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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?"
Something usually free is already widely used.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
If Word 2010 does this extremely well, perhaps they deserve to become the editor of choice.
How well does OpenOffice.org do this?
In biology, Word is already the document editor of choice. And Excel is the charting software of choice. It's really quite a pain.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Call me old fashioned, but I find WYSIWYG editors to be more work then useful when dealing with large documents that need to be formatted in a standardized way. Particularly if one needs to manipulate the text in a large scale fashion.
The guys who need this stuff are already geeky, and why would geeky guys use something "for pay" that comes out of a budget? And since this will be in a proprietary format, why would they risk these documents becoming unreadable?
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.
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.
I use LaTeX not only for its nice typographic properties, but because of how flexible it is. It's trivial to generate LaTeX code for automatically generating documentation, for instance. LaTeX may still be ahead in a couple areas (e.g., citations. Does Word beat out BibTeX yet?), but I'm not sure. As long as Word is GUI-based, I can't see it ever being anywhere near as flexible as LaTeX is.
This is still very cool though. I hate seeing flyers and menus and then that scream from 20 feet away "I WAS MADE IN WORD! MY TYPOGRAPHY WILL BURN YOUR EYES!" Anything that improves the quality of print around me is a good thing, I say.
So it can do something LaTex so what? It can also do HTML but I don't see Adobe or any other web writing tool throwing in the towel.
The big question is can it write it effectively. Word already has the tendency of turning a basic document into a code of spaghetti when saved as HTML. Somehow I don't see this being any different
'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?"'
About zero, but when will MS come after TeX for patent royalties on Microsoft OpenType ?
davecb5620@gmail.com
There is not a question about Word taking over from LaTeX in academia since Word already dominates academia.
In most disciplines in academia (all of the humanities and social sciences for example) no one has heard of TeX or LaTeX, and people mostly don't have the technical skills to use either program easily. And they are _already_ all using Word.
By contrast, in mathematics and other disciplines where LaTeX is a good solution, it is very hard to imagine something as clunky, bug prone, bloated and hard to use as Word taking over from something robust and easy to use (if you think the way mathematicians think) like LaTeX.
In earth science one gets the whole culture clash between the hard-core physics/computer types who like LaTeX and the biologist/ecologist types who like Word. I get a little depressed by the extent to which Word seems to be replacing LaTeX, especially given how much less nice the final result looks. If MS can really improve the typesetting then the "Not a chance" posts above are likely to prove wrong once Word 2010 becomes prevalent.
And does it run on *nix?
No? Then it's still useless to me.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Ho hum. Microsoft finally implemented a feature 5 years behind everyone else.
Most applications in Mac OS X get full OpenType support through the operating system. This includes Pages, Apple's very capable in-house word processor.
I'm not saying you should migrate from TeX (I use XeTeX for a lot of more complex typesetting operations), but you by no means need to look to Microsoft Word to get OpenType support. I switch between Pages for ease of use and TeX for freedom and typographic perfection.
TeX won't be replaced by Word because TeX's whole purpose is to provide a way to separate content and layout. Publishers care about this because the same content can be reshaped to fit their typesetting needs. Word is by its very nature a WYSIWYG. Why would publishers leave established infrastructure and a seamless way of assuring documents meet their typesetting needs to trust layout to amateurs and receive files which must be manually edited in order to modify layout?
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.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Office will take over from TeX when (at the least)
* It works on Linux (which lots of academics use.
* It works well with version control, making it easy to merge edits made by different people
* It is easy to generate tables from scripts and glue them into the document
* It is easy to take a pre-written document and put it in a new style.
Now, it's possible Office already does a few of those, and it's also very possible TeX does an awful lot more than that.
The cost isn't really that much of an issue for academics, as every university tends to have a site-licence for Office and other apps. Despite this, I still never use it.
Combination - fun iPhone puzzling
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)?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
A lot of these open source projects grew out of a direct need. There was a vacuum to be filled. The need shaped what the product wound up being. Trying to pound the square peg of MS Word into the round hole LaTeX fills is most likely impossible.
Support or not, they're just too different.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
A lot of people use Windows in academia, of course. The Unix die-hards will stick to their guns, but most will think it's great that Office 2010 can handle Math (BTW, the article never mentioned TeX).
Probably, this will introduce yet another rift in the culture, with some people demanding a document be made with Word. It'll be incompatible with everything else, as usual, creating yet another headache for those that avoid Microsoft (I do - I don't think they make good products - I prefer Mac, Linux and BSD).
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts
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.
Mad Software: Rantings on Developing So
"If Word 2010 does this extremely well, perhaps they deserve to become the editor of choice. How well does OpenOffice.org do this?"
I wouldn't use either for book size projects, that's what TeX is for.
davecb5620@gmail.com
- 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)
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Some of the folks using TeX are also owners of Mathematica, IDL and other software that costs thousands of dollars per license -- because it increases their productivity.
It's not an issue of cost, it's an issue of the benefit for the cost -- and I don't think there will be the benefit unless MS Word decouples the content from the presentation. (which allows the TeX users to write their paper once, and then have it formatted correctly for whatever journal it'll be published in) As for becoming unreadable -- so long as you can export it to PDF, Post Script, or whatever, you're fine for archiving.
And would MS Word replace InDesign? I don't think so, but if they've got this support in MS Word, I can only assume they'll bring it over to MS Publisher, and they might be able to pick up some users.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Or, in more Slashdot terms:
is a lot easier to use
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
In which case TeX is again the preferred tool to use, since the publisher can simply provide a class file with some basic instruction on how to use it, and the authors/editors can come up with a well formatted camera ready document simply by following the (usually one page of) instructions.
AccountKiller
I think it means exactly what he think it means. I think that what you mean is it is much harder to learn.
AccountKiller
More importantly, what use do ligatures have in modern times? If you're writing by hand, fine, it might be quicker to write several characters in one stroke.
Why do computers even have support for ligatures at all? What's the point? I'm not trolling, I just don't understand the necessity. What do ligatures add, why would you choose to use the "fi" ligature instead of the characters "f" and "i"?
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Well no, you use Styles. Section titles get the section title style, body text gets the body text style, and so on. Change the style definition and magically all the relevant text changes too.
Now when I say "Styles", that's what they're called in OpenOffice. I think Word has an equivalent, but they might call it something else. Any way up, you don't have to manually style your section headers as 24pt bold comic sans everytime in Word or OpenOffice.
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
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
People have little care or concern over what results are deemed "professional".
There are entire books and manuals that aren't made with the "proper" tools, because most people can't comprehend why Word or Publisher don't meet the criteria for "professional" results. With Publisher, it usually takes the harsh step of producing their document, from the raw material delivered by the customer.
"It looks fine on my Inkjet at home! Why does it look like so much dogshit on the floor?"
With Word, it's usually "good enough" for most people, even though the outcome isn't what you or they would really like. Give a Tech Writer a copy of Word, and they may "make-do", but I doubt you'll find many who prefer it to FrameMaker, InDesign, or even Pagemaker. That same Tech Writer will churn out a document with Word, and because it's "good enough", it will fly around the Globe, and even make it out as trade conference detritus or long-lived corporate gospel.
TeX, on the other hand, is not something most people care about learning. You *must* learn it to be able to use it confidently. There's no "good enough" with TeX - it either works, or it doesn't.
TeX is a Science. Word is a Comedy. People like comedy.
Funny, I constantly find myself wishing Office 2k7 had some form of command-line with tab-completion and -suggestion so I could find the commands they hid in random ribbon pages as either a large, small, or worded entry, in a popup screen somewhere, or just outright hid (ugh.)
Phew - the shit I have seen crammed into a spreadsheet.. With pride.
Any higher function than SUM should require certification.
"You got a license for that Pivot Table, Son?"
Features on top of features, with no real signposts to guide their implementation. Gag.
...I work at the Economics Research Institute at UNAM, Mexico's (and Latin America's) largest university. Researchers here are social scientists â" Their texts do include the ocassional formula, yes, but they mainly deal with straight text. Even so, I am painfully aware on how inconvenient a word-processor-minded program can be for them (i.e. try to get them to distinguish between cosmetic and semantic tagging â" No way). They literally use the computer as a fancy typewriter.
I have shown LyX to a couple of people, and are initially interested, even more looking at the quality of the results... But after I mention it cannot import (with formatting) Word documents, and that they won't be able to share their works (except as an unmodifiable PDF) with other colleagues, they go back to what they already know.
So, no, TeX is not necessarily widely used in all of academia. Just in the portion we, the computer-minded geeks, like looking at.
ligatures, number forms etc are not enough to take on TeX. Wake me up when it is possible to customize output routines for Word, when it's lexer is extensible and pluggable and when, most importantly, it has GLUE :)
(and please do not even touch formula entry and display in MS Word, may patience is really fragile on that topic)
I have had to convert multi-dozen page Publisher and Word documents into 'real' formats.
This pain comes at a price. See the 'Setup Fees' line item on your invoice. :)
"I know you could buy your own copy of $ProTool for that price, and for the sake of our business relationship, it's what we encourage you to do."
RIPs don't like Microsoft, no matter what kind of goofy pseudo-filter you pipe them through.
Manual (camera) seps are an alternative, and harder to find by the year.
In chemistry and many branches of engineering, Word already is more popular than LaTeX.
In mathematics, and most branches of physics, LaTeX is much more popular than Word, and with very good reason. I have no idea of what the proposed changes are for Word 2010, but I somehow doubt that the current painful way of using the equation editor is likely to be very attractive to these practitioners. LaTeX's superior fontwork also is a major advantage that Word currently cannot match.
The third issue is platform independence. Though versions of Word exist for Mac, Pages has come along very rapidly in the last 2-3 years, and will likely fragment the Mac market. Mac and Linux are both gaining market share (usually at the expense of Windows, and especially in academic settings), so unless Word addresses problems with the WYSIWYG method of entering equations (maybe steal some ideas from TeXMacs), and makes a concerted push on these two platforms (its non-existent on Linux), I do not see how it can make a dent in the traditional strongholds of LaTeX.
Most journals do not accept MS 2007 submissions (even the Word friendly publishing houses), let alone MS 2010.
As I'm typing this reply, I'm taking a break from typesetting the math paper with LaTeX. So, a couple of things come to mind, immediately. First, LaTeX is 'what you mean is what you get', not 'what you see is what you get'. In LaTeX I actually *say* what I want, rather than using the GUI. Does it matter? Yes. If I need to choose some spacing (rather than letting it to default), I can make my choice precisely, and say it so (e.g., 1pt, meaning 1 point). And in general, the strongest feature of (La)TeX: you have a complete control on the layout. You can setup the formulas any way you want. Period. Next, consider the following example. You need to use greek letters. In GUI (such as MS products), you have to pull down menu, find the option greek letters, select the one you need. In LaTeX I simply type \alpha, or \beta, or whatever. And the choices of fonts I got! Mmmm So once I've tried LaTeX I simply coudln't get back to GUI-based tools. Well, I can go on and on. And the last by not least: many free integrated editors/compilers for LaTeX. My favorite is Emacs/Auctex.
Now I'm talking about mathematicians, not 'academia' in general. If you are into some staff like philosophy or history, you'll be just fine with MS.
rtf2latex2e, save DOC file as RTF then pump it through that, you should end up only needing to do about 10-20% formatting work.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I have several really good "patentapplication.sty" and "litigationpleading.sty" files.
The bad news is that I used them to patent "A method for generating really good .sty files".
The good news is that no sane court would ever find the patents valid.
The bad news is that I am posting from East Texas.
The good news is that you'll be receiving some very nicely formatted letters in the mail.
The bad news... I could keep this up all day.
The good news is I won't.
In my experience, in Word you layout your document exactly how you want it to be viewed, make some minor change, again layout your document, make another change which again screws up your layout, and repeat throughout the editing process. What a waste of time.
I hate Word, and use it rarely. Those that like it can have it.
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
I had always wondered when law firms finally made the switch from WP to Word. IIRC, the only reason WP hung on for so long there was the installed base of templates. That points to why a law office can make Word work. Most of their output is boilerplate, cast within simple, strict formats, and no points for beauty. The law never started with TeX, InDesign, etc, so it's no surprise they went with Word.
Not that some of academia or small publishers won't try the new Word features, but I wager they won't like it. The core argument against using a Wysiwyg tool for research papers - that the authors get distracted by spending too much time dicking with the format - still stands. And, last I tried, Word still doesn't play nice with large, heavily formatted documents.
Luke, help me take this mask off
I don't use TeX everyday, but I do use version control for code every day, and find that fancy diff programs like meld go a long way to solving both those issues. If you haven't tried it out, I highly recommend it.
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
In this economy, it is unconscionable to get theory students "hooked" on commercial software like Word, Mathematica, or Matlab, when there are free alternatives. I've been out of grad school for about six years now, and haven't had a full-time job for four, which means no one is going to buy me pricey software. I am still maintaining a somewhat active research program in the hopes of jumping back into academia, so thank goodness that all of my graduate work was in C, rather than in Mathematica like my undergraduate work. This doesn't make as much difference to an unemployed experimentalist, of course-- software is probably the least expensive thing they lack-- but for a mathematician or theoretical physicist it makes all the difference.
I don't really care so much about how purty LaTeX looks, and in fact I often have to wrestle with it to get it to do what I want instead of what it wants. But I like that it lets me type in equations quickly (so much so that I often do algebraic derivation scratchwork on LaTeX, rather than on paper), I like that I can define elaborate macros (I use \def; none of this \newcommand stuff for me), and I like that my documents are completely transparent, being plain text files, and I can edit them anywhere.
need to catch up.
Many of you are talking about complaints that haven't been valid in Word for a few years now.
The Tex comparisons are fair, at this time. This article is about how MS is going after LaTex.
If you think that can't do it, there was a time word perfect was on every desktop.
Granted, given their record they won't have it right until 2014.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
...why people think it's not possible to properly lay out a document in Word. If you have equations or some weird complex imagery, or you need to work from master sheets, then no, Word is not for you. But for professional-looking structured documents that don't require some sort of overly technical (use *TeX) or creative (use InDesign) bent, Word is absolutely fine -- provided you know what you're doing.
Having once learned TeX and subsequently discovering I had no practical use for it, I took the same concepts I learned from playing with TeX and applied them to the tool I knew, which was Word (and later OpenOffice). I discovered that by mentally separating content from presentation before I started and learning the finer details of Outline Mode, I could generate far more impressive-looking documents than I ever thought Word capable of. (It helped that I once had almost 2,000 mostly pro fonts to work with as well, but I digress.) TOCs, cross-references, many of the things that make a document "professional", I could do with ease and style, provided I applied and tweaked the formatting at the end instead of on the fly, which is what you're supposed to do anyway. Office 2007 made that task much easier.
TeX and InDesign have their place, but I'm seeing a lot of people bashing Word claiming it can't do some things that it most certainly can. It's not a pro layout program and it's not a typesetting program, but if you don't actually need either of those things then it does perfectly well in the right hands.
They have got their training. Learning to write in Word usually takes several mini-courses for a computer-negated professor. They get the basics in the end (and the Editorial Department will just have to suffer to get it all in a decent shape, but that's their job and they are getting paid for it)... They don't want your training on jurassic technology which needs to be compiled, thankyou.
The fact that it is possible (and yes, annotations are a great use for it) does not mean it is practical. It is not, in FSF terms, the preferred form for modification. If I take a professor's Word document, and do a beautiful typsesetting job for it in TeX, and hand him back the resulting PDF... He will end up giving me the printouts with red ink showing the corrections to make. That is going back in time several decades, and will hurt workflow. So, if he wants to write in Word, so be it, write in Word. The Editorial Department will... do their best to turn that crap into something publishable.
And yes, it sucks. But you get tired of swimming upstream.
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
Output is all that matters?
So it'd have been fine if someone handed in a binder full of ratty, coffee-stained 3-ring-binder paper, written on with a mixture of pens and pencils, as their final thesis - as long as it was scientifically sound?
Oh, that's right! Presentation matters - and has always mattered. First, it was penmanship. Then, your papers had to be typed (ever see a scientific paper that was typed on a typewriter, with the fine parts of the equation added in afterwards - carefully! - with a pen? That's dedication). And once computers came about as commonplace, they had to be properly printed.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers