
Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient - mrzool
http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html
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flukus
I had to give technical support (get word to work) for a friend recently who
was working on a final group project which was a complex 100 page document and
it was an absolute nightmare. Emails everywhere as version control, things
being copied and pasted and losing formatting, incompatibilities between
different versions of word and stuff just disappearing in the chaos. I can't
fathom how anyone in there right mind can defend this as being more user
friendly than a tex document and really basic version control.

I had a presentation to do for work recently and I went with latex+beamer
despite having no prior experience with either and it turned out to be a
fantastic decision. A make file and a bash script with inotifywait and I even
had a live preview going.

It reminds me of that Einstein quote "Everything should be as simple as
possible but no simpler", it feels like many of our tools try to make things
too simple at the cost of making many things harder than they need to be.

~~~
xor_null
You want to explain to someone who e-mail word documents how to
setup/configure and use a latex distribution? I think for most tasks Word etc.
are sufficent.

------
quanticle
I think this article is drawing a false dichotomy. It's saying that there's a
hard dichotomy between a word-processor based workflow and a workflow based
upon a text editor and a typesetting engine. In reality, no such dichotomy
exists. Word processors since Wordstar have had tools to define styles and
update those styles at once across the document.

