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?"

Comments

Biology

[Hatta]

In biology, Word is already the document editor of choice. And Excel is the charting software of choice. It's really quite a pain.

I'd say....

[myNameIsNotImportant]

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.

Re:Never...

[TheRaven64]

To clarify: Is it now using Knuth's nice optimal line breaking algorithm with nice hyphenation (sorry, I can't remember who came up with that algorithm) or is it still using a greedy strategy? And, more importantly, does it nicely support semantic markup and allow the user to extend the semantic definitions? Does it nicely typeset source code and algorithm descriptions? Does it support the standard AMS syntax for equations (even OpenOffice has done that for years)?

Problems with Word

[WillAdams]

- 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)

Re:I'll bid this

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

I'm not sure how it is in other industries, but many IEEE conferences and journals accept LaTeX, pdf, or a doc file (they provide a template).

As a result, nobody in my school department ever tried to figure out how to use LaTeX (well, I did, but that's because I'm already a geek who has no problem with the learning curve and would rather just have a better tool). I'm not saying this is the norm even in other EE departments, and I know LaTeX is by far the default in academia. However, I'm pointing out that the switch has begun before microsoft even bothered offering those features.

Re:Low

[Abreu]

Part of the reason is that Latex is not just about formulas. It's also about styles, lists, bibliography, cross referencing within your doc, etc, which WYSIWYG has not been able to get right so far, and for the needs of power-users, I suspect it never will. I use both, and I still struggle to get Word lists to do what I want

Yes, but remember that Microsoft has gained dominance in many areas just by providing "good enough" software with the MS name.

Lots of people considered Lotus 123 superior to MS Excel. Lots of people considered WordPerfect superior to MS Word... What happened to those markets?

Now that I've spent time on the Tex learning curve, and I can typically get it to do what I want, why would I want to get on another learning curve?

Now, think of the guy who just gets into college in 2011 and has the option of learning LaTeX or continue using MS Word, which he has already used for years to do High School papers and other stuff...
Will he want to get on another (much steeper!) learning curve, or will he just figure out the "advanced typesetting" menus of Word 2010?

Re:Ligatures?

[WillAdams]

Ligatures are mostly decorative these days --- the original reason for them was to handle kerns which intruded into other characters, hence the existence of fi and fl --- also Gutenberg used optional / alternate ligatures to facilitate evening out the spacing of his lines, but that fell by the wayside, and has yet to be reasonably automated (though that was one of the intents of the HZ algorithm which URW developed and Aldus licensed to use in what became Adobe InDesign).

I make extensive use of Zapfino's ligatures in a small ``Peace on Earth'' card which the TeX User's Group mailed out one year:

http://www.tug.org/texshowcase/peace_on_earth.pdf

More discussion of them in:

http://www.tug.org/texshowcase/onetype.pdf

which is a companion piece to the broadside:

http://mysite.verizon.net/william_franklin_adams/portfolio/typography/typefaceterminology.pdf

William

Re:Wrong question

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

There is not a question about Word taking over from LaTeX in academia since Word already dominates academia.

Dominates is perhaps too strong a term. I've helped several friends to get Masters/PhD theses written up using LaTeX, after they gave up on Word out of frustration. The screwed-up cross-references and so on have bitten more than one of my other friends firmly in the backside. My usual example, unfortunate as it was, was that one friend submitted her thesis written using Word, only to discover that every single cross-reference was off by a page, and nearly had it sent back as a result.

Those friends were all studying humanities, languages and other arts subjects rather than maths or CompSci, BTW, and none of them had any difficulty using LaTeX once they'd been shown the basics for half an hour.