Why LaTeX is Superior to Office

http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2007/07/16/why-latex-is-superior-to-office/

by adulau • 15 years ago

20 21 15 years ago

chwahoo• 15 years ago

I don't see why the pedigree of the creators of Tex/Latex/Word was relevant to this article. Perhaps mentioning the clout of Knuth and Lamport was excusable, but I don't think it was reasonable to pick on the creators of Word for being less distinguished.

huhtenberg• 15 years ago

Contrary to what the article says Word (2003) does both kerning and hyphenation. I didn't bother to read the rest of the article.

pak• 15 years ago

I agree, there is a lot here that is not well researched, right down to not correctly capitalizing LaTeX and TeX. However, to your point, it's an unfortunate thing that neither kerning nor hyphenation are on by default in the versions of Office that can do it: Word alone has tons of poor defaults (and most people don't know how to change them, even I shudder at the thought of messing with Normal.dot). It's the usual reluctance of MS to break with the past.

Also, while we're at it, why is paragraph spacing NOT prominently accessible from a toolbar or the ribbon? In Mac Office 2011, I can only find it in the Format Paragraph dialog box, straight from 1995, as there is no more formatting palette. It's like they are begging everybody to continue hitting Enter twice between paragraphs (you know who you are, stop it already!).

windsurfer• 15 years ago

Aparently, kerning is off by default and only applies to the 8-bit codepages. Word doesn't use OpenType GPOS kerning at all, either.

You can get kerning working in Word 2003.

aaront• 15 years ago

One of my favourite reasons why it's superior to Office is that LaTeX documents are VCS friendly.

Definitely helps when working on SRSs and SDDs in my final project course (being that it's a group of 7 makes it even more valuable).

gamble• 15 years ago

> You write a really long document using one citation and formating style, and then you find out the journal requires a completely different style. ... If you are changing to a known style such as IEEE for example you can simply download appropriate templates, toss them to your project directory and add one or two lines to your document.

It's another question entirely if you have to create your own style.

This is one point where Word wins, but it's a big one. The learning curve for LaTeX is already pretty steep, but it goes vertical once you start to mess with layout. It works in academia and publishing because there are a relatively limited number of templates everyone conforms to that are written by LaTeX gurus.

alextp• 15 years ago

Actually I've created custom styles by modifying existing ones, and it isn't nearly as hard as it seems. Indeed, most academic styles are not more than a few hundred lines of code.

nathanb• 15 years ago

Unfortunately, X > Y shows up too commonly online, which really serves as a call to declare partisan allegiance rather than an invitation for discourse.

LaTeX is superior to Office how? To my eyes, LaTeX produces more attractive typesetting than Microsoft Word does, and it behaves better in most version control software (though you have to remember to manually wrap your lines if you use an editor that does soft wrapping and you don't want a one-word change to mark the entire paragraph-in-a-line as modified). However, Word is certainly easier to use, and tasks such as inserting an image inline can be done through a few clicks rather than Googling to determine the best package for floating images, creating some code, and continually recompiling into dvi to see if the result is acceptable (and then copying and pasting the ur-example into new documents for the rest of time).

(Perhaps an actual competent LaTeX programmer would disagree with the above, but that's how I and most of the people I know use it).

I prefer LaTeX over Word (or OpenOffice, since I run Linux), but this is because I tend to create documents in plain text first, and if I decide they need to be presentable it's easy to throw some boilerplate around that text and produce a nice-looking document. But is it superior? I really don't even know what that means.

cema• 15 years ago

Word is easier to use, but some of the document processors built on top of TeX/LaTeX (like Lyx) alleviate a lot of the LaTeX pain. And you still can go down to LaTeX if you need to fine-tune the output.

sausagefeet• 15 years ago

I really wish people would frame these in terms of what they perceive as strengths of X vs Y rather than trying to make some blanket statement. It makes it much easier to have a discussion.

muppetman2• 15 years ago

I'll be sure to give a copy of LaTeX to my father and see how easy he finds it.

I have no doubt LaTeX is very good for certain applications, but superior? According to what yardstick?

zerohp• 15 years ago

Now that you mention it, I think that I could give Latex to my father and he would probably pick it up fairly quickly. As would anyone who remembers wordperfect. Most people back then learned the "view codes" mode of wordperfect because it sidestepped the problems of wysiwig editing. Even my mother, who is entirely non-technical used the codes view at times.

muppetman2• 15 years ago

Ok, well your parents are much more clued in than mine! My Dad can figure out Word and Excel, but if he was expected to write codes I think he'd struggle. Maybe I'm being too harsh on him though.

radicaldreamer• 15 years ago

LaTeX superior to Office? Not for most people... for most people it's complicated, convoluted and a pain to install, learn, and maintain. And good luck sending a document to someone else to look over and mark up. Unfortunately, the author doesn't come around to this point till the end of the post.

ChuckMcM• 15 years ago

Wow I thought this was a humor article but the guy is serious. Anyone remember @Scribe ? Now don't get me wrong, I love LaTex, especially for math, and I've actually heard Don Knuth speak on what he was going for when he started TeX.

But to compare LaTex to Word is like comparing playing Chess to playing Halo 3. Sure they both have strategies and different pieces have different strengths and the goals are similar and you can use them to burn up a couple hours of your free time, but they are targeted to completely different audiences.

l0nwlf• 15 years ago

Just 2 hours back I though of writing my project report in LaTex, but then after 1 hour of tinkering I switched back to MS Office because I needed to get work done today.

May be if I'll have some spare time, I will learn it and write my next report in LaTex.

makmanalp• 15 years ago

It's hilarious and ironic that Simonyi helped develop Bravo, the predecessor to Latex, and then went on to oversee the development of Word, the main competitor.

MikeW• 15 years ago

When writing my dissertation I burned a couple of days trying to get up to speed with LaTeX as it came so highly recommended by smart people I respect. However the tooling let me down. Now I understand one of the joys of LaTeX is the ability to write with any text editor but there were a many things I wish made my life easier. Like an editor that actually ships with Spelling, tag completion, helpers and importantly... good documentation for how the UI works.

I was constantly frustrated. What about inserting a picture? I was pointed to packages to try to locate for my OS & install, perl scripts to convert my PNGs to whatever format my tex distribution uses. I wished whatever editor I used had a simple Insert->Picture menu that could do all of the work behind the scenes.

So I ditched that and bought Office 2010 Student edition for €69 and wrote my dissertation in Word. I got the formatting just how I wanted it within a few hours. The Navigation View was fantastic for visualising the structure of my document. I was able to drag and drop paragraphs, sections, chapters around with ease and even though I spent a few hours fiddling with the styles, I was able to turn out a PDF that looked absolutely terrific that had none of the formatting mess in that article.

I will take the time to learn LaTeX better in the future, but if minds are to be won, better intuitive tools need to be built that HELP the writer, not writing long articles saying why it's the best.

anon_d• 15 years ago

Everyone here is assuming that Word is easier to learn than LaTeX, but, IMHO, people are misinterpreting familiarity with intuitiveness. Word has a very steep learning curve that people don't see because everyone they know has already learned it. I've mostly managed to avoid using word processors for nearly a decade. I've recently tried to do some things using Word, and I found it to be incredibly difficult and frustrating. I've seen people with no experience using computers have similar experiences.

NY_USA_Hacker• 15 years ago

Well, I prefer TeX to LaTeX because (1) with TeX the documentation is just Knuth's 'The TeXBook' but with LaTeX the documentation is in at least two thick books each with several authors none of whom is Knuth, (2) TeX is rock solidly frozen but LaTeX is not, and (3) LaTeX makes assumptions about what is wanted and, then, is easier to use within the assumptions and more difficult otherwise.

I have over 100 macros I wrote for TeX for tables of contents, cross referencing, verbatim output, putting TeX text on figures as annotation, automatic chapter, section, figure, and table numbering, putting a frame around foil pages, etc.; those macros go back over ten years; due to the fact that TeX is frozen they still run just fine.

But for both TeX and LaTeX, I'm looking for darker fonts, especially for the TeX and AMS math fonts. Any ideas?

For the emphasis on plain text in the article, sure: I do nearly all my typing just into my favorite general purpose text editor KEdit.

gus_massa• 15 years ago

The first examples are unfair:

* Latex with indentation and justified-paragraph >looks better than> Word without indentation and left-align-paragraph.

* Latex with hyphenation >looks better than> Word without hyphenation.

I use both regularly, and I know that there are things that are impossible to do in Word and that I have programmed in a Latex package. But Latex has also some horror histories:

* Add the [spanish]{babel} package to a perfect working document. [spanish] does a lot of tweaks and like changing the roman numbers and making active <, >, ", ', ~ (perhaps not all of them in all versions)

* In particular the xy-pic package has problems with the redefinition of > in the [spanish]{babel}.

* In the {color} package you should remember to put the curly braces in the right place (i.e. Why \color{Red}{Hello} doesn't work?)

* If you change the .dvi file from a computer to another, weird things may happen.

* If you want to see your graphics in the .dvi, .ps ans .pdf files, you should put many copies of the graphics in the all the necessary formats.

Why LaTeX is Superior to Office

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