

LaTeX vs. Word vs. Writer - moxy
http://oestrem.com/thingstwice/?p=65

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markbao
Although LaTeX typesets beautiful documents, using it is frankly a pain as it
takes far longer to typeset a document in LaTeX than in Word or OOo Writer.
You arguably have more flexibility in LaTeX, but its nature to typeset using
its own sort of syntax makes documents take significantly longer to write.

And I don't think Times New Roman is a particularly bad font. Although it is
overused everywhere and may cause eyesores due to this fact, the font itself
is serious and a standard in many areas and thus is my second favourite font
(after Helvetica.)

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scott_s
The cost of learning how to write Latex documents becomes amortized over the
number of times you use it. I'm at the point now where it would take me longer
to produce equivalent documents in Word than using Latex. (And in the case of
articles fit for print, an order of magnitude longer.)

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plesn
LaTeX makes it easy to make something clean out of a bunch of text.

But when graphics enter, I'm easily stuck loosing _a lot_ of time. For now, i
tend to use tikz and will learn Inkscape, after bad experiences with dia,
metapost, etc. Sure under MacOS Omnigraffle produces great output...

Good documents are not only text...

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scott_s
Graphics are orthogonal to a Latex document. You specify where to find the
graphic, what format it's in and how to orient it. Making the graphic is
outside of the Latex process, which I am fine with.

All papers I make for publication have data graphs and figures aplenty, and it
would still take me longer with Word.

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plesn
I agree that _including_ figures is a strong part of LaTeX, I believe, as you
have good control over it. What takes times, is _drawing_ a diagram to
illustrate something.

Resorting to external tools and inserting is OK, but you often don't have the
same visual quality as the rest of the document. Here I don't know many really
good tools. That's why people still take a lot of time with pstricks, TikZ and
the likes!

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eru
I recently discovered graphviz to layout my graphs. (Graphs as in graph
theory.)

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KevinBongart
There is no doubt that LaTeX produces way more beautiful documents than
Microsoft Word, even if Word defaults settings are changed.

The thing is people need a word processor that comes out of the box with
professional fonts, nice alignment parameters. They sure don't want a piece of
software that begs them to download fuzzy fonts and paste text from a web page
without reformatting all of this...

People don't want to learn a language for writing text either. They don't want
to spend hours to find this package that would looks so great drawing a
horizontal line under the header.

Apple Pages is a good alternative, it's my choice for creating professional
documents (and believe me, I'm a real typomaniac) without losing time with
LaTeX.

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cgranade
Between XeTeX and LyX, you can get all the nice professional fonts and kerning
settings of professional desktop publishing suites, along with all the power
of LaTeX. A good set of examples is shown on the Beauty of LaTeX page
(<http://nitens.org/taraborelli/latex>).

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igorhvr
I am surprised no one mentioned TeXmacs ( <http://www.texmacs.org/> ) yet. It
is a WYSIWYG editor that can both import from (works reasonably well) and
export (works perfecly) to TeX.

By using it you can always do things nearly as quickly as you would using MS
Word, and then fine tune things later if you know LaTeX. Every time I want to
do something I think it is painful using LaTeX (like complex nested tables)
that's the route I take - it works really great for me.

Some folks here might also like the fact that it is entirely written in
Scheme.

~~~
jsmcgd
Wow - thanks for this. I can't believe I'd never heard of it before. Looks
like it will take the late out of Latex!

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igorhvr
You're welcome!

I thought the same thing ("I can't believe I didn't know about this
application before!") when I first heard of it 8 months ago...

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etal
For writing school assignments, I looked for a system that would meet two
requirements:

1\. The text can be edited using vim, or at least vi-like keybindings.

2\. The storage format is plain text, so any version-control system can
efficiently store, diff and merge it.

OpenOffice can work on top of a single XML file, but XML diffing is not like
diffing lines of code, and every accidental ^W is still interpreted as "close
document". HTML kind of works, but lacks too many typesetting and document-
creation features and fixing it with CSS becomes tedious. I played with
Texmacs and Lyx for a little while, but eventually bit the bullet and learned
LaTeX and vim-latex.

Verdict: If you were willing to invest your time in emacs or vim, learning
LaTeX feel similar but easier; spending a little extra time to learn a helper
package like vim-latex or AUCTeX really makes it worthwhile.

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jimbokun
Dragging tabs and margins around in Word seem like black magic to me. I never
have any good intuition about how things will reflow. Or a good sense of what
makes for a good layout in the first place, frankly.

The genius of LaTeX is you can crib someone else's style, and your output will
look like it was created by a typesetting genius. Personally, I don't think I
could ever fiddle around with Word long enough to get output that looks as
good.

Another big win with LaTeX is it lets you use an editor that's not awful.
Editing your actual text in Word is pretty painful if you're used to Emacs (or
other program actually designed for editing text productively).

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tptacek
Two responses:

(1) Lyx is a cross-platform graphical editor that spits out LaTeX, has
reasonable UI for many of the interesting things you'd do in a TeX document,
and has a pretty good set of preferences and controls. I used to swear by it.

(2) LaTeX is very painful to edit in, no matter what people tell you. Yes,
Word does a crappy job of typesetting. But LaTeX is very 1985. You can get
similar results in a visual editor with a page layout program; this is why so
many people used to rave about Framemaker over Word. On the Mac, iWork's
Pages.app will do a passable job; far better than Word. I've ported Quark
templates to it without a problem.

~~~
shutter
> I used to swear by [LyX].

If I might ask, what do you use now?

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tptacek
Pages.app. We paid a couple hundred bucks for a (well-regarded) local graphic
designer to build a print template for us that included typography, they
delivered it in Quark, and I ported it over to Pages.

For what it's worth, I edit text in a text editor (Emacs), then use Markdown
to get it into something that's easy to paste into Pages.app. I've done long-
form editing in Pages.app, and I don't love it, but it's far less painful than
LaTeX.

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teuobk
Here's what I use:

\- LaTeX if the document will have a bunch of equations.

\- Word for everything else.

For me, it's a question of efficiency. I find that I can typeset equations
much faster with LaTeX than with Word, and I find that I can typeset general
text much faster with Word than with LaTeX. The other issue is with shared
documents: if I need to share an editable version of a document with somebody,
there's a far better chance that they will be able to use a Word file than a
LaTeX file.

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sadiq
Have you tried LyX? <http://www.lyx.org/>

I started using it a few years ago and haven't looked back.

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snprbob86
Am I the only one who thinks ligatures and small caps are practically
worthless?

In fact, I think they both hurt readability. The few cases where ligatures
help, such as "f)" or "To", are better served by kerning pairs (which both
Word and Writer supports).

Word and Writer have spent their development effort on things that users care
about: being reasonably easy to use. And almost all of the font research of
recent years has gone into screen and print readability, not style.

~~~
moxy
I think you're underestimating the limitations of LaTeX. There is more to its
functionality than small caps and ligatures. While that may be the topic of
this article (which does a fantastic job at weighing the pros and cons of each
typesetter/processor), that still does not detract from the vast capability of
LaTeX's ability to process equations, particular formats, tables, etc.

~~~
jsmcgd
overestimating :)

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nirmal
I've been using LaTeX for years to write academic papers. Only recently have
some conferences started moving to Word. This has made simultaneous editing a
pain.

I've recently started exploring what it would mean to use the experimental CSS
multi-column support in Webkit and Gecko to recreate the CHI template. I've
had some good luck. Although, it would make life a lot easier if they
supported column-span.

~~~
etal
The latex2rtf program might help. The result looks like hell initially,
compared to the PDF, but the content, styles and images are retained
surprisingly well. (Equation support is weaker.) Just load the generated RTF
in Word/Writer, tweak the styles and margins, and save as a .doc -- if the
fix-up is simple enough for your document, you might not even need to keep a
parallel Word copy.

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bayareaguy
I don't use LaTeX directly but I have used Scrivener's LaTeX/XSLT output
template scheme and MacTeX with mixed success for some technical
documentation.

I say "mixed success" because getting the overall document structure setup the
way I wanted very error-prone. Some simple things like generating a table of
contents required me to drop down into low level details. I eventually got it
to do what I needed to do but for the amount of documentation I ended up
writing I'm not sure it was worth the effort.

Scrivener - <http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html>

MacTeX - <http://www.tug.org/mactex/>

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brentr
My preference is a bit biased since most of the documents I type up are
mathematical in nature, but LaTeX wins hands down.

Yes, the learning curve is much steeper than Word for LaTeX, but doesn't
everything worth knowing involve an initial period of head smacking?

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jodrellblank
Or perhaps the things that don't involve initial head smacking don't come to
mind when you think of things "worth knowing".

If everything you know was learned at some point, did you have an initial
period of head smacking for _everything you know_?

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brentr
Touche. Perhaps I was a little careless in my statement.

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Titanous
Note that there are quite a few more examples of what LaTeX does well here:
<http://nitens.org/taraborelli/latex>

Also included is the tex source used.

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jobeirne
That's a beautiful wordpress theme.

~~~
eyolf
Thanks :)

