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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?"
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.
Except for the fact that MS Word is more widely used than TeX...hell, most people who use TeX probably have word as well (Show me a university that doesn't provide a new copy to every single faculty)
Bottles.
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.
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Is LaTeX 3 out yet? Lack of support for hyperlinks is annoying.
What do you mean by 'support'? The hyperref package has been available for years and gives \url and \href commands for clickable URLs and links, and automatically turns all \ref commands into clickable internal links. It also turns the table of contents into PDF metadata so you get a nice ToC in the side bar on any PDF viewer that supports bookmarks.
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Out of sheer ignorance Excel is used for statistics. The statistics community has published about the many errors in that spreadsheet but people outside math culture just assume if it's from Microsoft, hey, it must be ok (I'm actually quite baffled by that attitude - don't they know they have to use anti-virus software? Don't they know their Windows is buggy? )
Numerics never was Microsoft's expertise and you better look elsewhere. If I were an advisor or examining your theses, I'd run your data through professional software (yes, I'm saying Excel isn't "professional statistics software").
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(I've posted this before, but still)
Yes, it is a pain.
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.
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Except for the fact that MS Word is more widely used than TeX
Not for professional, publication quality work.
most people who use TeX probably have word as well (Show me a university that doesn't provide a new copy to every single faculty)
I am not aware of MS word for Linux, which is the OS of choice, at least in science departments. Plus, unless they also improved the equation editor since whatever version shipped with Vista, that thing is not worth its weight in toilet paper (good luck drawing a commutative diagram with it, for example). At the rate MS is improving it has at least 25 years to go before it catches up with TeX.
"You can't allow somebody to commit the crime before you detain them." [Condoleezza Rice]
Word does have version control.
It is possible to change styles if you set it up properly when you are typing the document. Most people don't. It isn't the easiest thing to do, though apparently it is better in 2007 than 2003 which I use.
Would it be that hard for a WYSIWYG editor to implement a usable plain-text based editor to act as a fail-safe for users who actually know what's going on?
Kids these days... What you are describing is WordPerfect's Reveal Codes functionality. My 10th grade word processing class used WP, on Winderz 3.0. Even before that, I vaguely recall some C=64 editing software that had something like this functionality.
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Is LaTeX 3 out yet? Lack of support for hyperlinks is annoying.
Waiting for LaTeX 3 is certainly optimistic. I think they are still working out the syntax of the language...
But hyperlinks are working, and working well, for quite a while now.
Word already has the tendency of turning a basic document into a code of spaghetti when saved as HTML.
Word actually does a pretty decent job at HTML, but not by default. The format to save a document in is "HTML (filtered)", not regular HTML. When Word uses non-filtered HTML it introduces a requirement that the file should look the same if you re-open it in Word, so it includes a metric ton of meta-data and Office-only crap in the markup so that if you open the HTML document again in Word, it looks exactly the same as when you saved it. If you choose to filter all that crap out, it might not look as pretty when re-opened in Word, but the HTML markup is a lot easier to deal with.
Anyway, just a tip if you ever find yourself needing to export something from Word as HTML and don't want to spend the next hour cleaning it up.
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Don't respond to the trolls dude.
But to back your claim, here in the physics department of the KUL in Belgium, Linux is more widespread than Windows, and more and more students are trying it out.
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Except for the fact that MS Word is more widely used than TeX
Not for professional, publication quality work.
Actually, yes.
Aside for scientific papers, TeX is nonexistent in typesetting shops and publication houses. They almost all use proprietary typesetting programs (for InDesign to specialty software).
On the other hand, Word is used by most authors (the vast majority) to turn the final draft in.
And in some small publication houses and most vanity press type publications, Word is even used to provide the final typesetting outcome (gross, I know).
(Lulu.com for example takes in Word files to produce your books).
you said:
>There aren't entire books that are PUBLISHED using Word and other, non-professional typesetting tools
Sadly, that's not the case.
The `` for Dummies'' imprint for example is done entirely in Word using a publisher-provided stylesheet --- there are others, but I can't recall the title of the one which my previous employer did for a client.
There's even a New York phone directory (a smallish one, marketed to a specific ethnic group) which my employer prints which is formatted using Word --- I know 'cause they haven't worked out a way to do the bleed tabs, so I wrote a LaTeX file which assembles their pages and stamps them w/ the bleed tab (and if need be has options to adjust the page placement 'cause it's often inconsistent from one section to the next).
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As a scientest, I can assure you that science departments use mostly linux.
What type of science department are you talking about? What is your sample size? I'm also a scientist, and I can assure you that this is not the case, especially once you get out of the computer sciences and/or physics departments. Go into one of the life or other physical science departments (biology, chemistry, environmental sciences, geology), and you will likely find Windows as far as the eye can see, with the occasional Mac thrown in for good measure. I'm in my third biology department, and I'm the only person that I've known that uses Linux.
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
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