Anyone who has used Microsoft Word for a reasonable amount of time will recognise my very own Andy’s Laws on Word:
- Likelihood of a crash is directly proportional to the importance of a document.
- Likelihood of a crash is inversely proportional to the time left before its deadline.
- Likelihood of a crash is directly proportional to the duration since you last saved.
- Likelihood of you throwing your computer out of the window is directly proportional to the number of times Clippy pops up.
- That’s enough laws for now…
In all seriousness, I’ve written many words in large documents using Microsoft Word. Nowadays, I can use OpenOffice because it’s come a long way and really is a decent product (the current v2 beta is very good). However, ever since my never-ending woes with Word during my degree, when I started my PhD, I decided to go and try out Latex. Actually, that’s not quite true, I wanted to submit a paper to a journal and it only accepted Latex documents. The deadline was the same day as I found out about the call for papers. I jumped straight into the deep-end with both feet. Needless to say, I had a hard time of it and wasn’t Latex’s best fan that day. (Lesson: don’t try to learn something new in a rush!)
Undeterred, I stuck with Latex and realised that it wasn’t so hard after all. There was a learning curve, but for the typical documents that I often wrote, there was very little to learn. I’m very glad I persevered because I wouldn’t want to use any thing else for my papers/reports any more. I’m not the only one who’s glad to move away from the WYSIWYG world. This article will not be a tutorial for how to use Latex, instead an overview of its benefits and why I think it trumps what word processors have to offer.
What is Latex?
In 1978, Donald Knuth – arguably one of the most famous and well respected computer scientists – embarked on a project to create a typesetting system, called Tex (pronounced ‘tech’), after being disappointed with the quality of his acclaimed The Art of Programming series. Around 10 years later, he froze the language after originally anticipating spending a single year! Tex gave extremely fine-grained control of document layout. However, the vast flexibility meant it was complex, so by the mid-80s Leslie Lamport created a set of macros that abstracted away many of the complexities. This allowed for a simpler approach for creating documents, where content and style were separate. This extension became Latex (pronounced ‘lay-tech’).
Latex is essentially a markup language. Content is written in plain text and can be annotated with various ‘commands’ that describe how certain elements should be displayed. The Latex interpreter reads in a Latex marked-up file, renders the content into a document and dumps it a new file. Therefore, it’s not an interactive system that is the de-facto method for document creation nowadays.
Separation of content and style
Not the most obvious advantage, possibly because a lot of Word users don’t understand why this so beneficial. When producing your Latex document, you are concentrating on the content itself. You introduce structure explicitly by telling Latex when a new section begins, for example, but you don’t then faff around trying to decide how the section headers should look. That’s done later.
This is opposed to the average Word user, who will immediately highlight a given section header and apply formatting to it: maybe a larger font, maybe underline, etc. The point is that this will then have to be applied to every header manually. Latex is better as it uses a document style. This defines how different elements within your document should look (like Cascading Style Sheets defining styles in HTML pages). If you fancy a change, you only change the style definitions once, then the presentation of the document will be updated automatically. This also ensures a consistent looking document (you wouldn’t believe how many stylistically inconsistent Word docs I’ve read!)
Word does in fact have a similar Styles feature. However, because it’s optional, people don’t often know it exists. Latex forces you to declare the document semantics (this is a Good Thing!), which is why you can rely on it to produce a consistent looking document.
Portability
Latex portability comes in multiple ways:
- An actual Latex file is merely a text file, which is just about the most portable format in computing.
- The Latex system that processes the text file and produces the finished document has been implemented on just about every mainstream platform you care to mention.
- The default output file format for Latex is DVI (which stands for device independent). This was around well before PDF was dreamed up and the high quality files can be viewed via software viewers or printed out. DVI is an open standard, so once again, readers are extremely portable and exist on most operating systems. Admittedly, DVI is hardly ubiquitous and nowadays it’s often bypassed in favour for PDF (or it’s very simple to convert to other formats like PS or HTML)
Flexibility
You can get Latex to do just about anything you can think of! Over the years, an overwhelming selection of packages to extend its potential and macros that can simplify complex tasks have come into being, most of which are freely available on CTAN. For example, Latex’s main users are within academia and research institutions and they benefit hugely thanks to the Bibtex package that provides bibliography management – I pity my Word-using colleagues who suffer by actually manually word-processing their bibliographies (unless they’ve shelled out for a program like Endnote). There are other crazy packages that you can install which allow you to typeset music scores, chessboards and cross-words! CTAN is the main repository of these resources. Most are well documented and as you can imagine, with Latex being around for so long, the number of extensions is vast. The chances are, if you’re struggling to do a task, someone will have undoubtedly written a package to solve it easily!
Control
Even with simple documents, you can quickly become frustrated by Word’s rather unintelligent interference. The hours that are wasted trying to position that image which you know will fit at the bottom of the page, but Word refuses to put it there! How many can relate to this experience? You have your 30 page document with text, tables and images. You just spent the evening getting it formatted nicely – all your figures in the right place and then you notice that one of your paragraphs isn’t clear enough. You add one sentence, which then pushes an image on to the next page, leaving a massive gap at the bottom of that page where your image once was. This then daisy-chains down, knocking other tables and images out of place all the way to the end of your document! It’s a real laugh. Fortunately, Latex is much more clever in this respect and positions your images and tables with a lot of common sense. So, if you want your image to appear at the bottom of a given page, it’ll stay there!
Whilst Latex makes decent typesetting decisions for you, if you want to, you can have total control over the presentation of your document.
Quality
It’s difficult to disagree that the output from Latex is far superior to what Word can produce. This is emphasised greatest when it comes to documents with high mathematical content, which is a major strength for Latex. It also has much better kerning, hyphenation and justification algorithms that simply make the output far more professional than what any word processor. Its algorithms for laying out text are more sophisticated and extremely fine-grained. For example, the accuracy is so high because it uses a measurement known as a scaled point which translates as 100th of the wavelength of natural light!
Latex works with the concept of niceness (well, I suppose technically it’s badness – which it works to minimise). Latex has a large set of metrics that it evaluates against when generating your document. It experiments with various permutations of parameters and determines the one which gives the “nicest” output. It can take the time to do this because it isn’t interactive. Word processors don’t have the computational resources available (yet) to carry out the equivalent calculations and still remain interactive. Also, many people forget that typesetting is actually a professional skill – people train for years to learn how to layout publications. Yet, as soon as you open a word processor, you go about committing typesetting sins all the way. Typesetters know for example that its easier to read sentences that are approximately 66 characters wide. Have a look in your books and count the letters! Also, why do newspapers and magazines have narrow columns? But, the default layout of a word processor gives an average of 100 words per line. I suppose many people don’t mind, but you would notice if you read a lot of large documents.
A quick example. I took a document that I had used previously to demonstrate document structure in Latex. I used the same text and loaded it into Word and applied the equivalent styles. I’ve used default settings throughout. Word didn’t have a style for abstracts, so I put the title in bold. View the Latex output to the Word output. The styles that Word uses aren’t great. You could manipulate the default styles in Word to make it look more reasonable, but I’ve never been bothered because even if I could get it to match Latex stylistically, I still have to use Word, which I’d rather avoid!
Latex has been used regularly typeset entire books. Word processors simply aren’t good enough for that job – they are used by the authors to write the content and these files are then imported into professional typesetting software. Ok, that’s not strictly true – you could typeset a book in Word, just like you could drive a car with your feet – it’s not a good idea though!
Output
As mentioned, the default output is a DVI file. DVI was a clever little standard but unfortunately didn’t take-off. It takes little effort to convert your document into a Postscript or PDF file (in fact, you can just use the ‘pdflatex’ command instead of normal ‘latex’ if you only ever want to create PDFs). There’s no need to buy additional software such as Adobe Acrobat like you need to do to convert a Word document into PDF. (At least OpenOffice has its ‘Export to PDF’ functionality!)
Scalability
In my personal experience, using Word for documents with more than 20 pages has not been a pleasant experience. Obviously, that could be my own bad luck, but that is also the impression I’ve got from other users too.
With Latex, I’ve never found such problems. Additionally, you are free to split up large documents into smaller chunks and then let Latex combine them altogether later (like one chapter per file). It can also create tables of content, indexes and bibliographies easily, even on multi-file projects.
Stability
One of the reasons why perhaps so many people struggle with Word when creating large documents, is because it is prone to crashes. ‘Document recovery’ is now a high ranking feature of Word. I’m sure people would prefer if MS would just make their software more stable! (NB stability issues are not necessarily generalisable, so I’m speaking from personal experience, and of my friends and colleagues – I do not know of a single user who hasn’t lost work to Word, but that’s not to say that such people don’t exist.)
Because Latex is so mature – and developed by extremely clever programmers – bugs are negligible. And even if it were buggy, then there is no risk of you ever losing your original source text. Where as with Word, almost any tool within its integrated environment is capable of corrupting your file if it causes a crash.
Oh, you don’t need to worry about macro viruses either!
Cost
Well, this is one area where Latex wins hands down, since it is free! As with most open source software, the phrase “you get what you pay for” doesn’t hold true. You get an extremely mature system, that is still years ahead of its competition.
What about spell checking?
It’s a good point. This is not a deficiency of Latex, because it just processes the words you give it. However, within your text-editor, you do not get fancy lines highlighting your spelling errors or bad grammar as you type, like you get with Word, yet it’s a feature users have come to expect when writing documents.
For starters, I do not really care for a grammar checker and anyone who actually relies on it when using Word would be better off buying a book (or looking at writing style guides) than taking the useless advice it provides.
Secondly, the ‘auto-correct’ feature – whilst looking like a good idea – is not beneficial in the long run. Sure, it corrects the common typos that we all make. However, the problem in my opinion is that it means we don’t learn from our mistakes, e.g., you will continue to type ‘teh’ instead of ‘the’ because Word will sort it out for you. Having said that, if that’s your thing, then you can easily configure any decent text editor to perform the same task. (You could, if you really wanted to, use your favourite word processor as your text editor – but then you back to square one on the stability issue.)
And so on to spelling. The great thing here is that you have a choice! Aspell and Ispell are the most popular spell checkers I know of (both open source). These will check any text file you care to feed it and you can easily configure a decent editor to integrate its functionality from within the editor itself. How to get your text editor to utilise these programs is obviously dependent on your editor of choice. Some, like Kate, interface external spell-checking programs without any effort. I personally use (g)vim which can be configured to use spell-checkers like Ispell.
C’mon, be fair!
Ok, I am obviously biased here. However, I am someone who uses both systems. It’s perhaps not really fair to compare Latex and Word, because they are different types of system, which are suited to different jobs. However, for as long as people are using Word within academia and research institutions, I feel I should enlighten them and let them know what they are missing out on.
Sure, Word can be extended using its in-built scripting language. It also has document management features to help with large documents. As already mentioned, it has styles that can ensure manageable and consistent presentation. Yet very few people seem to take advantage of them. This is especially worsened by UI improvements that mean Word will hide features that you do not use, which makes it more difficult to remember what Word can actually do.
Word may have the advantage of a GUI which is good for beginners. It reduces the cognitive load as it’s a case of recognition verses recall. If people really want a GUI, then there are ones that act as a front-end to Latex. It’s not a WYSIWYG editor, because what you see on screen is not what you will get when you print it out. Instead, you have What-You-See-Is-What-You-Mean editors that still hold to the ideals of Latex by keeping content and style separate. However, they are environments that allow a more visual approach to your content, which is handy for producing complex equations, for example, but will pass your content to Latex for producing the final document. Lyx is the best example and was originally developed by Matthias Ettrich (yep, that’s right, the same guy who founded the KDE project). You can also get Latex editors, which are like normal text-editors, in that you see all the raw Latex commands, but they come with additional features that help with creating that file, like table wizards, symbol databases, etc.
The learning curve
The reason why everyone isn’t using Latex is because you can’t just load up and go, like you can with a word processor. I consider Latex analogous to HTML with CSS. You need to put some markup around your text before your browser knows what to do with it – and the same is true with Latex. Of course, nowadays, any one can knock up a webpage thanks to, er, Word, and various other visual HTML editors and as a result, they generally look crap. So, you need to invest a bit of time in learning some basic commands, but you’ll soon realise that it’s very simple afterwards. Here’s a Latex “Hello World!” as an example:
% hello.tex - Hello world Latex example
\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
Hello World!
\end{document}
This that generates the following output. It wasn’t that difficult, was it? To continue learning the basics, here are the best places to go:
- The Not So Short Introduction to Latex [pdf]
- Getting to Grips with Latex
- Text Processing Using Latex
So who is Latex good for?
Quite simply, anyone who is writing non-trivial documents and is tired of being let down by the performance of the current crop of word processors. If you are in academia, you really ought to be using it! Anybody writing anything maths related will not find a richer and better quality system. For example, even WikiPedia use Latex for rendering any formulas that appear on their site.
Latex isn’t for people who are too lazy or dislike change! I personally found the investment paid off because Latex allows me to produce my documents at a greater pace. I know that the enterprise will not be interested as Word is so ingrained, even though their business reports would look so much nicer. Their loss! For everyone else, it’s time to give it a fair try, just so that you compare and contrast, then decide which does the job best for your needs.
About the author:
Andrew Roberts is a computer science graduate from the University of Leeds, UK. He remained at Leeds to study further towards a PhD in Natural Language Processing. He has been using Latex for three years and is the author of the Getting to Grips with Latex series.
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well, the beta version works perfectly fine here and has several bug fixes over the stable version. As for the processes being stopped, I’m slightly confused. Make sure that in /etc/wyneken/wyneken.conf, that this is set:
WYNEKEN=/usr/bin/wyn
and make sure in the wyneken preferences that you have a dvi viewer set correctly. Else, I’m slightly confused as it just uses python’s os.spawnl() method to call the processes. Try wyn filename.wyn –dvi on the command line to see if the computer hangs. If it hangs there, then I’d like a copy of your wyneken file so that I could analyze it. You may feel free to contact me at karl1 at 99b dot org so that we don’t crowd up the osnews forums with our further discussion.
Thanks for the feedback though!
I’ve been looking for a more text-based way to write documents instead of using Word. I’ve been playing with LaTeX, and I’m impressed.
However, Microsoft is the standard at work. If I was to make a TeX document at work, but somebody was to demand a Word version of my document, is there a LaTex->Word conversion program?
–Lance
@angustia
Well, ConTeXt has localized commands in at least English, German, and Dutch. I don’t know of any similar effort for LaTeX itself, although it does have localized output via the babel package, which as well as translating the names of document components (e.g., in Spanish: “Section” -> “Sección”), also tries to honor the local typographic conventions (e.g., comma instead of decimal point) and hyphenation rules. What is more, LaTeX has good support for different input encodings, so you can easily use, for example, utf-8 to directly input text in non-Western languages (see also the Omega, Lambda, and Aleph projects). In principle, I don’t see why you couldn’t translate the LaTeX command names too.
The Lyx front-end also has an internationalization effort:
http://www.lyx.org/about/i18n.php3
Your criticism would also apply to any text-oriented system: XML, HTML, any programming language you care to mention – with the possible exception of binary machine code
I do my LaTeX editing with vim and vim-latex package:
http://vim-latex.sourceforge.net/
I prefer vim for all sorts of editing (c code, LaTex, …) . I’d be happy to know of any other nice vim packages for LaTeX editing.
another (working ?) simple TeX-solution to your problem:
define a macro called /SPolynomial (or /whatever
) like
/def/SPolynomial{/noindent/hbox{$S$-poly}/-/hbox{nomial}}
With backslashes instead of slashes
(backslashes get removed in Eugenia’s shout box)
and query-replace all your $S$-polynomial with either Spolynomial{} ot ‘Spolynomial ‘.
the {} is there because 1 space is ignored after a TeX command.
the /noindent is here to make TeX go into horizontal mode…
if you didn’t do that, at the begining of a paragraph, you would get
$S$-poly
nomial
instead of
$S$-polynomial
I you really don’t know where to begin or search the internet for hours…
Beside the “official” “Lamport” LaTeX manual, there’s also a free “Joli manuel pour LaTeX 2” from Benjamin Bayart, a then student in a french engineering school (ESIEE).
Its huge, its well user-friendly written, far more well structured than the Lamport: the problems with the Lamport is answering questions like “But how do I … ?”.
You can search for it on google : http://www.google.fr/search?hl=fr&rls=GGLD%2CGGLD%3A2004-51…
Of course, the major drawback is that it’s written in french, and I don’t know if it has been translated somehow.
Maybe LaTeX users could have a look at the TOC and give references of some english written equivalent…
Re. graphics placement (and other layout issues), my experience has always been that LaTeX is a lamb as long as you let it do its own thing. Trying to enforce your own ideas as to what goes where is to invite a world of pain.
I agree. Word processor users get frustrated initially with Latex because they are so used to inserting figures in the middle of a page immediately after they reference it. The thing is, when you look at professionally typeset books, figures and tables tend to appear at the top or bottom of a page, thereby not breaking the flow of text. It is alright also to have a figure on the next page.
But where ever Latex puts it, at least it’s not preceeded by a large blank which is what typically happens when a figure is shoved on to a subsequent page in WP software. Latex ‘floats’ figures and tables meaning that text flows around them.
@angustia
I don’t know how latex is used in asia.
Hmmm, have a look at
http://oku.edu.mie-u.ac.jp/~okumura/texfaq/
@JustPassingBY
Maybe LaTeX users could have a look at the TOC and give references of some english written equivalent…
See
http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=books
and
http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=tutorials
for comprehensive lists.
@Lionel B
Re. graphics placement (and other layout issues), my experience has always been that LaTeX is a lamb as long as you let it do its own thing. Trying to enforce your own ideas as to what goes where is to invite a world of pain.
This certainly can be true if you try to use the wrong tool for the job. LaTeX’s float mechanism is designed for the automatic placement of figures, tables, etc. You can easily customize the policy that it uses but fine-grained control of individual figure placement is not its forte.
However, you can use the optional float.sty package, which has an option for “right here, right now, or else!” figure placement. Also, there are many packages which allow pixel-perfect absolute positioning of objects on the page.
http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=floats
http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=abspos
You just have to read the FAQ. Yes, I know I’m starting to sound like a stuck record
@Lionel B
Re. graphics placement (and other layout issues), my experience has always been that LaTeX is a lamb as long as you let it do its own thing. Trying to enforce your own ideas as to what goes where is to invite a world of pain.
This certainly can be true if you try to use the wrong tool for the job. LaTeX’s float mechanism is designed for the automatic placement of figures, tables, etc. You can easily customize the policy that it uses but fine-grained control of individual figure placement is not its forte.
Don’t get me wrong… I think that LaTeX does a fantastic job of layout in general and figure placement in particular. I meant to imply that it’s best left to LaTeX to do what it’s so good at.
However, you can use the optional float.sty package, which has an option for “right here, right now, or else!” figure placement.
I used float.sty once only… and came to the conclusion (after clearing up the mess) that LaTeX knew what I wanted better than I did 😉
Look at the difficulty that S-Polynomial caused. How can anybody possibly claim the LaTeX allows one to concentrate on the meaning and not the layout? So LaTeX fails by its own criteria.
Secondly: I agree with Jack Perry’s quibble over diagram placement. Again, one cannot just concentrate on the substance of one’s writing. I used to get a lot of trouble with nested lists.
Thirdly: graduates may love or hate LaTeX (you’ve guessed, I’m a LaTeX-hater and an Emacs-hater); but clerical and secretarial staff always prefer WYSIWYG.
Fourthly: where I used to work, we used company macros to deliver a company look and feel for all our documents. These macros evolved in time, with the result that old documents could not be reprocessed. So an ASCII text format does not guarantee lifetime reproducibility.
For horizontal spacing issues, however, you have the reverse problem: LaTeX is that it would rather overrun a right margin than leave too much space between words. (The infamous “overfull hbox”, whose black slug indicating an error certain styles remove incidentally, even in draft mode… grrrr) I’m not sure why Knuth thought an overrun was such a better idea than extra whitespace in an hbox, while extra white space was preferable to an overrun in a vbox, but the result in many published papers, and even some books, has been ugly.
Well Knuth’s reasoning behind this actually has been explained. LaTeX has no idea what the optimal solution for a given line-break problem might be. Rather than make a blind choice between bad white-space or hyphenation, LaTeX is designed to warn the editor and let him or her decide how to deal with the problem. Usually what I do is just bump up olerance for small problems. If you want for LaTeX to NEVER overrun, there is sloppy.
For the specific case of $S$-poly-nomial, this seems like the perfect case for a command:
ewcommand{spoly}{$S$-poly-nomial}. spoly in your LaTeX source file will be expanded to the full expression with the manual hyphenation rule. Of course since LaTeX are just text files, you can also just do a mass search and replace as well and get them all in one shot. For other cases, there is also the hyphenation list for dealing with frequently used words that are not hyphenated properly: hyphenation{man-u-script}.
Take a look at ConTeXt too. It’s much more powerful than LaTeX, at least it offers much more flexibility in the sense of design and XML processing. I was completely satisfied with LaTeX, but ConTeXt simply offers more – since I discovered it I comletely forgot Word and PowerPoint.
(It is TeX-based.)
An example document:
http://www.pragma-ade.com/general/manuals/metafun-s.pdf
Two pages to start with:
http://contextgarden.net (ConTeXt WIKI)
http://www.pragma-ade.com/overview.htm (collection of documents)
Look at the difficulty that S-Polynomial caused. How can anybody possibly claim the LaTeX allows one to concentrate on the meaning and not the layout?
Look at the enormous list of problems with Word that have been compiled on this list, between my post and Andy’s post and everyone elses’. If a small hyphenation issue (one to which a fix was posted, btw), is the only problem with Latex, well, that’s a small price to pay indeed.
SI agree with Jack Perry’s quibble over diagram placement. Again, one cannot just concentrate on the substance of one’s writing. I used to get a lot of trouble with nested lists.
I hit some problems with diagram placement too initially. But then I figured out that diagrams really did look nicer at the beginnings and ends of pages, and didn’t worry about it so much. Again, I don’t think anybody would claim that LaTeX is perfect. But its a heck of a lot better than the alternatives.
but clerical and secretarial staff always prefer WYSIWYG.
There are a number of problems with this statement:
1) It’s not true. Back when Word was still in its infancy, and WordPerfect dominated the market, clerical and secretarial staff used WP. You know why? Formatting codes! It was a very hard thing for Microsoft to ween them off these WordPerfect features, and if you ever have to tech support for somebody who started using word processors in that generation, you’ll still here questions about how to enable the formatting codes in Word.
2) The fact is that people prefer what they’re used to. If secretaries and clerical staff prefer Word, its because what they’ve been forced to use all these years. That does not imply that its the better solution, or the most efficient solution. I know engineers who waste tons of time banging their head against complex Excel sheets when they’d be better off just using Matlab. Yes, its harder. Yes, it takes a time investment. But you owe it to your employer to be as efficient as possible, and taking hours doing something that could be done in half the time using a better tool is not efficient.
3) The simple fact is that secretaries generally don’t work on very complex documents. Rarely do you see them typing up hundred page documents with figures, tables, charts, and extensive bibliographical references. I find it very simple and fast to use TeX for everything these days (even short three-page jobs), but Word is certainly adequate for this sort of work.
Look at the difficulty that S-Polynomial caused. How can anybody possibly claim the LaTeX allows one to concentrate on the meaning and not the layout? So LaTeX fails by its own criteria.
Well, from what I can tell it caused few difficulties that would not have been quickly solved (with a quick dip into the documentation). I’m much more fond of systems that allow me to fix difficulties once for many examples, than systems that force me to fix problems each time they happen to occur in my page layout.
I would have to say that for the genre it was designed for, yes, LaTeX does allow one to concentrate on meaning as opposed to layout to a greater degree than most of the alternatives. All I have to do is say that my document is an APA submission, a fiction draft, or a letter, and the rest of the styles happen naturally. With Word or with Open Office.org, I’m almost always forced to waste a lot of time redefining styles, and then I have no idea as to whether those styles will be applied consistently, or whether I might have to deal with “side effects” because that table cell was auto-formatted into a different style.
Meanwhile, there are other features that more than make up for the little quirks. Indexing, intelligent cross-references, and BibTeX are three must-have features.
Now, granted I wouldn’t be using LaTeX for the types of output that would require something like Quark or Scribus, but I’m not paid to twiddle flowing text around artwork in variable collumn layouts. I’m paid to deliver thousands of words of double-spaced copy typeset just so with accurate citations, and images on separate numbered pages at the back of the manuscript.
“Look at the difficulty that S-Polynomial caused. How can anybody possibly claim the LaTeX allows one to concentrate on the meaning and not the layout? So LaTeX fails by its own criteria.”
Hyphenation of hyphenated words is not straight-forward. It could be argued that from a typesetting perspective, S-polynomial shouldn’t be allowed to be split over a line. It doesn’t look good.
There are other conventions too, like how cross-references are displayed, e.g., “see Section 1.2”. The “Section” and “1.2” should always remain together and not span multiple lines. In Latex, this can be achieved with ‘hard spaces’.
Don’t forget, some of the complaints with Latex are due to an ignorance of tried and tested typesetting rules.
Using WSYWIG tools it is easy to give the format too much power. – my categories are for the general text producer, not the poster-designer (for example). OverPower1 is to spend more time tweaking the format than the words. OverPower2 is to edit the text in order to make the line breaks look neat.
If you see only text when typing you will have little exposure to either fault. TeX and progeny are great for some. For me, text in TextWrangler (a terrific, beer-free Mac text editor) and output in InDesign. (InDesign is eye-wateringly expensive if it doesn’t make you money. My excuse for this luxury software is that version 1 was cheap…)
Implementation details are (for me) secondary to the primacy of the words, however they are produced. Hey I’ll even use Word if need be: am currently being paid to tame a couple of 300-page Word messes. Thank goodness for OpenOffice to revive broken documents. And VBA to repeat the corrections.
Err, sorry. Wrong thread
Meanwhile….
@cogito
How can anybody possibly claim the LaTeX allows one to concentrate on the meaning and not the layout?
You know, I kind of half agree with you there. With LaTeX the barriers between “content” and “layout” are a lot more porous than with, say, XML. Although this can sometimes be a source of problems, I think that LaTeX has the balance about right. After all, sometimes the layout is the content, or part of it.
you’ve guessed, I’m a LaTeX-hater and an Emacs-hater
Yeah, I guessed as much
Seriously, I have come across a handful of colleagues with similar attitudes – despite being obviously highly intelligent, they refuse to “get” LaTeX and demand that all document preparation be happy-clappy, pointy-clicky. They do seem to be a very tiny minority, though, at least in my line of work. Is this down to some difference in brain structure, some traumatic childhood experience with backslashes, or what?
By the way, how do you feel about GUI front-ends like lyx? Personally, I find these inferior to emacs+AUCTeX+RefTeX as a LaTeX “IDE”, but a good fraction of my colleagues and students prefer them. Different strokes, I guess.
but clerical and secretarial staff always prefer WYSIWYG
I’d have to agree with Rayiner that secretarial staff (like the rest of us) are creatures of habit. Feed them LaTeX from the cradle and they’ll never look back!
I’d have to agree with Rayiner that secretarial staff (like the rest of us) are creatures of habit. Feed them LaTeX from the cradle and they’ll never look back!
Well, I don’t know about that. I use OpenOffice.org for short documents such as one-off letters. There is definitely a level of complexity at which I find it more worthwhile to switch to LaTeX.
Which is why MSOffice has been so popular in the past. It is designed around the needs of a group of people who produce large quantities of short one-time reports and letters.
A short plug for OOoLatexEquation:
http://www.fyma.ucl.ac.be/wiki/~piroux/OOo%20macro
Lets you embed LaTex equations in OOo documents as PNG or EPS, and stores the original LaTeX notation in the image metadata – just doubleclick on the embedded equation image, and up pops the LaTeX ‘source’ for easy editing.
TeXPoint does something similar for MS Word.
I’d like to take issue with this comment from the author:
Quite simply, anyone who is writing non-trivial documents and is tired of being let down by the performance of the current crop of word processors. If you are in academia, you really ought to be using it!
I’m sorry, but this is just not true outside of math. The majority of the academy is absolutely dominated by MS Word to the point it’s almost impossible to work (for example to publish) without it. I manage to, but I use XML for document coding because I find it a much better solution than LaTeX for my needs.
And yes, I have years of experience with TeX.
>The fact is that people prefer what they’re used to.
Not necessarily true, I’m used to Word but I think that it sucks: FrameMaker is (well was: it’s been years since I used it) much, much better.
As for Latex formatting, I don’t know why people like it so much: when I was preparing a thesis (a long time ago 1996), I could easily see the paper made using Latex: images were often not on the same pages as the text which referred to it, which sucks from a readability point of view, sometimes the images were all put at the end of the chapter, which is even worse.
Also back then, Latex sucked for internationalisation, but I think this have been fixed..
I tried to learn it once and concluded that this sh****^Wpoor language wasn’t for me..
I hope that a better language such as skribe http://www-sop.inria.fr/mimosa/fp/Skribe/ will replace it eventually, but I’m not holding my breath..