

LaTeX vs. Word vs. Writer - jballanc
http://oestrem.com/thingstwice/2007/05/latex-vs-word-vs-writer/

======
pmiller2
As an experienced LaTeX user, I was less impressed with how good LaTeX did
than the spectacular results he was able to get out of Word and Writer. It
isn't that LaTeX failed to impress (it did) -- I was just amazed at how much
better the Word and Writer versions looked than the defaults.

Also, his characterization of LaTeX as nothing more than "a set of finely
tuned defaults" is absolutely correct. Generally speaking, one wants to think
hard before starting to twiddle too much with the default settings in LaTeX,
mostly because Knuth already did, and it shows. One also doesn't want to get
caught up in the trap of paying more attention to formatting than the text,
which is easy to do when using WYSIWYG environments. There's a good reason
that the smallest unit of "finely tuned defaults" available in LaTeX is the
documentclass -- because producing _documents_ is ultimately what it's all
about, not formatting text.

~~~
jballanc
I think the real lesson here is that, for the fixed cost of learning LaTeX
once, you get a significant benefit in improved rendering and layout (and
that's before even accounting for formulas) on par with what would be rather
significant incremental effort in each Word or Writter document you created.

I also love using LaTeX because I can grab a set of template and style files
from whatever publication I might be writing for, and I can be sure that the
outcome will be in line with what they were expecting. True, I could also get
a Word template, but I've always found that with Word templates I hit
backspace at some inopportune location and ruin the layout. "A set of finely
tuned defaults" indeed!

~~~
nailer
I don't get the same impression from the authors output as the author did. For
example:

[http://oestrem.com/thingstwice/wp-
content/uploads/2007/05/sm...](http://oestrem.com/thingstwice/wp-
content/uploads/2007/05/small-caps.png)

The left hand side of the capital D on the LaTeX output (bottom) looks thinner
compared to every other vertical in the sentence. Word (top) clearly doesn't
have this problem.

~~~
jamie_ca
It looks right to my eye.

Image editor says the vertical on the B, D, and right hand of M are all 3 px
wide for LaTeX.

Writer is 4, 3+2 anti-aliased, and 3+1 anti-aliased (both equating to
approximately 4, but the M winds up rendered with a very slight slope.

Word is 4, 4, 3+1 with the same slope issue.

Interestingly, the smallcaps B in LaTex has a wider vertical (4px) where
Writer and Word are smaller - 2px and 3px, respectively, after accounting for
anti-aliasing.

~~~
nailer
> Image editor says the vertical on the B, D, and right hand of M are all 3 px
> wide for LaTeX.

Yes, but the smaller caps should have thinner lines. Instead the larger font
is thinner.

~~~
ugh
“Yes, but the smaller caps should have thinner lines.”

That’s not true. Small caps should be drawn so that their line widths about
match those of capitals. They should not just be smaller versions of capitals.
Both Word and Writer fake small caps by making capitals slightly smaller.
That’s just wrong.

“Instead the larger font is thinner.”

As it can be. The thinnest lines of the capitals should in most cases be
thinner than the widest lines of the small caps. That’s just normal.

~~~
nailer
> The thinnest lines of the capitals should in most cases be thinner than the
> widest lines of the small caps.

That's not what's happening here - open up an image editor and measure it: the
_thickest_ line of the small caps is thicker than the thickest line of the
caps. Only LaTeX has this problem.

~~~
ugh
Then that’s how they were drawn. LaTex doesn’t fake Small Caps. No shrinking,
no fake boldness, no nothing. They are displayed as is.

~~~
nailer
Shrinking would give the right results, with line thicknesses proportionally
smaller than regular caps. Keeping the same weight and squashing vertically
would also give results that, although skewed, wouldn't have fatter lines that
the originals.

Whether you label those techniques as 'fake' or not does not change that LaTeX
and/or Metafont's displayed results are poorer than Word and OpenOffice in
this aspect.

------
btilly
The article missed the biggest advantage of TeX. The fact that it doesn't
change.

I can take a document written any time in the last 25 years in TeX and print
it today. It will still print the same way that it did then, modulo available
printing technology, down to the visible wavelength of light. I can then tweak
it and print the edited version, without any loss of formatting. Using WYSIWYG
word processors and random formats that have existed over that time, not so
much.

It isn't just word processing formats. The same is also not true of other
printing formats such as postscript and pdf. (Witness in this thread how pdf
documents that printed fine for one person not printing correctly for another.
That with a pdf created this year.)

This trait is very important for anyone who needs to archive documents. Such
as happens all of the time in academia...

~~~
alexitosrv
Maybe in TeX, but my experience with LaTeX had been a little different because
the packages and interdependencies between them changes with the time.

I mean, if you take a non-trivial document using several packages from several
years ago, and try to compile now, a likely result is the compilation fails
with some obscure error or the original result can be different in unexpected
ways.

Usually that can be fixed with the use of a new option or calling a different
command or little things like that, however the point of compatibility through
many revisions of many packages (and its interactions) in LaTeX is something
to be warned about.

~~~
gnosis
This is why you should archive the packages along with the source for your
document. This way you'll maximize the chances of being able to regenerate it
at some point in the future.

~~~
nailer
Couldn't you also archive the binary for OpenOffice and MS Word? In seems
appearing consistent between versions is an issue on all platforms.

~~~
gnosis
You'll probably also need to archive Windows and all the DLLs along with
those.

~~~
nailer
Why wouldn't LaTeX also require the OS to be archived for equivalent results?
Although LaTeX often uses it's own bitmap based font system it does require X
and supporting infrastructure.

~~~
gnosis
Because unlike Word, LaTeX can easily be rebuilt from source. And it should
work on future versions of the OS. Though, of course, there's no guarantee of
that either. So might be best to archive the OS too, just in case.

------
yason
LaTeX is really, really good. In fact, it's too good for the common people who
don't spend a lot of time writing and/or reading books and publications, and
instead spend their time not expecting publishing quality. The sad truth is
that Word is more than good enough for almost anything.

If you buy a cheap power drill and you use it maybe twice a year, it still
probably lasts your whole life and you really don't even _need to know_ why a
professional power drill might be much better. Unless, that is, you're a hi-fi
junkie and want to do your 100 holes with the best drill you can find, or
you're a professional who drills 100 holes a day.

------
beilabs
I've been using LaTeX to write my MSc thesis. Anyhow, one of the reasons I
used is was that it could be plugged into git quite easily, changes to
partials would appear in the source control and could easily be tagged.
Instead of changing one huge word or OO document, place a chapter in a partial
and only change that one file. All changes could also be tracked by my
lecturer. Quite easy tbh.

------
freetard
These days I just use Google Doc. Nothing beats it for what I need it for.
Fast, collaborative, no need to send it to emails 50 times, versioning.
Perfect for me.

------
xtho
And next week, we try to insert a footnote in a table (the footnote's text
should be displayed at the bottom of the page) while we have no Internet
access.

------
imok20
Interesting to note: Pages.app handles ligatures quite nicely (type "office",
for example).

~~~
KC8ZKF
As does TextEdit in rtf mode.

------
GavinB
This demonstration just shows once again that taste is far more important than
which tool is used.

~~~
sans-serif
I stopped paying attention after the part he bashed left alignment and (in
another blog post) Helvetica.

~~~
ssp
One of the best things that ever happened to Helvetica's reputation is
Microsoft shipping Arial, thereby causing nerds everywhere to suddenly
consider Helvetica some sort of high point of type design.

~~~
neilc
Helvetica's stature was established long before Microsoft Word was invented.

~~~
ssp
No, Helvetica's stature as a high point of type face design was not. In fact,
Helvetica was the Arial of that time, and _The People Who Are Always Right_
would snicker at it and instead go for Univers, the well-designed alternative
that the riff-raff didn't know about.

------
KC8ZKF
When I view the PDF from the article, the LaTeX portion is broken. Every "ff"
shows as a large "V", and there are no small caps.

~~~
jballanc
My guess is that either your copy of Garamond is broken, or if you don't have
Garamond that your PDF viewer is using a substitute font that doesn't have the
full set of characters.

~~~
KC8ZKF
I don't have Garamond at all. Perhaps the author should have used a PDF/X-n.

------
shrikant
_If LaTeX comes across a paragraph which it cannot divide in any good way, it
will give a warning, in effect saying: "as the text now stands, this is
impossible to make nice. Do something! Rewrite!"._

Sure, it says that "in effect", but (honestly asking) in actuality, is it more
along the lines of "PC LOAD LETTER"?

~~~
ramchip
It talks about underfill and overfull, usually ("Underfill \hbox"). It's
certainly not obvious the first time, but it's not very complicated either.

------
ned
He correctly points out that LaTeX is a typesetting tool, and that Word and
Writer are word processors, two very different approaches to text.

So why compare LaTeX to them, and not, for example, Adobe InDesign, or
FrameMaker?

~~~
wtallis
People often try to make Word do things that require a tool like LaTeX. Most
of this is because very few people know about LaTeX, and fewer still know that
the quality of LaTeX output makes it worth learning anytime you have a complex
document or one that needs to look _good_.

To recycle an analogy: Word is a hammer, and complex documents are screws.
When your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Ultimately, Word and TeX are just tools for producing formatted documents.
It's silly to cling to Word because it's WYSIWYG when it can't actually do the
job you need done.

------
Niten
For what it's worth, apparently Office 2010 is finally getting support for
common ligatures.

------
cookiecaper
I usually just use HTML for my docs these days. It's a lot easier to get
things to look the way I want than a WYSIWYG editor, and much more
portable/easier to use.

I like LaTeX too, but have found it's too much work for the simple documents I
need to write.

~~~
earthboundkid
I use Markdown → HTML → PDF (by princexml).

