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MS Word 2010 Takes On TeX
alphabetsoup writes "Office 2010 Technology preview was leaked a few days back. With its leak, a feature which was rumored to be present can now be confirmed. Office 2010 finally adds support for Advanced Typographic features (ligatures, number forms, alternates, etc.) of OpenType, allowing one to create documents so far possible only in TeX or InDesign. Between this, the new equation editor and styles, what are the chances of Word replacing LaTeX as the editor of choice in academia?"
Something usually free is already widely used.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
... at least as long as its justified text is as horrible as it is now.
Absolutely none!
If Word 2010 does this extremely well, perhaps they deserve to become the editor of choice.
How well does OpenOffice.org do this?
In biology, Word is already the document editor of choice. And Excel is the charting software of choice. It's really quite a pain.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Call me old fashioned, but I find WYSIWYG editors to be more work then useful when dealing with large documents that need to be formatted in a standardized way. Particularly if one needs to manipulate the text in a large scale fashion.
The guys who need this stuff are already geeky, and why would geeky guys use something "for pay" that comes out of a budget? And since this will be in a proprietary format, why would they risk these documents becoming unreadable?
still pretty slim, as it absolutely sucks at handling long documents, it doesn't work eliminate white space all that well (think multiple columns, where it matters the most), and its backwards compatibility is not exactly industry-leading. tex, however, is good at all of the above.
yeah, right.
because digging through a GUI (that changes with every release) to find what I want is soooo much easier than just \whatever{x}.
Think about it, in almost all universities the Faculty of Arts and Social Science is the biggest faculty by size. Word is already the Editor of choice in Arts and Social Sciences.
For Sciences (Comp. Sci., Math, etc) most publications take Word and Latex.
There's no particular guarantee it works at all.
Between this, the new equation editor and styles, what are the chances of Word replacing LaTeX as the editor of choice in academia?
Word and TeX are two very useful tools for two very different needs. Word has a long way to go before it is as complete, open and diverse as TeX and TeX has a long way to go before it is as easy to use and as pervasive as Word.
.doc vs .docx means but until they get their shit together and I can read my saved file like an validated XML document, I'm not going to be putting anything important in any sort of Office format. If I'm going to be writing a paper or book, it ain't gonna be typeset in MS Word while those memories are fresh.
This sure is great news for Office 2010 (and for me at my job which forces me to use Office) but I think you're a little premature in thinking either of them are stepping on each other's toes or even close to conflict.
I don't know anyone who was holding onto TeX based purely on its support for Advanced Typographic features of OpenType.
Call me a grudge holding idiot but Office would have to undo years upon years of me suffering from "<MS Product> has encountered a problem and had to close, your shit is in a temporary file though and we'll try to recover your information or pieces of your information but this never works. Also, the last thing I did before I closed was mutilate the master copy." Now I may be exaggerating but it has helped that nothing else could ever open those files either. I don't know what
My work here is dung.
Badness 10000.
I use LaTeX not only for its nice typographic properties, but because of how flexible it is. It's trivial to generate LaTeX code for automatically generating documentation, for instance. LaTeX may still be ahead in a couple areas (e.g., citations. Does Word beat out BibTeX yet?), but I'm not sure. As long as Word is GUI-based, I can't see it ever being anywhere near as flexible as LaTeX is.
This is still very cool though. I hate seeing flyers and menus and then that scream from 20 feet away "I WAS MADE IN WORD! MY TYPOGRAPHY WILL BURN YOUR EYES!" Anything that improves the quality of print around me is a good thing, I say.
So it can do something LaTex so what? It can also do HTML but I don't see Adobe or any other web writing tool throwing in the towel.
The big question is can it write it effectively. Word already has the tendency of turning a basic document into a code of spaghetti when saved as HTML. Somehow I don't see this being any different
'Office 2010 finally adds support for Advanced Typographic features (ligatures, number forms, alternates, etc.) of OpenType, allowing one to create documents so far possible only in TeX or InDesign. Between this, the new equation editor and styles, what are the chances of Word replacing LaTeX as the editor of choice in academia?"'
About zero, but when will MS come after TeX for patent royalties on Microsoft OpenType ?
davecb5620@gmail.com
There is not a question about Word taking over from LaTeX in academia since Word already dominates academia.
In most disciplines in academia (all of the humanities and social sciences for example) no one has heard of TeX or LaTeX, and people mostly don't have the technical skills to use either program easily. And they are _already_ all using Word.
By contrast, in mathematics and other disciplines where LaTeX is a good solution, it is very hard to imagine something as clunky, bug prone, bloated and hard to use as Word taking over from something robust and easy to use (if you think the way mathematicians think) like LaTeX.
In earth science one gets the whole culture clash between the hard-core physics/computer types who like LaTeX and the biologist/ecologist types who like Word. I get a little depressed by the extent to which Word seems to be replacing LaTeX, especially given how much less nice the final result looks. If MS can really improve the typesetting then the "Not a chance" posts above are likely to prove wrong once Word 2010 becomes prevalent.
And does it run on *nix?
No? Then it's still useless to me.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Ho hum. Microsoft finally implemented a feature 5 years behind everyone else.
Most applications in Mac OS X get full OpenType support through the operating system. This includes Pages, Apple's very capable in-house word processor.
I'm not saying you should migrate from TeX (I use XeTeX for a lot of more complex typesetting operations), but you by no means need to look to Microsoft Word to get OpenType support. I switch between Pages for ease of use and TeX for freedom and typographic perfection.
TeX won't be replaced by Word because TeX's whole purpose is to provide a way to separate content and layout. Publishers care about this because the same content can be reshaped to fit their typesetting needs. Word is by its very nature a WYSIWYG. Why would publishers leave established infrastructure and a seamless way of assuring documents meet their typesetting needs to trust layout to amateurs and receive files which must be manually edited in order to modify layout?
but one of the real glories of TeX is the ability to separate content from presentation. A closer example would be if HTML + CSS could handle all these things.
With LaTeX I can take articles written in basic LaTeX and style them to a specific theme or format for a book or journal. Word strikes me as much harder to do this with. It might be possible to do this with Word but there seems to be too much temptation to paint a document.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Incidentally, what will be the internationally recognized format of Word 2010 allowing me to use the documents unchanged over 20 year like I do with TeX?
And btw, a strong reason to use TeX is math formulae. Until Word formulae approaches the readability of those of TeX I dont see why mathematicians and physicists would change.
Even with better typography support, Word is still unsuitable for anything more complex than a letter to Grandma. That's because it still makes it harder to create structured documents than LaTeX does. If I'm writing a novel or a paper or something, the ability to simply say "\chapter{In Which I Make A Fool of Myself on Slashdot}" is MUCH easier than mucking with the mess that is Word's half-baked paragraph styles. The only thing Word does better than LaTeX is pictures.
Office will take over from TeX when (at the least)
* It works on Linux (which lots of academics use.
* It works well with version control, making it easy to merge edits made by different people
* It is easy to generate tables from scripts and glue them into the document
* It is easy to take a pre-written document and put it in a new style.
Now, it's possible Office already does a few of those, and it's also very possible TeX does an awful lot more than that.
The cost isn't really that much of an issue for academics, as every university tends to have a site-licence for Office and other apps. Despite this, I still never use it.
Combination - fun iPhone puzzling
LaTeX is not an editor.
And vi+latex is a lot easier to use than msword, so there.
I'd say the odds of MS Word replacing LaTeX are about the same as Microsoft releasing the source to Word so we can fix problems and add features as we need them.
A lot of these open source projects grew out of a direct need. There was a vacuum to be filled. The need shaped what the product wound up being. Trying to pound the square peg of MS Word into the round hole LaTeX fills is most likely impossible.
Support or not, they're just too different.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Languages aren't inherently fast -- implementations are efficient
However, unless one is concerned about the lack of ability to use 10 different fonts in a documents, or wants to see the effects of the 30 different colors one uses to code the text on a page, MS is not going to produce something better than TeX. Not only because does MS require that one moves to a non portable, non reliable, non readable format, but also because doing simple things takes quite a bit more time in MS Word, for the user that has the skills to so do.
This is a good thing for MS Word users. It will allow them to create better looking documents. I don't know of many LaTex users that will move to Word due to this. OTOH, the WYSIWG ease is going to over take the markup language professionals at some point because the former will simply be good enough.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I always find it funny that people talk about LaTeX being the system of choice in academia. While this may be true in Computer Science, Mathematics, and Physics circles, it certainly isn't true in a whole range of other disciplines such as Biology and the Social Sciences. The claim that LaTeX is what all of academia is using just isn't true.
Oh, and LaTeX is not an editor.
Mad Software: Rantings on Developing So
what are the chances of Word replacing LaTeX as the editor of choice in academia?
Hate to break it to you, but it already has, like 10 or 15 years ago. It is only some very zealous math people who still use TeX for anything important, and only even more zealous Linux or BSD users that do so on open source operating systems. In the last 10 years, closed source software has leapfrogged open source in every conceivable way. Windows 7 and OS X make Linux look like the crap that it is. Office 2010 puts POWER into the hands of both everyday users and power users like nothing else in history.
Admit it folks, open source software has failed miserably. Closed source has demonstrated, once and for all, that there is no real benefit to opening up software.
I await my downward moderation simply for telling the truth.
Unless, of course, the publisher insists on camera-ready text, and make the editors of their books/journals responsible for typesetting/layout. In other words, it's already in the hands of the amateurs.
Yes? No?
Word documents, IMO, are 'lost content'. I've been involved with several knowledge capture projects and the crap we've had to import from Word docs has required extensive manual preprocessing. Not so with DVI (XML and SGML are even better). Word might look pretty for the PHB's consumption, but the world is progressing rapidly to a point where documents are as likely to be read by a machine for their content as by humans for their kewl layout.
Have gnu, will travel.
"If Word 2010 does this extremely well, perhaps they deserve to become the editor of choice. How well does OpenOffice.org do this?"
I wouldn't use either for book size projects, that's what TeX is for.
davecb5620@gmail.com
Call me when it's been re-written by Knuth !
Come on, Timothy, you can't be that ignorant!
TeX is Obtuse and used by people who need it because other applications don't do what they need (that's how it came to exist in the first place!).
You can't get within spitting distance of academia without acquiring at least a basic understanding of Office.
If the features perform reliably and as advertised, then it's a matter of Academicians extending their Office knowledge. You won't have to learn two apps if you don't want to.
People familiar with TeX will almost certainly keep using it; new users will probably go with Office since they already have it and know it to some extent.
That or Microsoft will make the feature implementation so horrifically obtuse (just like the rest of the application suite!) and Academia will stick with TeX because their old docs work with it (always important) and it's - GASP! - easier to use than whatever Microsoft is trying to jam down their throats.
Bottom line, MS is very, very late to the party on this one... and if it weren't the fact that you can't function in Academia without Office (or semi-regular access to a computer with Office), I doubt anyone would notice. Or care.
- paragraph hyphenation is brain-dead one-line at a time
- one must invoke commands to generate the ToC and Index and remember to re-invoke them if pagination changes
- documents are non-portable / formatting is dependent on currently installed printer
- graphics can be embedded and can be nightmarish to get out in a press-ready form
- citations require third-party extensions which can interfere w/ importing / processing documents (hit Command shift F9 to convert all selected form fields to text)
- There is no easy way to assign paragraph styles --- one has to build a custom toolbar to have them all available w/ a click, the arrangement of said toolbar is dependent on the _length_ of the stylenames --- why the outline view can't have some sort of pop-up menu or ability to assign more than Heading 1--n and Normal is beyond me
- local formatting is insidious --- create an InDesign document, assign styles to everything, formatting everything w/ styles, take it into Word, then bring it back into InDesign and one will still have to clear over-rides to keep the text from being formatted as Times New Roman
and all of that doesn't consider stupid / ignorant users and the visually formatted, but not structured documents which they always create. Best indictment of that here:
Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient by Allin Cottrell
http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html
If typography were easy, Word wouldn't be the foetid mess which it is.
One will also never use Word as the basis for back-end typesetting systems --- I've done them for customized children's stories and telephone directory line ads --- a co-worker (Jeff McArthur) at my previous workplace developed one which would do customized versions of the CIA World Factbook as a demo --- the original version did the typesetting for a 2,200 page register and the technology was customized and sold to several customers.
Also, to be fair and accurate, Quark XPress and several other DTP programs handle OpenType features in addition to InDesign and XeTeX/XeLaTeX http://www.tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex and the nascent luatex, http://www.luatex.org/ (as well as ant http://ant.berlios.de/).
William
(who wrote a several thousand line WordBASIC macro to handle the formatting for a review journal for a major sci-med publisher so that the text could be pulled into Quark XPress 6, then 7, then finally InDesign CS3 --- I also wrote a xelatex package for typesetting the journal, but that was nixed by my boss 'cause if the journal had been done in TeX it would've been outsourced to India)
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Some of the folks using TeX are also owners of Mathematica, IDL and other software that costs thousands of dollars per license -- because it increases their productivity.
It's not an issue of cost, it's an issue of the benefit for the cost -- and I don't think there will be the benefit unless MS Word decouples the content from the presentation. (which allows the TeX users to write their paper once, and then have it formatted correctly for whatever journal it'll be published in) As for becoming unreadable -- so long as you can export it to PDF, Post Script, or whatever, you're fine for archiving.
And would MS Word replace InDesign? I don't think so, but if they've got this support in MS Word, I can only assume they'll bring it over to MS Publisher, and they might be able to pick up some users.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
This is the real question. TeX is currently at version 3.1415926 and that is still a long way from pi.
A very simple demonstration of the difference between Word and (La)TeX is in the handling of visual consistency. Suppose I'm writing a long document, with multiple sections, subsections, etc. To achieve consistency in Word, I have to manually check that I've left the same amount of white space above and below each heading. Likewise, I have to ensure that I've used the same font, weight, variant, etc.
Whereas, in LaTeX, I simply use the appropriate commends: \section{}, etc; and everything else is taken care of. Need to change the appearance of the headings at a later time? No problem, just tweak the definition of the \section{} command.
Is this for all users? Of course not. But when it comes to typesetting rather than word processing, LaTeX is a far superior product. Because Word is a WYSIWYG product, any extraneous white space (which LaTeX so usefully ignores) has to respected when laying out text, and this necessarily breaks any automatic formatting for visual consistency.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
InDesign and Word are very latecomers to this realm. Ventura and FrameMaker are both full-featured in tyographic finery and complex equation editing. Neither enjoy much market share, but Word will never match their intricate handling of long, technical documents.
MS Word compare with InDesign or another Desktop publishing? Unless 2010 is very different from 2007...
TeX (Markup Language), Word (Document Processing), InDesign (Desktop Publishing) is very different...
There are thousands many more thing that Word is not suitable for Desktop Publishing - Flow oriented instead of Page oriented, Color accuracy (non RGB colorspace), "Printer" (i mean that Printer!) supports...They target audience hardly overlaps.
MS uses to make a software called Publisher, used to be part of the Office Suite (or is it still?). That might be comparable to InDesign. (At least for someone who need to do it much less expensive)
...I've never met a good mathematician who typesets in anything but handcoded LaTeX (or, for the greybeards, similar packages that came out before LaTeX).
Everyone who uses Word invariably drops out early on in the game. People whose mindset makes them prefer Lyx get a little further. But the ones who stay the course know the difference between mathematics as it is meant and mathematics as it is expressed, and it simply wouldn't make conceptual sense for them to use a WYSIWYG editor. "x to the power of 2" is best written as "x^2", not "x with a 2 placed somewhere above and to the right of it". 4/ths is "4 where 5 parts are whole", best written as \frac{4}{5}, not "a 4 above a 5 with a horizontal line separating each number". Writing maths as it's actually displayed on the page is just silly.
Between this, the new equation editor and styles, what are the chances of Word replacing LaTeX as the editor of choice in academia?
LaTeX has a devoted following, but its userbase is decidedly in the minority - even among engineering faculty and students. The majority of academic users are using Word, and have been for almost as long as I can remember.
#DeleteChrome
Will it support ligatures on my nine-pin printer? I mean, seriously, this isn't a hot new feature, this is long, long overdue.
-Peter
LaTeX is not an editor at all, but a typesetting markup language. Use any editor you want. Word includes an editor, but it's extremely weak compared to any version of Emacs or vi, the tools usually chosen to edit LaTeX and TeX documents.
Your latex packages are redundant. Better and more precise layouts will be easily possible with OpenType.
And YES it does run on Unix. OS X is Unix. Linux and BSD are NOT Unix.
Closed Source RULES.
I can't imagine that there will ever be an editor of choice across all of academia. I'll assume based on comments in this thread that computer scientists must use TeX, but Word is (and has long been) the de facto standard in my own field. My PhD is in Mechanical Engineering; my research deals primarily with internal combustion engines - thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, combustion, etc. During my time in grad school, and since then working at a national lab, I've only ever encountered one person who used TeX, and that was a summer student (Physics major) at the lab who used it essentially as a form of rebellion because no one else did: he just wanted to be different. The journals I've published in would accept .doc, .pdf, .docx, and a variety of other formats (.doc generally pretty strongly preferred), with .tif images for plots, but I can't recall if I've even seen TeX listed as an acceptable format for submission. I've certainly never used it nor known a colleague to use it.
I expect that in some fields, the situation is reversed and TeX is more acceptable than Word. Clearly, there exist fields where TeX is used to some extent, at least. But calling it the "editor of choice" in academia is going a bit far. Perhaps it's the editor of choice in a particular field (or several), but I doubt there is such a de facto standard across the breadth of all of academia, unless it's already MS Word.
Up front: I agree with all of your listed strengths for LaTeX. However...
.tex file with them to solicit comments, or even the typesetted pdf? Forget it!
.tex file, they'll mash it all up, it won't compile again, and you'll waste a lot of time "collaborating." With the .pdf, Acrobat Reader's commenting feature is too cumbersome and inherently not interactive (if the pdf is even commentable). In my experience, Word's "track changes" feature is the only way to go. It enforces some critical ground rules (only one way to comment; *every* edit is recorded, etc.) that your time-starved colleagues can't ignore, and it favors "show, don't tell" attitudes with corrections.
The problem that arises with an academic manuscript (that isn't your thesis) is that you have collaborators, and probably some who aren't local. These collaborators will likely need to make useful comments on your manuscript drafts. They might even know how to use LaTeX (most of mine do). But sharing a raw
With the
Word itself is, of course, erratic, but as I recently discovered for a proposal, it can do a lot of things reasonably well (if not as beautifully and perfectly as LaTeX). Section numbers come to mind.
I'll consider using Word as soon as I can use git to track changes in documents and effectively resolve merge conflicts.
TeX and it's offspring LaTeX aren't editors, they are programming languages that generate typeset output. My editor for TeX is emacs, but I have used Notepad, vi...anything to edit my TeX files. TeX and LaTeX are passed down from user to user in graduate programs because the learning curve is extremely sharp. The two reasons that TeX won't be supplanted quickly are that (1) academic journal formatting for TeX (in the form of style files) is commonly available and graduate students in many science/engineering programs use the style files from their senior counterparts. This builds familiarity and then you just keep using TeX because you recognize its beauty and ease of use. More importantly (2) TeX files are simply text files. A dissertation is very small in this format. It is very, very portable; very, very stable; and you can use any editor you want (well, except WYSIWYG editors unless you do some pre-formatting). TeX is a programming language for typesetting, lets not call it an editor.
I remember reading somewhere about a bug in excel where a nomenclature for genes was substituted for dates. They had alphanumeric codes for genes and codes like "apr03" were automatically replaced by "April-03-2007" or something like that. It seems that thousands of experiments in DNA sequencing had to be redone, because they had saved all the data in excel spreadsheets and had no backups.
People have little care or concern over what results are deemed "professional".
There are entire books and manuals that aren't made with the "proper" tools, because most people can't comprehend why Word or Publisher don't meet the criteria for "professional" results. With Publisher, it usually takes the harsh step of producing their document, from the raw material delivered by the customer.
"It looks fine on my Inkjet at home! Why does it look like so much dogshit on the floor?"
With Word, it's usually "good enough" for most people, even though the outcome isn't what you or they would really like. Give a Tech Writer a copy of Word, and they may "make-do", but I doubt you'll find many who prefer it to FrameMaker, InDesign, or even Pagemaker. That same Tech Writer will churn out a document with Word, and because it's "good enough", it will fly around the Globe, and even make it out as trade conference detritus or long-lived corporate gospel.
TeX, on the other hand, is not something most people care about learning. You *must* learn it to be able to use it confidently. There's no "good enough" with TeX - it either works, or it doesn't.
TeX is a Science. Word is a Comedy. People like comedy.
Open source, people
http://scribus.net/
Does anyone have any statistics or real info on what fraction of academics use latex, as opposed to word ?
In my personal experience, NOT one person I know uses latex.
My guess, latex is restricted to a small % academics, consisting of the partly overlapping set of retrogrouchs and math heavys
I've done a lot of layout of books written by academics. All of them used Word. But NONE of them had a clue what "Advanced Typographic features (ligatures, number forms, alternates...". Most of them couldn't tell the difference between a straight or a typographic quote. Or between Arial or Times. So whoever wrote the summary was just trying to provoke controversy by making it "new Microsoft features" versus "Free software", and then watching the predictable flame war.
Obviously some academics are interested in typography -- mathematicians, linguists -- and they have tools they've developed to do their job. Just because Word, after about 20 years, has finally decided to support some basic typographical features won't make much of a difference. Those using Word won't understand or notice them, as most Word users don't use 98% of its features now (though they still insist on having the latest version). A lot of Word users start a new page by hitting enter until they roll the page, for instance.
Phew - the shit I have seen crammed into a spreadsheet.. With pride.
Any higher function than SUM should require certification.
"You got a license for that Pivot Table, Son?"
Features on top of features, with no real signposts to guide their implementation. Gag.
...I work at the Economics Research Institute at UNAM, Mexico's (and Latin America's) largest university. Researchers here are social scientists â" Their texts do include the ocassional formula, yes, but they mainly deal with straight text. Even so, I am painfully aware on how inconvenient a word-processor-minded program can be for them (i.e. try to get them to distinguish between cosmetic and semantic tagging â" No way). They literally use the computer as a fancy typewriter.
I have shown LyX to a couple of people, and are initially interested, even more looking at the quality of the results... But after I mention it cannot import (with formatting) Word documents, and that they won't be able to share their works (except as an unmodifiable PDF) with other colleagues, they go back to what they already know.
So, no, TeX is not necessarily widely used in all of academia. Just in the portion we, the computer-minded geeks, like looking at.
No? Then I'm not switching over from LaTeX. It's already easy to use and does what I want it to do. It also has countless 3rd party plugins that add features, and I doubt that the new version of Office has all of these features yet (for instance, QFT contraction notation).
It doesn't work on Linux? I could probably screw around with Wine, but that seems like a waste when I already have LaTeX installed. Linux is necessary for my work.
And it's not free? Well, I see no reason to pay for a product unless it's actually better than what is already available. I'll happily switch over if this is the case, but the bar has been set pretty high.
FWIW, equation editor in Office 2007 is already great. To the point where many people who don't know LaTeX and have Office 2007 don't have to invest the time into learning LaTeX. I still prefer LaTeX myself, but I have already invested the time into learning it, and it was HARD to learn.
If you haven't yet seen Office 2007 equation editor, check it out before you bash it. They really did a great job on it. Too bad the rest of Word sucks ass if you want to do structured formatting.
ligatures, number forms etc are not enough to take on TeX. Wake me up when it is possible to customize output routines for Word, when it's lexer is extensible and pluggable and when, most importantly, it has GLUE :)
(and please do not even touch formula entry and display in MS Word, may patience is really fragile on that topic)
If you care about immaculate document appearance, you don't want Word. Word is great for document automation and producing adequate looking documents. You can make Word do anything you want it to do, except produce immaculate text. You may also not want to use Word for extra-long documents. It's the standard--only a deluded fanboy could deny that. It's also a bloated hog.
TeX/LaTex is good for producing immaculate looking documents and not much else. You've got to keep using it for your skill set to remain sharp. I'd use TeX/LaTeX if all I did was produce beautiful documents or ship files to a TeX-loving publisher. I'd never want to share a TeX document, because I'd always be afraid my recipient wouldn't be confident enough to work with it. I'd run screaming before I'd attempt any kind of document automation with TeX--the labor wouldn't be worth the yield.
LyX is a good idea as a front end to TeX and LaTeX, but it offers no help in document automation. It won't let me do the stuff I can do in Word. There is a strong vibe in the LyX community that wants to keep LyX focused on document layout and not much else. That won't increase their market share.
I had shifted to Open Office until my wife wanted me to automate a Word form system for her. I had to then buy the damn thing. MS got me because they are the "standard." I hated buying it, but there it is . . ..
The whole reason we have Joe, Pico and other such editors is because people have learned Word's ways.
If you ask me, they are a scourge, and are dumbing-down entire cultures.
The same thing will happen with Word.
Please google for "BibTeX4Word". Word doesn't need to beat BibTeX, because BibTeX and Word can nowadays be used in combination...
I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...
Well, many users use LaTeX because they are concerned about viruses. And will probably continue to use LaTeX, unless this article turns out to be workable.
what are the chances of Word replacing LaTeX as the editor of choice in academia?
Zero.
Aside from anything else, people don't learn tools like this and give them up at the drop of a hat, but more to the point I'll believe it when I see it for Word to include all the knowledge embedded in LaTeX to make text and equation layout really pleasing.
My sister is a Mathematics professor, and she has settled with Word and its equation editor. She has developed her own system of churning out hand outs and lectures for her math classes with Word. Like her, many in Academia (including in Computer Science) end up with this route.
It is kind of sad, but that is the natural order of things. My sister, and people like her, have enough in their hands already to learn another system; MS Word is ubiquitous, and - if you are careful with your templates - it's predictable.
The benefits of typing your equations with LaTeX as opposed to doing them the point-n-click way - which btw, it's incredibly obvious to them, it is not incentive enough to break from their established procedure to get their jobs done.
If MS Word really pulls this off - and that's a big IF - it will be a good thing as it will bring to those already familiar with the product a new set of capabilities.
Now, if MS Word doesn't pulls it off - which is possible, then there is still life for LaTeX.
But even now, for many types of jobs, MS Word does an ok "good enough" job, thus making a dent on Tex/LaTeX. I think Lamport predicted something like this would happen. And if it isn't MS Word, it will be some other, more advanced commercial or FOSS product.
I have had to convert multi-dozen page Publisher and Word documents into 'real' formats.
This pain comes at a price. See the 'Setup Fees' line item on your invoice. :)
"I know you could buy your own copy of $ProTool for that price, and for the sake of our business relationship, it's what we encourage you to do."
RIPs don't like Microsoft, no matter what kind of goofy pseudo-filter you pipe them through.
Manual (camera) seps are an alternative, and harder to find by the year.
Which they don't.
The trouble I have had is that they don't produce 'clean' LaTeX.
You have to export, and if you try to bring it back in, there's quite a bit of residual goofiness.
I much prefer TeXmacs, but rendering on the fly is sloow.
Most people don't remember this, but Mac users used to love Microsoft. That ended with Word 6.0, when Microsoft took away all of the features it had been prototyping on the Mac and made Mac users fall back to Windows users' level of functionality. It's been a hatefest ever since.
One of the features of Word for the Mac 5.1 was "formulas", which allowed the same sort of advanced layout we see in TeX. I suspect that this is the return of that feature, for both Windows and Mac.
I think it may be too late to salvage good will between Mac users and Microsoft at this point, but maybe it's possible.
Why not use texmaker, LED or even Lyx?
Okay seriously I've just run out of pointless things to say.
I can't agree with this. I collaborate with my colleagues, and many in my group have international collaborative works on the go right now and we all use LaTeX. When I collaborate with my supervisor we tend to use CVS, I've even found a package that supplies some of the basic functionality for tracking changes. Yes it isn't one of LaTeX's strengths but it isn't a deal breaker at all.
I was waiting to see you weigh in, you Typographical Mastermind, you. :)
Micro-interview:
What are a few of your favorite attributes of LyX?
Why LyX versus other WYSIWYG tools, TeX or otherwise?
For a while I used the LyX Gui to do what I wanted and then inspected the LaTeX LyX generated. Then I would write the LaTeX using vim, giving me arguably the best of both worlds. LyX allows you to View Source while you type, making this even easier.
Scribus is 'page layout' software.
It would be the perfect thing to arrange pre-rendered LaTeX, exported as Postscript or some other neutral format, within a larger document.
AFAIK, it doesn't have any real equation or graphics generation capabilities of its own. Someone please prove me wrong! :)
First, I don't see why anyone with a text editor couldn't open a LaTeX file and make edit. Sure, you need some training to be proficient, but if you just want to add a note or make some corrections anyone should be able to figure it out.
Second, who makes their PDFs unmodifiable? The fact that people choose Adobe Acrobat Reader doesn't support editing does not mean it can't be done -- annotations are a great way to get feedback on papers and a largely analogous to the sort of editing/commenting that people would be able to do with a paper copy of the document.
Wow, this article really seems to have brought the soft science practitioners out in force. Where are all the real academics?
In chemistry and many branches of engineering, Word already is more popular than LaTeX.
In mathematics, and most branches of physics, LaTeX is much more popular than Word, and with very good reason. I have no idea of what the proposed changes are for Word 2010, but I somehow doubt that the current painful way of using the equation editor is likely to be very attractive to these practitioners. LaTeX's superior fontwork also is a major advantage that Word currently cannot match.
The third issue is platform independence. Though versions of Word exist for Mac, Pages has come along very rapidly in the last 2-3 years, and will likely fragment the Mac market. Mac and Linux are both gaining market share (usually at the expense of Windows, and especially in academic settings), so unless Word addresses problems with the WYSIWYG method of entering equations (maybe steal some ideas from TeXMacs), and makes a concerted push on these two platforms (its non-existent on Linux), I do not see how it can make a dent in the traditional strongholds of LaTeX.
Most journals do not accept MS 2007 submissions (even the Word friendly publishing houses), let alone MS 2010.
Usually a kid with nothing much to do.
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
This is the same problem we have with code colaboration, and SCM software is the only sane way to build and colaborate on any complex venture...
It's nice that something similar is built into Word, but it lacks much of the power of a full SCM.
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
I agree with many of your observations, except the separation of content/style. In LaTeX, I would frequently need to add negative boxes to get figures to look right and would need to break up long equations to prevent having text appear in the margins.
In Word, I agree that most people fail to separate content and style, because you can just start using Word with no training. The same is not true of LaTeX, which forces you not to take shortcuts. However, these same good practices are also supported in Word. For example, if you want your paper to be re-formatable (e.g., in case your first conference submission is rejected), you should use Styles. Using Styles properly, I can re-format a paper in seconds. Because of slight changes in .cls files (e.g., conference-specific functions), it takes me longer to re-format using LaTeX. Similarly, cross-references can be obnoxious in Word until you look into the details and realize that they work just like cross-references in LaTeX.
As I'm typing this reply, I'm taking a break from typesetting the math paper with LaTeX. So, a couple of things come to mind, immediately. First, LaTeX is 'what you mean is what you get', not 'what you see is what you get'. In LaTeX I actually *say* what I want, rather than using the GUI. Does it matter? Yes. If I need to choose some spacing (rather than letting it to default), I can make my choice precisely, and say it so (e.g., 1pt, meaning 1 point). And in general, the strongest feature of (La)TeX: you have a complete control on the layout. You can setup the formulas any way you want. Period. Next, consider the following example. You need to use greek letters. In GUI (such as MS products), you have to pull down menu, find the option greek letters, select the one you need. In LaTeX I simply type \alpha, or \beta, or whatever. And the choices of fonts I got! Mmmm So once I've tried LaTeX I simply coudln't get back to GUI-based tools. Well, I can go on and on. And the last by not least: many free integrated editors/compilers for LaTeX. My favorite is Emacs/Auctex.
Now I'm talking about mathematicians, not 'academia' in general. If you are into some staff like philosophy or history, you'll be just fine with MS.
Since Word 2007 it already had better equation typesetting than TeX... Word started kerning based on whitespace in the four corners of glyphs, rather than just the left/right sides of the glyphs.
(of course, in both systems, you can manually tweak the positioning of individual glyphs -- like the LaTeX logo. you just don't want to).
Word 2007 also looked better for mixing regular text with maths since it sets text and maths with the same unicode face. Latex requires you to opt into one of the packages (e.g. CM, or palatino, or whatever) so you're much more constrained in font choice.
That said, word's macros aren't anywhere near as powerful as latex's, so I haven't been able to use it as well for fields with lots of specialized notation.
LaTeX is free (Office can often be acquired pretty cheap in academia), however what would prevent me from switching is the fact that a .tex document is easily handled by SVN/CVS, while my experience with office (note earlier versions, 2010 might be different) is a nightmare.
I'm staying with LaTeX.
Too little to late Microsoft! I've already learned how to use the FREE program TeX. I am not going to waste more of my time and money on Word.
Go strangle yourself with your stupid ribbon! And shove Clippy where the sun don't shine while you are at it.
My officemate produced a beautiful doctoral dissertation with LaTex. Unfortunately, he has now been manually re-working it over the course of several weeks to coerce LaTeX to format it more like MSWord so that it will be approved by the publisher who is printing his book. "Everyone else" produces "camera ready" copy for this book series using MSWord with provided templates. When my friend argues with the editor that his LaTeX output is better, he is told that those styles are no longer considered better -- I assume this means that Uncle Bill has managed to win the formatting game as he has managed to control what is "proper" grammar through his green squiggles.
I'm not saying this is a good thing, but it is his sad story. And this is a top-rung German academic book publisher. (They turned down my book [another story] but fortunately, my publisher does all of the typesetting for me!).
rtf2latex2e, save DOC file as RTF then pump it through that, you should end up only needing to do about 10-20% formatting work.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I think that this thread is comparing apples to oranges.
Word is a WYSIWYG editor, while TeX/LaTeX is more a Typesetting type of program.
In Word you layout your document exactly how you want it to be viewed, whereas in TeX/LaTeX you simply concentrate on the content and allow the program to typographically set your document.
I think they are each useful for their own purposes. I don't see one replacing the other at this time.
"The meteor that will kill that dinosaur is out in orbit."
People will use the easiest software they can get away with. A lot of physics magazines make it clear they want Tex (I refuse to cap the X) so a lot of physics papers are submitted in Tex. However, I know quite some people who author their documents using something else because they think Tex is a pain in the arse and then either use a conversion tool and manually fix the errors or get a temp to convert it. In most of the social sciences Word is more common, because they think they don't need formulas as much and Word is easier to use. And a lot of computer science papers end up being HTML because in that field it is much more common to publish things on your own website. But in the end for most fields it all boils down to what the magazines want.
Some scientest are found in Misoury, where Schrodinger's cat lives or not in the 'show me state'. But all scientests are skeptics who don't accept anything without validation, the origin of the word is "science test".
Think global, act loco
I haven't seen anyone mention this yet but there are some things that are very hard to do and can be done in tex/latex fairly easily. Its all about complete control.
For example, have you a program that does some crazy calculations. You can easily send its output to an awk script that massages the output to produce latex code (to create pictures, tables). If this is done multiple times, tex/latex easily wins, word starts falling apart.
... unless you narrow it down to Mathematics, Physics and Computer science departments of course. BTW. I fully sympathize with those inclined to defining it as such :-).
All that stuff about typography is bullshit. The only real reason latex is used there is formulas, which is a niche feature that lacks relevance outside the exact sciences. You might find the occasional sociologist, anthropologist, biologist, etc. using Latex but by and large they are anomalies in a population that is mostly completely ignorant of the 'joys' of compiling and debugging your tables, references, and what not and giving up on the many comforts that come with a decent word processor, none of which seem to be particularly well cared for by your average programmer's editor (which tend to optimized for different purposes).
Now there will be a ton of uber geeks itching to mention a feature or two that is their biggest reason for sticking to latex but the truth is that this crowd is simultaneously to conservative to switch to anything else and too uninvolved in OSS to actually step forward and fix one of the many OSS word replacements so that it can do whatever it is that makes Latex work for them. Apparently, nobody that cares enough to recognize the many flaws of latex related workflows is competent or willing to step forward and fix them. Guilty as charged myself as well (obligatory disclaimer for sitting on my ass here).
Open Office? Crappy compared to both MS Office and Latex. When given the choice, I choose to use something else (seem to default to word, but just because it is easy). Latex, if I have to. Abi word: niche product that doesn't do most of the things a scientist would need. Great if ms write/wordpad (same thing really) would have done the job as well. What else is there? K-office. Nice, ambitious, and notoriously nearly done but not actually usable ever since people started working on it (10-12 years ago?).
Consequently, we're stuck with a software system put together by a nearly retired professor and author of excellent books on computer science who peeked with his career in the seventies, i.e. some 30-40 years ago, that has had no updates worth writing home about since before I started studying computer science in the mid nineties. Nothing against Donald Knuth (great achievements and would have been honered to have been taught by this man). But shit, the world has moved on. Is latex really the best mankind can do when it comes to writing articles and thesises?
Jilles
I have several really good "patentapplication.sty" and "litigationpleading.sty" files.
The bad news is that I used them to patent "A method for generating really good .sty files".
The good news is that no sane court would ever find the patents valid.
The bad news is that I am posting from East Texas.
The good news is that you'll be receiving some very nicely formatted letters in the mail.
The bad news... I could keep this up all day.
The good news is I won't.
Call me crazy, but I'd instantly switch from LaTeX to just about anything if it could be good enough. I don't need fantastic published documents here. I just need a proper editor that doesn't require learning insane and (somewhat) inane code groupings in order to to simple things. I wound up writing a whole scientific thesis on Pages.app because writing in TeX completely and utterly disrupts my creative process (I have trouble concentrating on the task at hand when I have to stop for 5 minutes to figure out how to do something new. I have trouble reading the paper when I can't effectively see the section I just wrote)
Not claiming everyone is like me, but I personally would switch to Word, no matter that I hate it, if it could approximate TeX's advantages.
www.eissq.com/BandP.html Ball and Plate System. Amuse your friends. Crush your enemies.
I mean it's hard to beat TeX and a modern editor in terms of usability. While on Word I need to make click-orgy's just to get a little formular and need to worry about font sizes, TeX just does all of that for me. It just works and it actually does things a typewriter does not do.
First TeX is almost bug free, that's useful not obsolete,
and it produces __beautifully__ typeset output
and it separates document structure from content, which all
graphic visual editors do not
and you can use any text editor of your choice.
And it cost nothing but time to learn
I had always wondered when law firms finally made the switch from WP to Word. IIRC, the only reason WP hung on for so long there was the installed base of templates. That points to why a law office can make Word work. Most of their output is boilerplate, cast within simple, strict formats, and no points for beauty. The law never started with TeX, InDesign, etc, so it's no surprise they went with Word.
Not that some of academia or small publishers won't try the new Word features, but I wager they won't like it. The core argument against using a Wysiwyg tool for research papers - that the authors get distracted by spending too much time dicking with the format - still stands. And, last I tried, Word still doesn't play nice with large, heavily formatted documents.
Luke, help me take this mask off
Just a few reasons why not:
Journals today routinely refuse to accept anything but LaTeX submissions, or charge for retyping anything not in LaTeX. So there is an 'industry standard' barrier to overcome.
If Word is to compete, it will have to be possible for a journal to easily force the supplied word document into the journal style. In LaTeX this is done by telling the author not to use anything stupid (i.e. commands that force styles, which most authors will normally not use anyway) then editing one line of the supplied LaTeX to use the journal style file (or supplying said style file and having the author do it).
Microsoft will need to make it possible to easily put together LaTeX and Word submissions into one journal, with the styling indistinguishable.
Short version: the only way MS can possibly get Word to be seriously used for scientific papers is to make it export (good, non-style-forcing) LaTeX source. Which in turn would mean it would have to lose all the desktop-publishing features MS has tried to put in (since these force styles). So you'd have to have two Word modes, one where it does what it usually does, and the other where it throws out all the DTP stuff, uses LaTeX styles, and in general becomes a tex editor. But then it is in competition with a whole bunch of free software, and at most universities you are supplied with a computer which may be pre-loaded with Word, but it's also pre-loaded with a default tex editor which will not be Word. Since it's quicker (IMO) to type the tex for most of the markup you need than to switch to the mouse and place symbols on a GUI, no-one who's already using other editors will switch, and since the students who are learning LaTeX will get the default (non-MS) editor, no-one would use the MS version.
...it lacks much of the power of a full SCM.
I'm going to start off by saying that good interaction with version control is, I think, the single biggest benefit Latex offers over Word for the sorts of things that I do, at least pre-submission time. (This is probably partly borne out of a overly enthusiastic perspective on version control, but it's definitely up there.)
That said: track changes does have a few benefits over SCM use. First, it's much more user friendly if you are reading to see what's changed. (Ironically, this is most important when you have collaborators, which is when VCSs shine brightest.) SCMs will give you diffs, but it's diffs of the Tex source code. I don't know about you, but I really don't like trying to read that, especially if some misguided soul hit meta-q and changed the line breaks. An alternative is to use something like latexdiff, which overall is pretty awesome, but can be kind of clunky to use and, in my experience, has often needed a few manual changes to the output before the result compiles.
Second, track changes doesn't just show you what changed or give you a way to accept or reject a full revision, which VCSs make easy, but gives you much finer-grained control on what specific changes to accept or reject. You can cherry-pick changes; this sentence's changes are good, this sentence's changes are bad. To get the same effect with a version control solution you would need to save and commit after every individual changes to the document. I make pretty fine-grained commits, and even I am a long way away from that level.
You sir are a fucking idiot, and an example of why it will be so hard to get to rearing decent scientists in the USA. What earlier comments have been about is the difference between excellent and "good enough" but then I would not expect a M$ shill to understand that.
Word's text layout algorithms suck, and always have, it does math badly, and it wastes users time tweaking the output by hand.
Few users understand templates, or use them properly, and fewer yet can create new styles fluently.
They may take our lives, but they will never take our freedom!
I don't have word installed, havent had for 4 years now. And besides, I couldn't install it even if I wanted. It runs neither on GNU/Linux nor Solaris/OpenSolaris and neither of the BSDs. ( I think wine is for drinking not using :) )
Since TeX is open source, and not very big, as programs go you would think, since the source is Open, M$ would get a Google Summer of Code Intern to rip out the crap and just copy TeX
One of the unsung virtues of LaTeX (and TeX) is the durability of archived documents.
I have documents going back to 1995 on my laptop (I lost everything older to a hard drive crash). Since they're just text, these documents are perfectly legible in any operating system. Moreover, the TeX API has been stable for decades — I can still turn every one of these documents into a PDF (or DVI, or PS, or ...) from the original TeX source.
How many of you can still open Word files you wrote using Windows 3.1?
-JS
Vanity of vanities, all is vanity...
Word -> OpenOffice-> Docbook -> LaTeX, provided you have a decent template in Word......
The basic thing is that usually what you want from a pubishing perspective is a nice, structurally defined file. You want to eventually get this into a format like LaTeX where you can do the actual typesetting.
After writing my book in LaTeX ("The Serpent and the Eagle: An Introduction to the Elder Runic Tradition") I have decided I am extremely happy with LaTeX's layout and typesetting abilities. However these elements are done last. If you have a decent tool chain, you can import from Word, OpenOffice, DocBook, etc.
This being said, DocBook is not as structurally rich as LaTeX (no separation of tables and floats in LaTeX terminology, for example-- DocBook tables are all LaTeX tabular or similar) so something is lost.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
The answer is a concerted set of Mann & Sherman anti-trust violations and a kit-bag of dirty tricks, OOXML anyone.
Now the world is wiser, and at least in the EU there is no chance and since the GDP of the EU is now significantly bigger than that of the USA, Go F. Nellie Kroes
Bestens und kunnen de kracht met u zijn
I don't use TeX everyday, but I do use version control for code every day, and find that fancy diff programs like meld go a long way to solving both those issues. If you haven't tried it out, I highly recommend it.
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
You may still have to wash your brain after using "Microsoft Word" for a while, but there is no peril in clicking "I'm feeling lucky" after entering that into Google.
On a more serious note, unless you were in CS or some rather esoteric publishing, you probably have never actually heard of LaTeX before. I stumbled upon it more or less by accident on one of the university's VMS machines and taught it to myself with their beat-up copy of the TeXbook. I loved the output and was happy to see I could get it on Linux. Later I went out and purchased my own copy of the TeXbook. However, it's a pretty esoteric product and the whole process would not appeal to Joe Average User. Attempts to give TeX a facelift have never particularly impressed me. I think the biggest impediment to its widespread adoption would would be the lack of a good user interface to the underlying system. At this point you'd still have to wean businesses away from word files, as well...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Or if you are, you haven't read the Pragmatic Programmer yet. . . they talk it up quite a bit.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
Saving your word document as RTF will destroy most of its formatting in the first place.
In this economy, it is unconscionable to get theory students "hooked" on commercial software like Word, Mathematica, or Matlab, when there are free alternatives. I've been out of grad school for about six years now, and haven't had a full-time job for four, which means no one is going to buy me pricey software. I am still maintaining a somewhat active research program in the hopes of jumping back into academia, so thank goodness that all of my graduate work was in C, rather than in Mathematica like my undergraduate work. This doesn't make as much difference to an unemployed experimentalist, of course-- software is probably the least expensive thing they lack-- but for a mathematician or theoretical physicist it makes all the difference.
I don't really care so much about how purty LaTeX looks, and in fact I often have to wrestle with it to get it to do what I want instead of what it wants. But I like that it lets me type in equations quickly (so much so that I often do algebraic derivation scratchwork on LaTeX, rather than on paper), I like that I can define elaborate macros (I use \def; none of this \newcommand stuff for me), and I like that my documents are completely transparent, being plain text files, and I can edit them anywhere.
Answer: NONE . Office 10 doesn't run on UNIX.
I can definitely buy that something like that helps with the individual commits thing (I didn't see it *explicitly* listed as a feature, but it wouldn't be all that hard to add once you have repository browsing support (which is listed as a feature of Meld), but I fail to see at all how that helps with the first problem, since you're still looking at the Tex source.
Here in Bangor, North-west Wales, even the Computer Science department at the University fails to have Linux in a usable installation. - they seriously wanted me to use Windows.
When I was trying to do a masters there in the autumn they failed to have the software up and running halfway through the first semester that they were expecting us to use to do the course! (One of the missing things was Tex - and the help desk claimed never to have heard of it - even in their back office!)
We even had lecturers tell us to install it on the university's centrally administrated computers! In the CS dept.! Fuck wits! I had work to be doing. I did not want to bother hacking their system.
need to catch up.
Many of you are talking about complaints that haven't been valid in Word for a few years now.
The Tex comparisons are fair, at this time. This article is about how MS is going after LaTex.
If you think that can't do it, there was a time word perfect was on every desktop.
Granted, given their record they won't have it right until 2014.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
In meld you can click any of the diff blocks to promote the change block to the other version.
It doesn't keep you from looking at code, but it does a good job of letting you see the changes nicely highlighted in context.
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
I think that OpenOffice can export a document as a tex-file. The export is not perfect, but it does a decent job.
The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head
off topic, I know .. .but, people are using emacs for the most weird things :P
I'd dare ask, and what exactly file format is MS going to use for these advanced functions? Will it work on MS Word 2020 or 2030? Will the options change that you cannot use it anymore. TeX has been around for, what now, 30 years? It is also cross-platform and I can just keep all the non-formatted documents in plain-text or a script to take out the formatting is farily easy to accomplish.
I'd say for the unaware, or those that need something they think will work well (see my experience below), Word might be great. But for those that might entertain retrieving documents 10 or 15 years from now, TeX is a much better option.
I've grown accostomed to using Word at university and at work for many years. I decided to learn LaTeX two years ago for a large document I was working on. I was having so many formatting headaches with Word (perhaps I need to read an "Advanced/Expert or PowerUser book? LOL" on how to do this with Word). The problem is as much as some formatting is easy to use with Word, I always have problems with editing it afterwards so it all looks nice and pretty - professional that is.
With LaTeX it was so simple, I learned what I needed to do with the entire language within about 2 hours, I had a two column 200 page document with full bibliography. All I know is when I do my Master's degree, I'm going LaTeX no question.
and that they won't be able to share their works (except as an unmodifiable PDF) with other colleagues
I don't think so. It's true that only someone else who has Lyx (or TeX knowledge) can modify a shared file, but since Lyx is free and easy to download, I don't see how that presents a problem.
You might as well say that you can't share Word documents with people who don't have Word. Except that Word isn't free, so that is a problem.
there is no god but truth, and reality is its prophet
...why people think it's not possible to properly lay out a document in Word. If you have equations or some weird complex imagery, or you need to work from master sheets, then no, Word is not for you. But for professional-looking structured documents that don't require some sort of overly technical (use *TeX) or creative (use InDesign) bent, Word is absolutely fine -- provided you know what you're doing.
Having once learned TeX and subsequently discovering I had no practical use for it, I took the same concepts I learned from playing with TeX and applied them to the tool I knew, which was Word (and later OpenOffice). I discovered that by mentally separating content from presentation before I started and learning the finer details of Outline Mode, I could generate far more impressive-looking documents than I ever thought Word capable of. (It helped that I once had almost 2,000 mostly pro fonts to work with as well, but I digress.) TOCs, cross-references, many of the things that make a document "professional", I could do with ease and style, provided I applied and tweaked the formatting at the end instead of on the fly, which is what you're supposed to do anyway. Office 2007 made that task much easier.
TeX and InDesign have their place, but I'm seeing a lot of people bashing Word claiming it can't do some things that it most certainly can. It's not a pro layout program and it's not a typesetting program, but if you don't actually need either of those things then it does perfectly well in the right hands.
As I said in my post, people use Word using the stupid WYSIWYG mindset. And yes, what you see is what you get -- No less, no more. If you try to explain to a non-computer-savvy person how they should work with styles instead of font sizes... Most of the time they will just stare into the void. That means, OpenOffice will not have any structure with which to export to a meaningful TeX file. So you will end up with the worst of both worlds: A non-WYSIWYGy system which does the formating somewhat uh-similar to what you had intended, and with no clue on what you really wanted to achieve.
LyX's approach is IMHO great - WYSIWYM. What You See Is What You Mean. Forget about how it is rendered, I want only to see the approximate structure.
They have got their training. Learning to write in Word usually takes several mini-courses for a computer-negated professor. They get the basics in the end (and the Editorial Department will just have to suffer to get it all in a decent shape, but that's their job and they are getting paid for it)... They don't want your training on jurassic technology which needs to be compiled, thankyou.
The fact that it is possible (and yes, annotations are a great use for it) does not mean it is practical. It is not, in FSF terms, the preferred form for modification. If I take a professor's Word document, and do a beautiful typsesetting job for it in TeX, and hand him back the resulting PDF... He will end up giving me the printouts with red ink showing the corrections to make. That is going back in time several decades, and will hurt workflow. So, if he wants to write in Word, so be it, write in Word. The Editorial Department will... do their best to turn that crap into something publishable.
And yes, it sucks. But you get tired of swimming upstream.
It can. CSS supports print media as well as screen media, and speech media. It's fully possible to write a document in HTML with modern features like unicode, mathml, etc., and run it through a program to get nice printed output. Unfortunately it's not quite a click-to-convert process, and it's not one many people know about. The most well-known example of it is a tool called Prince, which produces high-quality stuff like this Wikipedia page rendered to PDF via CSS. See the Prince Samples page for more.
I think Prince is proprietary, but it's freely downloadable with packages for many distros already made, and I think if people realised what a nice solution it is, we could replace TeX etc. fairly quickly, and have a modern HTMLpublication system which works well with long documents, modern vector graphics and math and languages etc., and also works well with standard software version control tools like Git.
So *that's* what they've been doing with Leslie Lamport all these years.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
due to its ability to render funky typography. Its used because it separates the function of 'writing' from the function of 'typesetting'.
If you want to see a better explanation, see http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html
Some point out that Word is already dominant in various parts of academia, like biology. Yes... on the desktop, but not for making the final print-ready copy in a quality journal. The publishers will transfer the content of the Word file to another system (e.g. InDesign, QuarkXPress, something in-house, or who knows, maybe even TeX) to produce the print copy. The point is that Word may be dominant on the desktop, but it isn't in the publishing house... and nor do I believe it ever will be because it's just not what it's made to do.
Documents created with programs like Word, while adequate in some situations, simply never look professional. Making a beautiful page is more complex than what word processors do. It concerns issues beyond merely identifying ligatures, like identifying aesthetically "optimal" positioning of characters, words and lines (kerning, line-breaking, etc.). Now apart from its utility in formatting equations, which is surely the reason for its ubiquity in mathematically oriented fields, what is ultimately special about TeX lies in such things as its line- and page-breaking algorithms (Have you ever noticed how changing one character can change a line-break ten lines earlier as TeX takes a holistic view of the page's aesthetics?).
Basically, comparing the publishing process to earlier times, word processors are the typewriters and typesetting systems like TeX are, well, the typesetters who skillfully place the type for the printing press. Making a newer, better typewriter is a great thing for the authors who use them, but it won't displace the typesetters. With a better typewriter, people might be more inclined to simply circulate their (comparatively ugly) typewriter copy, but serious publication will still demand typesetting.
As a final remark, several people have commented that TeX separates content from presentation. That is really quite far from the truth; if anything, I'd say this is really more true of word processors like Word (if used well)! Rather, that is where LaTeX comes in, defining lots of macros to essentially support this content / presentation separation.
Word is a word processor; TeX is a typesetting system.
Yes, it is from 1997, but still true.
'Knuth acknowledged he was paid a "seven-figure sum" from Microsoft, which he will use to finance his work on a project he has code-named "Volume 4".'
http://www.panix.com/~clp/humor/computers/microsoft/TeX.html
As soon as Word deals with figures correctly, and lets me easily float their position around text to wherever they look good.
As soon as Word deals with cross-references correctly, both citations and figures.
As soon as Word does bibliographies/works cited well, and doesn't require some third-party extra-cost bibliography management software to do things well.
As soon as Word stops leaking information, like putting my Windows domain and login information embedded into my documents.
As soon as Word stops being Word I guess, and starts being TeX. I don't even know TeX all that well, but I do know that it's easier for me to make a pretty-looking academic document using an 'obscure language' (I still edit my TeX using a text editor and a Makefile) than it is using what is supposed to be a WYSIWYG editor.
I think it says something about Word's usefulness as an academic tool when many computer scientists won't use it because it's difficult to understand and somewhat magical-seeming in its decision-making.
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
Not quite.
You have a fundamental issue here which is that most of the print media css stuff I have come across are:
1) Inflexible (hard to tweak layout on the occasion where it needs to be tweaked, no separation between table and figure floats, etc-- both are fundamental issues with SGML)
2) Layout depends on your conversion engine, and I haven't seen any extremely good engines of this sort that use css directly.
HTML/CML + CSS gives you a subset of what LaTeX can give you.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I'm getting sick and tired of this marketing drivel called "leaking". It's plain and simple research - by dripping some data to the outside they get feedback if it's worth trying to dethrone another standard. It's a method for a company tring to manage its public face when they get a backlash against the idea, but to me such information doesn't "escape" or is not released "by accident".
"Leaking" is to me unauthorized and certain not of benefit to the organisation or individual "losing" the data, like Liechtenstein bank details of UK MP expense details. Not a bloody PR exercise of a company trying to massage public opinion. /rant
Insert
Output is all that matters?
So it'd have been fine if someone handed in a binder full of ratty, coffee-stained 3-ring-binder paper, written on with a mixture of pens and pencils, as their final thesis - as long as it was scientifically sound?
Oh, that's right! Presentation matters - and has always mattered. First, it was penmanship. Then, your papers had to be typed (ever see a scientific paper that was typed on a typewriter, with the fine parts of the equation added in afterwards - carefully! - with a pen? That's dedication). And once computers came about as commonplace, they had to be properly printed.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Saving your word document as RTF will destroy most of its formatting in the first place.
This is usually an improvement.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
I know, because I have to convert my awesome-looking pdfLaTeX files into word processor documents when I submit them to journals or for conferences.
there is a simple way to reach .doc and still look good: convert the LaTeX document into images, put the images into word.
Problem solved.
what are the chances of Word replacing LaTeX as the editor of choice in academia?
$$ 1 + e^{\pi i} $$
http://outcampaign.org/
For the really lazy, there's always LyX.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
On 1: What do you mean by separation between table/figure floats? In CSS, can't you just assign two different classes that are both floated, but have other different properties? There's some fundamentally different kind of float that you need?
On 2: Not that I'm discounting the possibility, but Prince's layout engine isn't good enough for you? What's wrong with it?
If you want a REALLY REALLY GOOD wordprocessor for Macs give Mellel a shot. OpenType support has been included forever, plus tons of other high end features.
And it costs pretty much nothing $49)
I quickly made my presence as a LaTeX user known when I started grad school. My lab-mate and a postdoc in the lab also use LaTeX, but our advisor has been a Word user for decades. After the subject came up once, the Postdoc (who has a Ph.D. in math) says to me "Just so you know, the new equation editor in Word can use the LaTeX formula markup," as if that was supposed to make up for the fact that after using Word for 15 years, I still didn't know why it never behaved the way it said it did, nor why the documentation was stupid and useless, or that the output looked like crap.
It's not that I can quickly make pretty formulas in LaTeX, it's that since LaTeX is (mostly) not a commercial product, and its used almost entirely by intellectuals, the help files are actually useful, and I can actually find out how to do something in LaTeX. On top of that, I can edit the files in plain text using any editor.
I think the biggest problem is that a lot of people don't understand what plain text is. People think if it looks like letters on the screen, it's text. Then they wonder why they can't open the same file on a Mac as they could on a machine with Windows. I switched from using Stata's do-file editor to Emacs, and my supervisor was shocked: he thought you had to use the IDE-esque do-file editor.
And the best part is that the output actually looks like something I would want to read. I was never satisfied with the output from Word: it both looks like what is on the screen, and departs from it in radical ways. I could never tell where the pagebreaks would actually be when I used word processors. After using LaTeX it hit me that what goes on the screen and what comes out of the printer really ought to be two different things, instead of being in denial and thinking they should be the same on screen as on paper. I would spend hours formatting Word documents, and the help files had no explanation for why it everything would change in other sections when I changed the formatting of one section. Formatting is not my problem! The typesetting program should take care of that.
And as to these changes, Word will always look like crap as long as it's the fare of the masses.
On 1: What do you mean by separation between table/figure floats? In CSS, can't you just assign two different classes that are both floated, but have other different properties? There's some fundamentally different kind of float that you need?
Ok. In print a "table" is one kind of float. A "figure" is another. A table of figures generally only includes the former. I suppose you could create classes of divs in this sort of way, but then generating tables of figures would be problematic, for example. I didnt see anything in Prince's engine which handled this gracefully.
On 2: Not that I'm discounting the possibility, but Prince's layout engine isn't good enough for you? What's wrong with it?
It didn't look like 2-page layouts properly handled gutter margins from their samples. Proper margin management on double-sided bound documents is a key feature of LaTeX.
On a third level, crossreference, index, etc. management didn't look graceful using PrinceXML. Also, none of their examples had footnotes, so I couldn't judge those. Being able to put a footnote which says "See also page x below" where x is the actual page where information is found on is quite helpful, and having the pagenumber autogenerate (and even hyperlink in the PDF) to its target is something I use all the time.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
A few notes:
1. You can get ligatures, etc. built-in on any Cocoa app. Apple's had that stuff for at least a major OS release or two now.
2. Emacs+LaTeX beats, in terms of power, managability, and expressibility, word any day of the week. Emacs is a much better text editor than word. LaTeX is much better at styles. It's also much better at figure handling.
3. It's nice to have the ability to treat your document the same way you do normal source code, with comments and version control.
4. WYSIWYG interfaces tend to encourage distracting oneself with formatting while they're still writing. I like keeping this stuff separate. When I care about formatting, I just setup the parameters & style data once for the entire document. The rest of the time, I'm free to think about the actual content.
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
I could really use an actual example of the problem, but I suspect that what you want would be doable with the cascading aspect of CSS. Floating tables might be assigned the classes "floating" and "tabular", whereas floating figures could be assigned "floating" and "figure" if you need common features, but also separate features. For tables of figures, there is also a "display: table" option in CSS3, which essentially lets you use tables as layout tools, rather than as informational tools. In other words, it does properly what web designers did for years by breaking the rules.
On crossreference etc... Hmm. Yes, that's probably the biggest issue I can imagine. XPath and XQuery are probably the right solution there --- as an underyling tool for a simple command/gui to use of course --- but I don't know much of the details of those.
I must confess though... I haven't actually tried prince; I've been on a quest to find a modern alternative to LaTeX that supports Unicode, multiple languages, generates nice (accessible) print and HTML, works with DVCS tools, math, etc., and ideally also allows single sourcing. So far I haven't found a decent solution, but Prince looked like one of the more interesting options. My biggest problem with it is that it uses an XML syntax when I think a less verbose bracketed syntax is much better. Wrapping every single paragraph in tags is also pretty annoying.
Ummm.... :-) That is one of the big mismatches.
In printing, tables aren't necessarily tabular
XHMTL table -> Latex tabular and friends
XHMTL floating div -> LaTeX table, figure, etc.
They are not at all the same things. XML and HTML folks tend to use "table" to mean "tabular data" while it has a very specific layout meaning in the world of print which has NOTHING to do with tabular data.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
The quality of your M$ shilling ...
.ttf/.pfa mechanisms makes font management a problem for beginners. This is the BAD side of 80% good enough.
"And it cost nothing but time to learn" You don't value your own time.
Simply tells me that you are an idiot and a stupid cunt to boot!
All tools take learning, eg PCB & VLSI CAD tools can take months, even simple
tools like compilers & debuggers take days or weeks to really get to grips with.
The ONLY problem with TeX is that Knuth's TeXbook is ideosyncratic and often opaque
but there are lots of good TeX and LaTeX tutorial/intro books.
TeX (and MetaFont, which is now very marginal) has a difficult to master, and professionally
oriented font management system which combined with
For most Linux users the CTAN and distributions hide this and it just works, __beautifully__.
This thread demonstrates so much stupidity
.tfm file).
1 People dont realise that TeX sets with any of Metafont, Adobe & Truetype (you just need a
2 people claim that manual-set is better, nonsense, anyway find a Linotype machine
People talk about Word as if anyone would use it to set Books or more complex documents
such as Plane manuals.
The first thing Word does not do cleanly is separate format and content, which is fatal for large or complex documents. Then as another poster said you can spot Word output from the Moon since it is so ugly.
If the folks in M$ wanted to make a change they wouldnt be adding more menus and advanced features they would, instead, fix the bugs in their existing code.
Go slit your fucking wrists fucktard.
-geekoid