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

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: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.