MS Word 2010 Takes On TeX 674
alphabetsoup writes "Office 2010 Technology preview was leaked a few days back. With its leak, a feature which was rumored to be present can now be confirmed. Office 2010 finally adds support for Advanced Typographic features (ligatures, number forms, alternates, etc.) of OpenType, allowing one to create documents so far possible only in TeX or InDesign. Between this, the new equation editor and styles, what are the chances of Word replacing LaTeX as the editor of choice in academia?"
Apples to Oranges (Score:5, Informative)
Between this, the new equation editor and styles, what are the chances of Word replacing LaTeX as the editor of choice in academia?
Word and TeX are two very useful tools for two very different needs. Word has a long way to go before it is as complete, open and diverse as TeX and TeX has a long way to go before it is as easy to use and as pervasive as Word.
.doc vs .docx means but until they get their shit together and I can read my saved file like an validated XML document, I'm not going to be putting anything important in any sort of Office format. If I'm going to be writing a paper or book, it ain't gonna be typeset in MS Word while those memories are fresh.
This sure is great news for Office 2010 (and for me at my job which forces me to use Office) but I think you're a little premature in thinking either of them are stepping on each other's toes or even close to conflict.
I don't know anyone who was holding onto TeX based purely on its support for Advanced Typographic features of OpenType.
Call me a grudge holding idiot but Office would have to undo years upon years of me suffering from "<MS Product> has encountered a problem and had to close, your shit is in a temporary file though and we'll try to recover your information or pieces of your information but this never works. Also, the last thing I did before I closed was mutilate the master copy." Now I may be exaggerating but it has helped that nothing else could ever open those files either. I don't know what
Re:Low (Score:5, Informative)
OpenType and Mac OS X (Score:3, Informative)
Ho hum. Microsoft finally implemented a feature 5 years behind everyone else.
Most applications in Mac OS X get full OpenType support through the operating system. This includes Pages, Apple's very capable in-house word processor.
I'm not saying you should migrate from TeX (I use XeTeX for a lot of more complex typesetting operations), but you by no means need to look to Microsoft Word to get OpenType support. I switch between Pages for ease of use and TeX for freedom and typographic perfection.
Re:Apples to Oranges (Score:5, Informative)
For easy-to-use, LyX is the best front-end for LaTeX:
http://www.lyx.org/ [lyx.org]
IMO it's one of the most innovative of software projects, commercial or otherwise.
William
Not only that (Score:5, Informative)
but one of the real glories of TeX is the ability to separate content from presentation. A closer example would be if HTML + CSS could handle all these things.
With LaTeX I can take articles written in basic LaTeX and style them to a specific theme or format for a book or journal. Word strikes me as much harder to do this with. It might be possible to do this with Word but there seems to be too much temptation to paint a document.
Re:Low (Score:5, Informative)
Is LaTeX 3 out yet? Lack of support for hyperlinks is annoying.
What do you mean by 'support'? The hyperref package has been available for years and gives \url and \href commands for clickable URLs and links, and automatically turns all \ref commands into clickable internal links. It also turns the table of contents into PDF metadata so you get a nice ToC in the side bar on any PDF viewer that supports bookmarks.
Re:Biology (Score:5, Informative)
Out of sheer ignorance Excel is used for statistics. The statistics community has published about the many errors in that spreadsheet but people outside math culture just assume if it's from Microsoft, hey, it must be ok (I'm actually quite baffled by that attitude - don't they know they have to use anti-virus software? Don't they know their Windows is buggy? )
Numerics never was Microsoft's expertise and you better look elsewhere. If I were an advisor or examining your theses, I'd run your data through professional software (yes, I'm saying Excel isn't "professional statistics software").
Re:Biology (Score:5, Informative)
(I've posted this before, but still)
Yes, it is a pain [nih.gov].
LaTeX the editor of choice?! (Score:5, Informative)
I always find it funny that people talk about LaTeX being the system of choice in academia. While this may be true in Computer Science, Mathematics, and Physics circles, it certainly isn't true in a whole range of other disciplines such as Biology and the Social Sciences. The claim that LaTeX is what all of academia is using just isn't true.
Oh, and LaTeX is not an editor.
Re:Not only that (Score:5, Informative)
This is kind of funny, because I often explain Word to techies as being much more like HTML/CSS than it appears at first. Every paragraph is like a >p< tag. A style is like a CSS style. It actually makes a lot more sense when you think about it this way.
It also doesn't hurt that Office 2007 makes dealing with styles a lot easier than it used to be, and offers a lot of different automatic themes that look pretty good. So long as you use the standard styles (Heading 1, 2, 3, etc.), you can immediately re-theme a document without much effort. It's really pretty cool.
Re:Low (Score:5, Informative)
Except for the fact that MS Word is more widely used than TeX
Not for professional, publication quality work.
most people who use TeX probably have word as well (Show me a university that doesn't provide a new copy to every single faculty)
I am not aware of MS word for Linux, which is the OS of choice, at least in science departments. Plus, unless they also improved the equation editor since whatever version shipped with Vista, that thing is not worth its weight in toilet paper (good luck drawing a commutative diagram with it, for example). At the rate MS is improving it has at least 25 years to go before it catches up with TeX.
Re:TeX vs. Office (Score:5, Informative)
Word does have version control.
It is possible to change styles if you set it up properly when you are typing the document. Most people don't. It isn't the easiest thing to do, though apparently it is better in 2007 than 2003 which I use.
Re:Not for me (Score:2, Informative)
No. It doesn't.
Re:As soon as Word is non WYSIWYG (Score:4, Informative)
Would it be that hard for a WYSIWYG editor to implement a usable plain-text based editor to act as a fail-safe for users who actually know what's going on?
Kids these days... What you are describing is WordPerfect's Reveal Codes [wikipedia.org] functionality. My 10th grade word processing class used WP, on Winderz 3.0. Even before that, I vaguely recall some C=64 editing software that had something like this functionality.
Re:Low (Score:4, Informative)
Is LaTeX 3 out yet? Lack of support for hyperlinks is annoying.
Waiting for LaTeX 3 is certainly optimistic. I think they are still working out the syntax of the language...
But hyperlinks are working, and working well, for quite a while now.
Re:When it replaces notepad (Score:3, Informative)
Word already has the tendency of turning a basic document into a code of spaghetti when saved as HTML.
Word actually does a pretty decent job at HTML, but not by default. The format to save a document in is "HTML (filtered)", not regular HTML. When Word uses non-filtered HTML it introduces a requirement that the file should look the same if you re-open it in Word, so it includes a metric ton of meta-data and Office-only crap in the markup so that if you open the HTML document again in Word, it looks exactly the same as when you saved it. If you choose to filter all that crap out, it might not look as pretty when re-opened in Word, but the HTML markup is a lot easier to deal with.
Anyway, just a tip if you ever find yourself needing to export something from Word as HTML and don't want to spend the next hour cleaning it up.
Re:Microsoft OpenType (Score:1, Informative)
About zero, but when will MS come after TeX for patent royalties on Microsoft OpenType ?
First vanilla TeX engine by Knuth doesn't know anything about OpenType (it has been frozen 10 years before OpenType came to excistance), all TeX's typography is its own innovation. Only recent extended TeX engines (like XeTeX or LuaTeX) implement OpenType.
Second, OpenType is an ISO standard and AFAIK those stndarisation bodies require royalty-free patent licensing.
Re:Low (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Visual consistency (Score:3, Informative)
Well no, you use Styles. Section titles get the section title style, body text gets the body text style, and so on. Change the style definition and magically all the relevant text changes too.
Now when I say "Styles", that's what they're called in OpenOffice. I think Word has an equivalent, but they might call it something else. Any way up, you don't have to manually style your section headers as 24pt bold comic sans everytime in Word or OpenOffice.
Re:Low (Score:5, Informative)
But to back your claim, here in the physics department of the KUL in Belgium, Linux is more widespread than Windows, and more and more students are trying it out.
glue (Score:2, Informative)
ligatures, number forms etc are not enough to take on TeX. Wake me up when it is possible to customize output routines for Word, when it's lexer is extensible and pluggable and when, most importantly, it has GLUE :)
(and please do not even touch formula entry and display in MS Word, may patience is really fragile on that topic)
Re:Biology (Score:3, Informative)
1) people who use excel for statistics don't know anything about statistics, so it doesn't matter - someone (the boss, the journal editor, your colleague) wanted something (error bars, ..) so you put them in. It rarely affects how people actually think (much less, are the underlying numbers suitable for a statistical treatment)
2) at least in molecular biology (biochmemistry, immunology, nucleic acids, etc) excel is the great can opener - (a) I have maybe 10 different instruments in the lab that spit out electronic data, and excel lets me simply handle everything in a single format; (b) most of us can do data manipulation in excel (take the avg of every 3 numbers and make a bar graph with error bars) so it works good enough...
3) the replacements either don't do a whole lot more, or cost a fortune and have a steep learning curve, or both
There is a reason a lot of people use excel for a lot of things, it is good enuf
Re:Not for me (Score:3, Informative)
http://oestrem.com/thingstwice/2007/05/latex-vs-word-vs-writer/ [oestrem.com]
Re:If it works... (Score:3, Informative)
How well does OpenOffice.org do this?
OpenOffice doesn't do TeX-style markup, since the sole reason for OpenOffice existing is to feel familiar for users of Microsoft Office (pre 2007), and since Word doesn't do it (yet) then neither can OOo.
If you don't care about Microsoft Office then you're free to use anything. I use LyX ( http://www.lyx.org/ [lyx.org] ), a GUI word processor which outputs to TeX, when I'm doing large projects or anything scientific. I use Abiword ( http://www.abisource.com/ [abisource.com] ) for creating quick throwaway documents, and I use leafpad (GUI, http://tarot.freeshell.org/leafpad [freeshell.org] ) and Nano (commandline, http://www.nano-editor.org/ [nano-editor.org] ) for writing down anything that doesn't need any formatting.
Re:LaTeX the editor of choice?! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Low (Score:4, Informative)
Except for the fact that MS Word is more widely used than TeX
Not for professional, publication quality work.
Actually, yes.
Aside for scientific papers, TeX is nonexistent in typesetting shops and publication houses. They almost all use proprietary typesetting programs (for InDesign to specialty software).
On the other hand, Word is used by most authors (the vast majority) to turn the final draft in.
And in some small publication houses and most vanity press type publications, Word is even used to provide the final typesetting outcome (gross, I know).
(Lulu.com for example takes in Word files to produce your books).
Re:Apples to Oranges (Score:1, Informative)
I especially like it that it does not hide the code from you so that it doesn't get in your way.
Re:Academic does not necessarily mean Computer Sci (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Much more than you think leaves Word & Co. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Much more than you think leaves Word & Co. (Score:4, Informative)
you said:
>There aren't entire books that are PUBLISHED using Word and other, non-professional typesetting tools
Sadly, that's not the case.
The `` for Dummies'' imprint for example is done entirely in Word using a publisher-provided stylesheet --- there are others, but I can't recall the title of the one which my previous employer did for a client.
There's even a New York phone directory (a smallish one, marketed to a specific ethnic group) which my employer prints which is formatted using Word --- I know 'cause they haven't worked out a way to do the bleed tabs, so I wrote a LaTeX file which assembles their pages and stamps them w/ the bleed tab (and if need be has options to adjust the page placement 'cause it's often inconsistent from one section to the next).
William
Re:Not for me (Score:3, Informative)
Word supports a bunch of bibliography managers like EndNote. The combination beats out TeX.
Sorry, but I strongly disagree. EndNote has the advantage of being good as a bibliography manager. But unless it has improved a lot in the last three or four years since I last used it, it really feels clunky when compared to some BibTeX bibliography managers such as BibDesk (which by the way is free). I wouldn't change BibDesk for EndNote even if I got paid to do it!
Now, regarding the actual generation of the formatted bibliography, BibTeX works smoothly and very reliably with LaTeX. The same cannot (could not?) be said of EndNote and Word. It is evident that support for EndNote was bolted on top of Word. I've seen EndNote generate bizarre entries, or, more commonly, a bibliography that looks OK suddenly becomes mangled as the Word document evolves (of course you can always regenerate it).
One area where EndNote+Word excels: when you want to generate your own bibliography format. You will find .bst (BibTeX format) files for pretty much any mayor citation style out there, and they work like a dream. Want to change your IEEE-formatted bibliography/citations to AMS or IOP or harvard or APA style? Just change the name of the .bst file you are calling. (Although for harvard-like citations you may also need to call NatBib, but that's one line of code). But if you want to come up with your own personal style you would have to develop your own .bst file, which is painful compared to EndNote's tools. But seriously, are you so picky that none of the dozens (hundreds?) of mayor styles out there will suffice?
Re:Low (Score:3, Informative)
As a scientest, I can assure you that science departments use mostly linux.
What type of science department are you talking about? What is your sample size? I'm also a scientist, and I can assure you that this is not the case, especially once you get out of the computer sciences and/or physics departments. Go into one of the life or other physical science departments (biology, chemistry, environmental sciences, geology), and you will likely find Windows as far as the eye can see, with the occasional Mac thrown in for good measure. I'm in my third biology department, and I'm the only person that I've known that uses Linux.
TeX is neither obsolete, or Un-usable (Score:5, Informative)
and it produces __beautifully__ typeset output
and it separates document structure from content, which all
graphic visual editors do not
and you can use any text editor of your choice.
And it cost nothing but time to learn
Re:It is More Complicated than That (Score:3, Informative)
I don't use TeX everyday, but I do use version control for code every day, and find that fancy diff programs like meld go a long way to solving both those issues. If you haven't tried it out, I highly recommend it.
Where I'm confused is... (Score:2, Informative)
...why people think it's not possible to properly lay out a document in Word. If you have equations or some weird complex imagery, or you need to work from master sheets, then no, Word is not for you. But for professional-looking structured documents that don't require some sort of overly technical (use *TeX) or creative (use InDesign) bent, Word is absolutely fine -- provided you know what you're doing.
Having once learned TeX and subsequently discovering I had no practical use for it, I took the same concepts I learned from playing with TeX and applied them to the tool I knew, which was Word (and later OpenOffice). I discovered that by mentally separating content from presentation before I started and learning the finer details of Outline Mode, I could generate far more impressive-looking documents than I ever thought Word capable of. (It helped that I once had almost 2,000 mostly pro fonts to work with as well, but I digress.) TOCs, cross-references, many of the things that make a document "professional", I could do with ease and style, provided I applied and tweaked the formatting at the end instead of on the fly, which is what you're supposed to do anyway. Office 2007 made that task much easier.
TeX and InDesign have their place, but I'm seeing a lot of people bashing Word claiming it can't do some things that it most certainly can. It's not a pro layout program and it's not a typesetting program, but if you don't actually need either of those things then it does perfectly well in the right hands.
Re:Much more than you think leaves Word & Co. (Score:1, Informative)
That you could mention Clancy in the same sentence as Pratchett makes me cry... that you do not know that Pratchett actually can typeset his own work, and did from early in his career when he was a newspaper writer, might reveal something...
TeX isn't used... (Score:4, Informative)
due to its ability to render funky typography. Its used because it separates the function of 'writing' from the function of 'typesetting'.
If you want to see a better explanation, see http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html [wfu.edu]
Presentation matters (Score:3, Informative)
Output is all that matters?
So it'd have been fine if someone handed in a binder full of ratty, coffee-stained 3-ring-binder paper, written on with a mixture of pens and pencils, as their final thesis - as long as it was scientifically sound?
Oh, that's right! Presentation matters - and has always mattered. First, it was penmanship. Then, your papers had to be typed (ever see a scientific paper that was typed on a typewriter, with the fine parts of the equation added in afterwards - carefully! - with a pen? That's dedication). And once computers came about as commonplace, they had to be properly printed.