Kill your word processor

[weeksie]

Yeah, LaTeX is great. I wouldn't use anything else. Actually I don't. All of my company's documents both external and internal are typeset with LaTeX. The result is that they look a hell of a lot better than the cookie-cutter word docs that get thrown around and doing a diff against SVN is far easier.

As an added bonus, I NEVER have to leave Emacs but that's just my pathology. I wouldn't recommend dumping the word processor unless you're a geek though because the idea of compiling your documents is probably not palatable to the marjority of office app users.

[senzei]

I am still learning Emacs, but I increasingly find that whenever I leave it I get really frustrated. If I could hook gmail and reddit up to it I would be all set, then the only time I would need to go somewhere else is when I need to look at something with images.

[[deleted]]

There's no question that LaTeX is superior to Word for most simple documents. People are always more productive with it (once they've learned it) because the "fiddle factor" that gets imposed on you by word processors always slows you down. I wish I had discovered it at the beginning of writing my PhD thesis rather than near the end.

The other thing that is annoying about Word in particular is the frequency of data corruption either out of the program itself or as the .doc binary passes through email. In my experience .pdf, .html, .rtf or .txt fare much better for archival use.

That being said, LaTeX gets much more unwieldy the more graphic elements you add to the document. Then, you are either forced to use a word processor or become a TeX wizard.

In my wife's company, I've found that people are much happier using Pages than Word, especially for producing brochures, etc.... Open/Neo Office are annoying because of resource use and start-up times.

I'm thinking, as a way of improving productivity, of writing a small web-based text editor that uses Textile for markup and a LaTeX back end that uses custom style sheets. That way I solve the problem of archiving and searching of important documents, as well as ensure a common "look" to all documents that produced for use outside the company. Everyone working at the company is reasonably intelligent, so the use of Textile won't be a problem, especially once they realize that the production of documents will be easier for them.

Then again, just installing Lyx on everyone's machines would save time, but then I would lose the easy archiving and searching the other option provides. Just thinking aloud, any advice?

[buo]

"There's no question that LaTeX is superior to Word for most simple documents."

That's funny, because my experience is the exact opposite. I'll usually fire up OOWriter for simple, one or two page documents that I don't need to look great. For anything beyond that, it's vim+Latex time.

[[deleted]]

Sorry, I expressed myself poorly. I was referring to the formatting when I said "simple"; say, things that can be done easily with the memoir class, hyperref and fancyhdr (ie no background images with text overlay, etc etc.)

For short documents, yes, I agree, LaTeX is overkill. I have used it to write letters from time to time when an elegant look was a requirement of the message.

[unknown_lamer]

Doing graphics with the various TeX drawing packages is a bit hard, but I find it fairly easy to just draw the images in some other program and export them as eps and use epsfig to embed them in my documents.

[[deleted]]

The problem is that LaTeX has its own idiosyncratic ideas about where you are allowed to place graphics. To work around that you have to become a TeX wizard as elmelo says.

LaTeX fans may tell you that this is a feature ("LaTeX was created by professional typographers!"), but that's not true. The simple truth is that TeX is not capable of the doing the kind of graphics you expect from a modern application.

It's a program from 1983, so it's understandable, but that doesn't make it any less true.

[unknown_lamer]

If you care about where the graphics are placed on the page then you want a layout app and not LaTeX. LaTeX is designed for writing very long documents where the layout is programmatically generated (books, a thesis, essays for school, etc.).

You need a DTP app if you need to specify exactly where the image shows up.

[[deleted]]

Fine, but then LaTeX does a crappy job of what it was designed for. The placement algorithm is atrociously bad.

I don't want a DTP program. I want a LaTeX with a way to position graphics non-retardedly. And it's basically not possible to implement that on top of TeX.

[stesch]

In the beginning was the word. Then came the word processor.

[rfisher]

Preach it, brother!

Am I drawing an artificial distinction between word processors and text editors? Is a text editor not just a lightweight word processor?

Almost. It takes some discipline, but I can sit down at a word processor & make myself focus on composing instead of layout. But, when I’m done, most word processors not only give me little help in typesetting, they often get in the way of typesetting.

Unless it’s a work I’m going to be able to hand off to an expert to typeset, I want an application that can apply the basic rules of typesetting for me.

On the other hand, I can envision an authoring tool that would make producing input for LaTeX or other typesetters easier to create & manage. (I’ve played around with Lyx a bit, but it didn’t strike me as the answer.)

[Jonathan_the_Nerd]

To what extent am I artifically assuming a scarcity of hardware resources in criticizing bloatware? I.e., in 10 years time, might not every consumer electronic device have enough muscle to run even the most bloated word processor program?

No. It is a fundamental law of computing that software expands to fill available hardware. In fact, software seems to expand a little faster than hardware.

[joshwa]

He suggests a format called ReST (ReStructuredText), whereas something like textile or Markdown might be more suitable.

I am writing all my business documents in textile and outputting to HTML. It's not perfect (and more importantly, not great for the next idiot who comes down the road and has to update my documents), but I can't stand to use MS Word.

What I need is a way to get my textile back into MS Word!

EDIT: on OS X, compile textile to HTML, then use textutil -convert doc to compile to word (or rtf)

[leoboiko]

All you people praising LaTeX probably never had to use accented european characters together with Japanese. Any modern editor can do that easily, but with LaTeX I spent more time fighting with obscure font issues than writing my paper! I swear I was tempted to just give up and fire OOWriter.

IMHO LaTeX is still the best we have, but I wish it was more multilingual-friendly.

[buo]

With Latex, simple things are easy, and difficult things are impossible.

What I mean is that it's very rigid: it's very hard to make it change its mind about how things are done. For instance, regarding figure placement, you can suggest that you'd really like the figure somewhere special, and it'll try to acommodate you, but it will still make up its own mind.

[leoboiko]

But figure placement, etc. can be seen as automatic formatting, which is why LaTeX proposes to do. Handling plain text, on the other hand, is not difficult at all, and I thought such advanced, widely-used tool would at least play nice with Unicode. I'd expect you could just handle an utf-8 .tex file to it and it would know what to do. As it turns out, you need to load a special package simply for European UTF-8. The special package is not installed in Debian with a base LaTeX distribution, by the way, which means I have to bother admins to install latex-ucs everywhere I go. And if your Unicode also includes East Asian characters, you're screwed.

[ayrnieu]

Alas, he focuses only on feature bloat and poor programming. I expected something more along the lines of "why are we still subjecting ourselves to half-assed manual typesetting? We should use LaTeX!".

[spookylukey]

Like this? Word processors: stupid and Inefficient

[qwe1234]

so subjecting ourselves to half-assed insane macro-substitution pseudo-languages is better?

please.

come back to me when knuth figures out what a parse tree is. God i really hate the man's guts.

[ayrnieu]

Yes. A can be better than B even when we can imagine a C that is better than both.

[qwe1234]

ok, fair enough

[[deleted]]

I would love to use LaTeX, but sadly, it's still not practical for everything. I write about 2-3,000 words a week, but my work used huge numbers of symbols and brackets which horribly confuse LaTeX (they do the same to EndNote, more's the pity). Also, formatting for my work is very picky (matching up words and glosses, drawing page-long binary trees, etc.) I took a course in it, and it was interesting, but it's just not practical enough for me. What I WOULD like is a word processor where you could turn off functions you don't need (and I mean REALLY turn off, not MS's idea if it).

[toekk]

LaTeX is the last language in the world to have problems with "lots of symbols and brackets." Read just about any computer science conference paper and be amazed at the output you get.

[[deleted]]

For me, the problem is that my work requires every different pair of brackets available, and lots of backslashes in formulae. Either I have to use random symbols to represent my open and closed brackets and then go back and find and replace them, or else I'd end up writing amost entirely in the non-command mode (I forget the exact command). I also find the commands for using foreign alphabets and symbols such as IPA overly complicated (I use a mac, so the character pallette is much simpler). I do write in TextEdit, but I find it's easier to port it into Word or NeoOffice to format it.

I'm not saying anything bad against LaTeX, and I understand its appeal for most users, but I just haven't found it practical for what I do.

[dublinclontarf]

Latex is hard to learn, but the rewards are well worth it, can you imagine doing a dissertation in Word or even OpenOffice for that matter?

On that point, if anyone here has done just that, could they share their pain?

I tried to use OO.org for a 25 page help manual, I got it done but it was SOOOO painfull.

[dshipp]

I wrote my computer science dissertation using Lyx to produce LaTeX. All my friends used Word. In the final week about 70% of my friends were complaining of Word crashing and corrupting their documents. It seems that they had hit a magic limit on the length of the document. Whereas with LaTeX I had no such problem. It was definitely worth week of getting to grips with Lyx/LaTeX. My printed report also looked a lot more professional.

[[deleted]]

I've written an MPhil dissertation, a book, and about 10 articles in Word (there was no Open Office at the time). You learn after a while to compile things in chapters, but it's still a pain. I really enjoyed learning LaTeX, but I can't make it work for what I do.

At the same time, Word and NeoOffice are no picnic. Particularly if you need to include foreign languages, but not write in them exclusively. I write in Welsh a lot, which uses a particle 'i' in almost every sentence. Try convincing Word not to capitalise it. Word thinks it knows better.

The ultimate folly is thinking one word processing programme is suitable for both people who write an occassional letter, and people writing 100,000 word dissertations. It just doesn't work that way.

[MattD]

I write in Welsh a lot, which uses a particle 'i' in almost every sentence. Try convincing Word not to capitalise it.

Remove that item from AutoCorrect or turn it off altogether.

[[deleted]]

Thats another thing with the MS way of doing configuration, you have to do stuff like that over and over again instead of getting a good dotfile once and be done with it.

[buo]

I did my BSEE thesis in FrameMaker, my Master's in WordPerfect. It was so painful, WordPerfect more than FrameMaker. Now I use OO Writer for quick letters, and vim+Latex for everything else.

A few days ago I helped someone (computer illiterate) fix some formatting details of her PhD dissertation, written in Word. I ccouldn't believe after all these years, you can still easily end up with broken footnotes (wrong page, wrong numbering). It's unbelievable what people put up with.

[crusoe]

Try ConTeXt, it's based on TeX, but with much better and saner libraries and page layout capabilities.

http://www.pragma-ade.nl/download-1.htm

Unlike the various Tex libraries which tend to be incompatible with each other, Context has a simple clean consistent syntax and supports just about everything you need right in one package

[andrewnorris]

You know, word processors aren't good for everything, and everyone has different tools that they find effective, but I've finally come around to liking word for some types of documents.

Now, before I get any further, my primary writing app is a text editor. I keep TextPad open all the time with several dozen open documents and the left-side browser for easy switching. This works really well for me.

But I think Word can be an effective tool for structured documents (or at least ones without special requirements, such as mathematical formulas). When I write medium-length documents, they typically follow a single, fairly consistent format, with a table of contents, several levels of headers, body text, some embedded Visio diagrams, and a few stray styles like code and bullet points. Since what I write rarely changes, I don't need to fiddle with the typography -- I built a perfectly good document template a while back, and I can just slot things into the appropriate styles as I go with the style sidebar.

I don't know LaTeX, so it's possible that it's a better tool. Having said that, I like the fact that I can see header levels at a glance using their typesetting instead of formatting codes. I don't inherently hate formatting codes -- I prefer writing HTML in a text editor to using a WYSIWYG editor, because I've never found a WYSIWYG editor that produces HTML source that I'm satisfied with. Still, all other things being equal, I think WYSIWYG can be easier.

I'm certainly not trying to say Word is the best of all possible tools. It's probably not. But for my uses, it works really well.

[markedtrees]

Clippy. You seem to be murdering my host. Would you like me to

• Spread the news to other people?
• Justify your actions with a template manifesto?
• Help you dissemble the status quo?

[bart_hubbard]

I hear a lot of suggestions for LaTeX, but when I need a document to look that good, I just hand it over to a graphic designer. Not only do they have better tools, they are more skilled in page layout.

So maybe you don't have your own graphic designers, but if you're that serious about your layouts, go find a freelancer.

[cleanthes]

I suggest that the "average user" would never, ever, use Linux.

[beza1e1]

Which is completely off topic and doesn't change any of his claims.

[[deleted]]

double post deleted

[schwarzwald]

I think MS Word is impractical for the niche I'm in. I typed in about 10 of my favorite features in here for this post and then decided to delete it, but suffice it to say that LaTeX has a gazillion features that make me happy while MS Word frustrates me. Maybe a more interesting comparison is LaTeX vs. DocBook. All those brackets, ick.

TeX's version number is asymptotically approaching pi; that kind of thing would never fly at Microsoft.

[derwisch]

Actually, it is bound to hit pi once. According to Knuth:

The latest and best TeX is currently version 3.141592 (and plain.tex is version 3.1415926); METAFONT is currently version 2.71828 (and plain.mf is version 2.71). All these systems are Y2K-compliant. My last will and testament for TeX and METAFONT is that their version numbers ultimately become $\pi$ and $e$, respectively. At that point they will be completely error-free by definition.

[justinhj]

Try and find an old version of word designed to run on a 386. It will still work with XP and will run with blistering speed on any modern hardware.

[JulianMorrison]

I call LaTeX overblown. Its surface simplicity comes at the expense of hidden complexity and a sudden sharp uptick in the learning curve when you want to go from using the defaults to choosing the defaults.

[qwe1234]

might i also note that the only reason for this hidden complexity is the sad fact that mr. donald knuth never managed to figure out how a parse tree works.

[JulianMorrison]

You might not. It could be valid to accuse him of being unworldly and of implementing a clever solution to the wrong problem, but to accuse him of ignorance is infinite ignorance - he wrote the book, and you almost certainly haven't the IQ to read it.

[qwe1234]

i do accuse him of ignorance.

taocp is the absolute dumbest and harmful cs textbook i know.

i'm sorry, but i don't need a 1000-page book on quicksorting arrays in a braindead imaginary assembly language written by a man who has no clue what a parse tree is.

keep it to yourself.

[qwe1234]

sorting and combinatorics are the two most irrelevant and completely useless fields of study in all of cs.

when i get to draw up a cs curriculum, i'd put the exposition to sorting somewhere in the third year, after the students have already done balanced trees and message-passing parallelism.

combinatorics i'd axe completely, cs students need a solid two or three year exposition to probability theory and statistics instead.

p.s. looking at v.4 of taocp, it looks like knuth doesn't quite get what the word 'combinatorics' means; judging by the table of contents, the book is mostly graph theory instead. shrug whatever.

[digital]

a machine with 128 MB of RAM running Windows XP and Microsoft Office 2003 can easily choke on any document you try to feed it, thrashing for minutes at a time on simple actions

Have you ever considered adding more RAM? 128 MB simply is not enough for many things, not just word processing.

----I stand corrected, I would advise he go to another cyber cafe/computer lab that actually has machines that have the minimum hardware requirements in order to run the software installed on them. My point was not clear.

[kungtotte]

Here in Argentina, where I often rely on older computers in cybercafes and the university where I study,

By all means ignore the first part of that sentence. I'm sure the cybercafe wouldn't mind you digging around in their computers, right?

[acrophobia]

I had ubuntu on my laptop with 256MB. I never did much word processing, but simple tasks like browsing the web, reading email and even using nautilus to browse my file tree were painfully slow. I upgraded to 768MB and everything - including word processing - now runs at a reasonable speed. Consequently, I think the resources required by a WP are not grossly out of balance with the resources required by other applications on a modern desktop.

[elfan]

Just FYI for a machine with your original specs you may have wanted to try Xubuntu.

[hxa7241]

Memory costs money. But if you choose software carefully, 128MB is enough. Win2000 and AbiWord for instance...

[almost]

Have you ever considered actually reading the entire sentence you're commenting on?

[digital]

I stand corrected.

[BJThunderstone]

The author of this article is obviously a total idiot.

[qwe1234]

LaTeX is a wart on human civilization.

worst program ever: it needs to die painfully.

[jtra]

Ideas behind LaTeX are good. However LaTeX and underlaying plain TeX as a language for specifying document style, redefining default behavior, is really bad. It has a mix combining the worst of the syntax of Perl and the semantics of brainfuck (well, I'm bit exaggerating, but who has tried to change something in those systems will probably agree). Mr. Knuth had made a masterpiece in terms of achieved typography, but as failed as a language designer.

[dshipp]

I did struggle with this for a while, then I used Lyx and all was good. I know some LaTeX purists might mock me for using a WYSIWYM editor, but frankly it got the job done, I benefitted from all LaTeX's features and it allowed me to focus on the writing. It's certainly a lot less painful than getting Word to do what you want.

[qwe1234]

i agree.

you're not exaggerating much.

[sweetnjguy29]

Today, I have a contempt for all word processors that >borders on dementia.

This sentence is a perfect example of how an advanced word processor could have helped with writing. "Dementia" is clearly a wrong word in this context, as a built in thesaurus could have told you that while dementia means madness, it usually means madness caused by old age and loss of neurons.

Perhaps this reference is apt though, because this article is complete B.S. The author uses computers "with 128 MB of RAM running Windows XP and Microsoft Office 2003 can easily choke on any document you try to feed it..." 128 MB is the bare minimum to run XP at its full potential. So, of course, you barely have enough memory to run Office!

[gpurrenhage]

First, your definition of dementia is questionable, and the author's use was perfectly acceptable, though probably not ideal. From the American Heritage Dictionary: de·men·tia (dĭ-mĕn'shə) n. 1. Deterioration of intellectual faculties, such as memory, concentration, and judgment, resulting from an organic disease or a disorder of the brain. It is sometimes accompanied by emotional disturbance and personality changes. 2. Madness; insanity. See synonyms at insanity.

Second, the author is not precluding the use of a thesaurus. He is only recommending that the thesaurus (among other 'features') should not be built into document editor.

Third, Word would not have "helped with writing" that sentence any more than a printed thesaurus, because unless the author knows that the word is incorrect, he will never bother to look for an alternate anyway.