTeX. The documents it produces are beautifully typeset and look great -- especially for math. The notion that the writer is agnostic of the typesetting procedure and methods with LaTeX is a complete lie. I've never had to worry about ratios, measurements, indentations, word-per-line, empty pages and other problems as I have in LaTex. LaTeX submissions to journals are becoming less and less available -- in physical chemistry and chemistry journals at least.
There is a large and important market for high-quality typesetting software with excellent math functionality. More importantly, something which interfaces with bibliographic software well, and produces high quality PDFs. (Bibtex does a decent enough job, but I find that it's plagued by the same problems as LaTeX.)
I've searched for an alternative as well, and I'm quite sure that none exist. I haven't seen other type setting documentation formats for journal submissions, which I think is an important hint.
I understand your qualms with LaTeX as a long time user, but given the alternatives I find it better (though word processors are easier to use, LaTeX makes things much prettier).
A word processor front end (let's pick Open Office Writer as an example) with a LaTeX backend would be a good mix, but also give you the downside of WPs, namely constant layout fiddling instead of focussing on content.
I don't quite understand your complaint about the way LaTeX is structured wrt packages. It's pretty much the same thing you see with Firefox where you have a core program with lots of useful plug-ins for added functionality, and as such it's the same argument as it has.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
The problem is that all the things with decent interface have crappy quality of output. Truth is, latex (tex really) have far FAR better output than anything else. Nothing comes close in terms of typesetting text and math correctly. I can spot a word document once it's printed. Not by the font, but by text layout. Reading something written in a gui word processor like word (or openoffice) hurts your eyes and your brain.
Plus, your problem was the interface. So why not consider something that outputs latex? It needs to be a front end that handles all the dirty work and uses latex for what it does best. Just like you don't care that most of your operating is written in C which is just as old technology.
Plus, most places that want mathematics documents, really want you to submit latex. You're better off with something that can output it natively.
Writing something that does the same thing is stupid if what is wrong is an interface. If a good interface is written, you might never know you are using latex (or tex) in the background.
No internets for you.
troll
As used on the Internet:
1) As a verb, the practice of trying to lure other Internet users into sending responses to carefully-designed incorrect statements or similar "bait." In a real example, a Usenet newsgroup contributor mentioned the discovery of an ancient African carving containing a list of prime numbers. The contributor further listed some of the prime numbers found and included some numbers that, in fact, are not prime numbers. Other contributors then sent serious replies, correcting the list of prime numbers cited.
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
I've taken a couple of stabs at LaTeX through the years. I have no real need for a proper type-setting platform like LaTeX because I am not in the world of academia that demands it, so I was never able to get past the learning curve imposed by LaTeX.
Now, let me say... I get it. I understand how invaluable it is to submit a paper in a format so less time can be wasted "making it pretty" and more can be spent on the meat of the work. That fact doesn't elude me.
What I never figured out was how to download a stinking template from IEEE and start writing a document. I never figured out how to compose my own document type so I could use it to empower the written arts that I am interested in. I never got past the hurdle, so to this day I still use OpenOffice Writer as my word processor and haven't been able to "transcend" to a proper type-setting program so make all the boring formatting tasks easy.
I even read the LaTeX Wikibook a number of months ago and this didn't even get me over the hump on my way to publication.
So, I echo the sentiments of the article submitter. LaTeX is hard, and either better documentation or a better alternative is needed to make it accessible to the rest of us.
Support the 30 Hour Work Week!!!
It sounds like FrameMaker will probably do just about everything you want, including a very robust equation editor, automatic cross-referencing, robust table creation, Postscript and TrueType font support, and even XML includes.
However, know in advance that you will never love FrameMaker, nor will it ever love you. Its ways are Harsh and Unyielding. You will have to walk The Way of The Frame Within the Frame, and it will not make you any happier. (Except, unlike Word, your pictures won't decide to move for no apparent reason.) You must embrace the Pain Which is The Reference Page, and come through the other side.
But once you have mastered The Beast Which is FrameMaker, it will dance (albeit slowly) at your bidding...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
What is it about LaTeX that makes it so special? Can't scientific documents be laid out correctly in a word processor? I ask out of ignorance, not rhetoric.
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
Yes, Kile makes things easier. Pictures still kind of go where they want, but they are always the right size and perfect if you use eps. Hint: "convert image.png image.eps" does not make a vector graphic but it does make things easy on LaTex. For graphs, use gnuplot which has eps as a format choice.
Don't forget about kbibtex for your references. If you use it as you research, you will have a good database of everything you uncover about a particular subject. Reference tracking and style management is a LaTex strong point.
Finally, always look for a LaTex template when submitting work. Every good journal has one and it typically tells you exactly what you need to do to make it work. There's no need for Jedi Skills when you have the Source!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Hi, I recently finished a PhD in math; while I probably haven't Texed as many pages as you, I have plunked out my share over the years. I've found the unix/linux front end program Kile to be extremely labor saving, particularly its newest version. It has forward/backward search, automatic completion for \ref commands, and a built in library of click-to-use symbols (and for these you are automatically advised of what packages are needed to use them.) I am agnostic on the issue of whether something "better" than LaTex is possible, or whether with great power always comes irritating details, but for what's out there, I think Kile can greatly improve the experience.
Actually, I strongly disagree, In my opinion it is one of the few things in which OOo truly tops office. Of course LaTeX tops both, but really OOo is quite fine.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
The font system has a lot of benefits (it is defined algorithmically, so if a font is defined correctly, it is completely scalable - it should also mean that a GPU can generate the font on-the-fly from the definition at time of use, rather than need binaries) but lacks some of the capabilities of OpenType (the next-generation TrueType). I would argue that the first step should be to upgrade or replace the metafont system with something that can generate all of the information an OpenType font would need to produce the desired result, without losing any information or capabilities you'd expect in a TeX-style font, with a proof in the form of a metafont compiler that compiled to OpenType fonts with the loss of metafont-specific information only.
This is useful for those of us who find most modern font designers to be difficult to work with. I work with CAD packages just fine, screen layout designers I can use almost blindfold, but font designers are nothing but pain.
LaTeX - or, more correctly, TeX, suffers from the same problem as all markup languages - it is embedded. Old-style desktop publishing packages had this right - they let you design the blocks on the pages, then you put the text onto them. The two were not combined, but kept logically and physically separate. This allows you to massage the layout without tampering with the content. If tags need to be used for this, then let the tagging be automagic and keep the user out of it.
TeX is infinitely more powerful than any modern wordprocessor, but is still nowhere near the power it could be. There's a whole section on why you can't do spiral text, for example, as TeX is line-based. Well, duh. If you support multiple layering, where each layer transforms those within it, you can have text go however you like, because you then have the capacity to map a straight line (for the purpose of one layer) onto any shape you care to define (by means of another layer).
The problem, then, is not the complexity of LaTeX but the lack of suitable abstraction and layering. LaTeX 3 seems to be going nowhere on the official branch, and I've often wondered if it wouldn't be easier if a LaTeX-ng was offered up where you support OpenType generation, OpenType use, abstraction and layering. Four modules. It shouldn't be too difficult to write just four extension modules to the existing code, and then the LaTeX users/developers can figure out which (if any) to keep around. It might even kickstart LaTeX 3.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
MathML is pretty full featured. Equations are stored in a standardized XML format.
http://www.w3.org/Math/
Really?
Wikipedia has a great example on why MathML (or XML in general, rather) isn't that great. At all.
Following is the quadratic formula in LaTeX:
x = \frac{-b \pm \sqrt{b^2 - 4ac}}{2a}
Now, in MathML:
BEHOLD! No, it's not the first code sapmle. It's not the second or third either.
(/. didn't allow me to post the monster here)
Am I the only one that never liked LaTeX? I really tried, but plain TeX worked a lot better for me. I did my thesis in plain TeX and wrote the math tests I used to give in it as well. My solution was to develop a set of basic macros to import each time. I could never get used to how LaTeX tried to do everything for you. I much prefer a blank slate to build upon rather than someone else's vision. As I remember, even importing pictures (eps/ps format) was simple. Maybe plain TeX is worth taking a look at. You don't need to learn a whole bunch of complicated commands because there aren't any :). And it's a safe bet that once you've learned it, there won't be too many changes made in future releases. There's this four volume book set (I don't remember the author, but they were green) that I learned from. It showed you everything you'd want to know.
It's an MS Word addon that is specifically designed for highly technical formulas. I cannot personally rate it, as I don't use it. However the people who are using it are professors of electrical or computer engineering, so it clearly works for that field at least.
I thought that math was actually pretty reasonable in OO. I usually use it to write short equations, but I found that it was convenient to have the functionality to program a math function rather than deal with some wissywig editor. If I needed to write any moderately complex equations though, I'd probably go with LaTeX hands down. Learning it is a pain, but you have a bit more control when dealing with various markups and macros.
Who follows the TeX world closely knows that a number of new steps are being taken, from the already mentioned XeTeX to luatex and the libification of many programs. I see these as significant steps towards the renewal of TeX towards the introduction of a full-featured, scriptable but with GUI available, typesetting system.
In my opinion, LyX or something like LyX is what the OP needs. Yes, it's "just" a front-end to LaTeX, but so what? Would he really care what's "under the hood" if the frond-end took care of things such as getting the proper image format, solving package incompatibilities and easying table layout?
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
You should think of TeX as a slightly high level description language for your document, eg if PDF (say) takes the role of machine languague, then in this analogy TeX would be C and LaTeX would be C++, and LyX would be like Visual Studio. With this analogy, we can see the flaw in your question: there's nothing wrong with these tools, other than the fact that you're no longer willing to use them, because you want something even higher level.
You really have two choices depending on your temperament: If you like to have control of all the layout details, then you should learn the tools properly and start taking advantage of the features to simplify your workload dramatically (you obviously don't know the tools well enough or you wouldn't complain about document classes, table composition, etc.) I suggest you learn how to use macros, and maybe read the TeXbook. In this way, you will be able to grow your own high level interface to LaTeX which will suit you extremely well. Since you've used LaTeX for years already, this is a good investment.
If however you're happy to delegate the fine tuning of your documents to the software, then your other choice is to give the LyX developers some feedback on what you'd like to see, or wait for a better front end to come out, which hides the complexity even more than LyX. Those things happen every once in a while, but they invariably introduce complications that make life more difficult when working on a joint paper together with other people. Try TeXmacs if that's what you want.
Unfortunately, because it's an imperative language used to perform an inherently declarative task. Maybe growing up with HTML spoiled me, but I'd rather describe what my document is, rather than sequential instructions on how to create it.
Also, I like the separation of semantic meaning and presentation that comes with modern HTML+CSS, and I don't think LaTeX offers that.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
[disclaimer: I am the main author of LilyPond, a system that you could easiest describe as "LaTeX" for music notation]
The problem is not with TeX. Knuth is mostly as brilliant as people say he is. The problem is that
1. the extension infrastructure of TeX is very outdated (WTF, a macro expansion language?)
2. the development ecosystem around TeX is filled with souls that are of lesser stature than Knuth. They're mostly people that need to write mathematics (physicists. mathematicians), as opposed to people that know how write software.
LilyPond back in the day used TeX as a backend engine, and I vividly recall all of the brokenness I encountered in the support-tools that surround TeX (dvips, xdvi, etc. etc.). Things have gotten a lot better now that we have pdflatex - it cuts a whole truckload of crappy tools out of the document pipeline.
Font handling remains atrocious. In case you're wondering: someone was bright enough to base parts of the fontsystem on the DOS 8.3 restriction, so URWGothicL-Demi is and will be called uagd8a forever inside TeX -and worse- if you have to add a modern (OTF, TTF) font, you have run scripts to make LaTeX's font subsystem understand these files in terms of the ridiculous naming scheme.
People get hung up over TeX's beautiful formatting algorithms, but they are not actually that complicated, and by todays' standards TeX is a small program: tex.web is just 25k lines, and that includes its ample comments. LilyPond has page layouting and line breaking that is far more complex.
The real problem with typography, whether for music or documents, is that it's full of traditions that predate automatic processing, and are not specially suited to computerizing. For example, in some language words change their spelling/typography when they get hyphenated (eg. the German eszet letter which hyphenates to s-s).
IMO The challenge is designing the software such that these idiosyncrasies can be captured effectively without hardcoding them, so people can create their own idiosyncrasies.
As for the original poster's question, the system that looked the most convincing to me is Lout, but I have never tried it out.
Han-Wen Nienhuys -- LilyPond
I use LaTeX because its output looks better than anything else I've seen on the market. The difference is subtle, but noticable. If you place a LaTeX document side by side with the same text processed by a different system, the LaTeX one is obvious. The reason for this is that the designers of TeX and LaTeX knew about proper typographical conventions. They knew about how to space letters, about line spacing. Looking at a well made LaTeX document is like looking at an elegantly typeset book. You aren't sure exactly why it looks good. But it does.
I've used Framemaker. It isn't bad. It's keystrokes for creating mathematical equations are efficient. However, its output still doesn't have the elegance of LaTeX. LaTeX does things that no other system does. For example, when you put an equation inline with text, it changes the format of the equation to fit in the line. Usually, inline equations don't cause the spacing of the line they are in to change. Try that in Word!
I do agree that tables are a pain to use. But I usually find that once I've made a template, then I don't have to mess with the details later. I use LaTeX to create mathematics exams, and I wouldn't use anything else. Using templates, it is faster than any other tool I have seen.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
I disagree that the market is that small. Its not large, but 1% of 1% would be too small.
The reason that LaTeX doesn't have the market is because its a programmer's way of typesetting, and Word is 'easier', even if the results are poorer, take more memory and storage and are harder to make changes.
Doing my thesis in LaTeX made the process much easier, but doing things like APA formatting of the bibliography using the classes was more trouble than it should be.
If a replacement does come out, I imagine it will come from the open source side, as, like you said, the market isn't big. Its also the highly technical people both that would be able to write it and would need it, so the encouragement is there.
Also, I agree on the Knuth comment, his contribution was huge and has helped many fields. However TeX, and LaTeX, are stuck in a decade very different to ours when it comes to typesetting.
How many times can one person +5 for saying the same thing repeatedly in the same topic?
Speaking as someone who is now pretty experienced at TeX (haven't yet *released* any packages but I've been writing some as I work on my thesis) and knows about the internals I have to say that LaTeX has an absolutely awful design. Sure, it produces pretty output but the macro language is almost as bad as brainfuck or assembly language.
To be fair this wasn't really a design failure on Knuth's part. He specifically wanted to avoid TeX becoming a full fledged programming language and I believe he expected other front ends to produce TeX commands but was eventually convinced to add some programming features to TeX. Combine this with the strong emphasis on compatibility and the restrictions of machines at the time and you get a language whose programming model is based on redefining parts of the language and involves finite numbers of registers and tokens.
Not to mention a number of really annoying limitations like the inability to use more than a dozen or so math fonts in the same document.
Unfortunately TeX works well enough to typeset papers but is too complex to inspire many people to hack the source. Thus there is not a great deal of manpower devoted to producing a successor and no one will buy an incompatible commercial product that won't interoperate with their colleagues.
This isn't to say no one is working on a replacement. LuaTex seems to be the way forward but I just wish it would come along faster. BTW as a stopgap measure perltex is pretty useful.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
I don't know if this is the case for you, but I find most people who find LaTeX hard are using it wrongly. Specifically, they are trying to precisely control the formatting, placement, etc. etc. of everything in their document. This is, pretty much, how you use today's WYSIWYG word processors. It's very cumbersome and arcane to do the same in LaTeX, and the results don't usually look very good in either case.
The right way to use LaTeX is to basically enter the semantic structure of your document, let LaTeX do all the typesetting, and then tweak it a bit as necessary. Realizing this was the point where I stopped fighting with LaTeX and started letting it work for me. I've been getting compliments on how beautiful my documents are. There's a lot of typesetting knowledge encoded in LaTeX, and, really, it probably does a better job than most of us can hope to do. One particular example I like to share is that, when I took my thesis to the printer, he remarked how glad he was that, finally, someone had thought about making the margins large enough that the text would be readable once printed and bound. I hadn't. But LaTeX had.
Incidentally, the above is also why I don't see a lot of value in WYSIWYG editors for LaTeX. On the one hand, being able to see what your final document will look like while you are creating it is good. On the other hand, it makes it very easy to fall into the trap of spending all of your time correcting this or that perceived layout error, instead of getting your actualy work done while letting LaTeX do the typesetting. I am not even sure WYSIWYG can be made to work right; a lot of algorithms in LaTeX are simply slow, and changing even one letter can cause your text to jump around, which is very annoying while editing.
Then, of course, there is the matter of commands. I recognize that having to type in commands is a significant hurdle for many people. Being a programmer and having a lot of experience with HTML, this isn't the case for me - I am used to using commands. As a programmer, I actually see LaTeX as having an advantage here: by defining new commands, you can automate repeating tasks and increase the maintainability of your code...err...document. I don't actually do this a lot, but it's very nice to have that ability for when it's useful.
All in all, I won't deny that LaTeX is hard. I know it is. On the other hand, I am not actually sure it is harder than Microsoft Word, which, in my experience, is its main competitor. Although Word is probably easier to get started with, learning the basic LaTeX necessary for creating a simple document is really not that much work, and the documents you produce will look a lot better than what Word produces. When you get to more complex documents, I find Word has a tendency to screw up - it will crash and/or eat parts of the formatting or content of your document. Granted, that's bugginess, not something inherent in WYSIWYG word processing, but it still ends up causing you a lot of frustration and losing you a lot of time. I've never seen LaTeX do this, and, even if it did, you would still have the source code of your document - at the very least, all your content is still there.
So, there you have it. My opinion, my experience, with input from quite a few others - LaTeX users, non-LaTeX users, and "I tried LaTeX but couldn't figure it out" users. In the end, my conclusion is that LaTeX is far from perfect, but it's still the best.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Here is some info from the FAQ:
Lout is similar in function to LaTeX and troff. Indeed, it borrows ideas, techniques and conventions from these typesetting systems. For example, Lout uses Knuth's (the author of TeX, on which LaTeX is based) optimal line breaking algorithm, and has extended it to paragraph breaking across pages. For simple documents, Lout, LaTeX and troff offer much the same functionality, with different syntax (see the "Simple Examples" section). Lout is much more "programmer friendly" than TeX's macros (and a fortiori than incomprehensible troff macros). See the "Advanced Examples" section.
Lout makes it easy to mix text and graphics. You can draw lines, arrows and boxes, scale and rotate objects, use color commands. While many of these things are possible in LaTeX by including Postscript files generated by utility programs such as xfig, you have to specify the size of each included figure, losing a lot of Lout's flexibility.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
* Technically the admin account, as I'm on Windows these days, but I can call it root if I want to.
I was going to mark this +1 informative until I found out that the poster runs windows :-)
But seriously, I had the exact opposite experience. I started on Lyx, got really frustrated, and moved to TeXmacs. But I'm in Linux: maybe the TeXmacs interface is worse in Windows? Or maybe's it's just a matter of taste. Either way, I'd definitely suggest trying out both.
MOD PARENT UP!!! Thanks for your extensive comments.
/tx/ pronunciation (that is, with a voiceless velar fricative as in Modern Greek, or the last sound of the German word "Bach", similar to the Spanish "j" sound)."
What software do you use with LaTeX?
Quote: "When you get to more complex documents, I find Word has a tendency to screw up - it will crash and/or eat parts of the formatting or content of your document."
I've experienced that. Sometimes Word even ruins its own files so badly that it can't read them. If that happens, here's a tip: Load the Word file in Open Office, and save it in Word format. That repairs the file. Word will then be able to read its own file. So, Open Office is a necessary Microsoft Office utility.
I sure wish Open Source authors would choose sensible names for their projects. The name TeX and LaTeX has undoubtedly reduced the acceptance of the software. See this quote, for example:
"TeX's creator Donald Knuth promotes a
Didn't he look around and see that no professional communication was using "Voiceless velar fricatives"? Did he decide that all other writers in the entire English language were wrong, and he was being more communicative than the professionals? Or was he intentionally making communication difficult?
IMO, the equation editor in Word 2007 was a huge improvement over the previous versions.
But you can include TrueType and other fonts.
Given that this is a clean rewrite, some other problems might have been solved on the way.
Actually it was the exact same thing for me. I did my masters in MS-Word in 98 and i hated it (open the document and all images shifted position.. .*ARGH*).
When I started on my PhD, a colegue told me about LaTeX and gave me the 'Not so short guide' and I started writing using a simple template as starting point. It worked like a charm. Sure I have had my times where I had to fight a bit to get what i wanted (especially when I had to install the institute style class in order to finish my thesis).
Also I have done papers in MS-word and LaTeX, and anyday I would choose Latex for an article, as getting the margins etc right for a MS-word publication is REALLY a pain whereas the journals supporting LaTeX have done it extremely simple by publishing style-classes. This makes submitting articles for review (where the layout must be different than the finished articel, e.g double linespacing etc.) MUCH less of a hasle than in Word/OO-Writer.
So if you are serious about using a typesetting program, use LaTeX!
Yours Yazeran
Plan: To go to Mars one day with a hammer.
I'm not submitter, but I share some of his frustration.
First, I've used LaTeX since around 1987 (that was on the Amiga, btw) and I'm still convinced that for most of the documents I write LaTeX is clearly superior to other systems I've tried.
That's not to say there aren't some obvious points for improvement. Font support is archaic and really not something from this decade (nor the previous). I understand that XeTeX has some improvements in this area, I'll check it out. I need/want to use the Gentium font but after jumping through all the hoops that are indicated in the sparse documentation, it no worky.
But, for me, the number one frustration is the sheer impossibility to create a new base class. I write software for a living and have used many obfuscated languages. However, I just don't "get" the intricacies of programming for LaTeX.
I would love to have a letter.cls that doesn't look like it's an afterthougth. There is dinbrief.cls, but that has all sorts of problems of its own. I've tried several times to create a letter class, for A4 paper, that looks professional to use in a business. No such luck, I just couldn't do it. And the lack of alternatives on the 'Net seem to indicate that there aren't many others that could do it either.
So, to summarize, LaTeX a wonderful tool for typesetting reports and articles. Especially if those are heavy on math. But for other correspondence it isn't so great, or at least, it hasn't kept up with modern developments in font technology and document design.
And check out Apache FOP for something up the same alley, but FOSS
At the time (admittedly about 5 years ago) the OOo formula editor worked and the Microsoft Office one simply didn't in several odd ways. For instance you couldn't embed a formula in a table in MO, which made it kind of useless.
You sure about that? I wrote my Masters dissertation 6 years ago in Word (I know, us lazy engineers) and had no problems putting equations in tables. As this involved linearising multivariate equations for numerical solution on the computer, I had plenty of Jacobian and other matrices that I lined up using tables.
How about MathCad? Not only can you word process but it is easy to update the calcs in the document. You can embed charts and Excel spreadsheets if required. Check it out and see if it meets your needs.
Can it match the styles advocated by the various journals?
Word uses essentially the same algorithm to manage paragraph flow as TeX does, just more sophisticated in the areas of inserting non-text objects such as images and much more sophisticated for mixing languages of different scripts.
The reason TeX output looks "better" to some is mostly that it looks different. TeX was created exclusively for dealing with European languages, and it was created for creating printed books, with only the typographical conventions of printed books, before desktop publishing really existed. By default it looks different and "more bookish", kind of quaint, people interpret that as being "better".
Don't get me wrong I love TeX and its legacy is gigantic (again, Knuth's algorithms were reused in modern word processor). It's just not the best tool anymore.
I learned OpenOffice five years before, why would I go back?
Because MS Office is a better product in this respect?
Esp. when it doesn't come with PDF output out of the box.
Adding PDF export to Office 2007 is trivial, and unlike the PDF export in OpenOffice, the MS Office version isn't riddled with obvious bugs that haven't been fixed for years and render it hopelessly unreliable.
And I don't trust that. Every version they say they improved something. Paying all that money just to find out is not that wise.
If you have a problem with MS Office for some philosophical reason, that's your prerogative, but please don't produce lame excuses like this and then criticise it without even trying it.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Have to post as AC, but I think you might be pleasantly surprised with the next version of FrameMaker....yes...I said that correctly!
This post seems internally inconsistent. Word uses the same algorithm, but people like TeX because it looks totally different? Perhaps we have different definitions of what it is to use the same algorithm.
Obviously I wouldn't push OOo as a viable substitute for LaTeX
Have you tried OOoLatex?
Actually, it wasn't so much made for European languages. It was made for typesetting in general. In fact, look to the KOMA-Scripts package, which was designed because European publishing wasn't originally well accounted for in TeX.
There are a number of other benefits which are, perhaps, why it looks more "bookish". Kerning, ligatures, finer control over hyphenation, glyph variants, real fonts, support for semetic languages, support for asian languages, etc. Take a look at the index of Knuth's Art of Programming. Arabic, Chinese, everything beautifully typeset. The Index seamlessly generated with appropriate sorting.
I suppose it's possible to look at professional typesetting and say, so what? In the end, though, that's the benefit. TeX is a typesetting system and a lot of people seem to want a Word Processor. These are different things.
There are things that are possible in TeX that aren't possible in Word. You have more control over the document (although Word certainly gives an appearance of control). TeX can make type that looks GOOD. However, some people think of text and publishing as commodities in the online world. They decide that they can live without these things.
That's fine with me. Personally, I enjoy seeing something done really well. I use TeX as it suits me. Someday, maybe someone will make a good WYSIWYG typesetting system. Until then, we have TeX.
I think Mauve has the most RAM. --PHB (Dilbert Comic)