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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.
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").
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
(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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This is kind of funny, because I often explain Word to techies as being much more like HTML/CSS than it appears at first. Every paragraph is like a >p< tag. A style is like a CSS style. It actually makes a lot more sense when you think about it this way.
It also doesn't hurt that Office 2007 makes dealing with styles a lot easier than it used to be, and offers a lot of different automatic themes that look pretty good. So long as you use the standard styles (Heading 1, 2, 3, etc.), you can immediately re-theme a document without much effort. It's really pretty cool.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
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]
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