vurtry.blogg.se

Word isn't bad (Ligatures work perfectly and automatically, word breaking is okay, but far from perfect like LaTeX.

LaTeX has better and nicer textflow and rendering. Same thing in LaTeX: if you don't use \section to mark sections, of course its difficult to change them afterwards, just like in Word when you don't mark headings as headings. Want to change the look of all the headings? Sure, why not. You just have to learn how to use it and be consistent. The template engine in Office is amazingly good. You can work in huge documents with lots of images in Word nowadays without the software crashing. Looks as ugly as software can look, but works very well. Why?! And let me use a different math font, please!) - edit: for ~60$ (academic) you can get MathType, a equation editor that knows its shit. (Except for the fucking \mu that looks like a v. If you only have a couple of equations Office works just fine and looks ok. If you have a lot of equations, you can't not use LaTeX, that's what it's made for. They have awesome online tools or you can access the online documents with your Offline Word. Working in teams in Word works just fine.

Everything else (LibreOffice, yes) and below (MS Office 03/07) is just garbage. I'm working a lot with MS Office 13 and even more with LaTeX. Besides closed/open source, is there any real reason left to use latex? Today MS Office does all of those things well. Every time I write a production file, I need to add ugly, opaque formatting commands everywhere (footnotemarker to get the figure to appear in right place, etc) Latex can not really separate content from style, and latex source code is often difficult to understand, especially for someone who didn't write it.Īt one time, office had terrible math typesetting, couldn't handle automatic reordering of section numbering, and couldn't keep track of references. Over the years, though, I have gradually realized that latex is not really WYMIWYG.

I love simple content languages like markdown/pandoc for simple tasks. Beamer presentations are the standard in my field, and journals often require submissions to use a specific latex template. I am an academic, and I have been using latex for years.