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)?

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: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.