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?"
Biology (Score:5, Interesting)
In biology, Word is already the document editor of choice. And Excel is the charting software of choice. It's really quite a pain.
As soon as Word is non WYSIWYG (Score:2, Interesting)
I'd say.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:As soon as Word is non WYSIWYG (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
More than a decade ago I used to run Dreamweaver to create webpages, but most of my edits were done in the "html view". I could see Microsoft targeting a future where documents have a separate view which lets you see all the formatting mumbo-jumbo. Non-WYSIWYG isn't too hard to envision for a traditional Word Processor...
Re:Never... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Word Is The Editor of Choice (Score:3, Interesting)
A lot of people use Windows in academia, of course. The Unix die-hards will stick to their guns, but most will think it's great that Office 2010 can handle Math (BTW, the article never mentioned TeX).
Probably, this will introduce yet another rift in the culture, with some people demanding a document be made with Word. It'll be incompatible with everything else, as usual, creating yet another headache for those that avoid Microsoft (I do - I don't think they make good products - I prefer Mac, Linux and BSD).
Tex works ... (Score:3, Interesting)
I wouldn't use either for book size projects, that's what TeX [miktex.org] is for.
Problems with Word (Score:4, Interesting)
- paragraph hyphenation is brain-dead one-line at a time
- one must invoke commands to generate the ToC and Index and remember to re-invoke them if pagination changes
- documents are non-portable / formatting is dependent on currently installed printer
- graphics can be embedded and can be nightmarish to get out in a press-ready form
- citations require third-party extensions which can interfere w/ importing / processing documents (hit Command shift F9 to convert all selected form fields to text)
- There is no easy way to assign paragraph styles --- one has to build a custom toolbar to have them all available w/ a click, the arrangement of said toolbar is dependent on the _length_ of the stylenames --- why the outline view can't have some sort of pop-up menu or ability to assign more than Heading 1--n and Normal is beyond me
- local formatting is insidious --- create an InDesign document, assign styles to everything, formatting everything w/ styles, take it into Word, then bring it back into InDesign and one will still have to clear over-rides to keep the text from being formatted as Times New Roman
and all of that doesn't consider stupid / ignorant users and the visually formatted, but not structured documents which they always create. Best indictment of that here:
Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient by Allin Cottrell
http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html [wfu.edu]
If typography were easy, Word wouldn't be the foetid mess which it is.
One will also never use Word as the basis for back-end typesetting systems --- I've done them for customized children's stories and telephone directory line ads --- a co-worker (Jeff McArthur) at my previous workplace developed one which would do customized versions of the CIA World Factbook as a demo --- the original version did the typesetting for a 2,200 page register and the technology was customized and sold to several customers.
Also, to be fair and accurate, Quark XPress and several other DTP programs handle OpenType features in addition to InDesign and XeTeX/XeLaTeX http://www.tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex [tug.org] and the nascent luatex, http://www.luatex.org/ [luatex.org] (as well as ant http://ant.berlios.de/ [berlios.de]).
William
(who wrote a several thousand line WordBASIC macro to handle the formatting for a review journal for a major sci-med publisher so that the text could be pulled into Quark XPress 6, then 7, then finally InDesign CS3 --- I also wrote a xelatex package for typesetting the journal, but that was nixed by my boss 'cause if the journal had been done in TeX it would've been outsourced to India)
Re:OpenType and Mac OS X (Score:2, Interesting)
Not only Pages, TextEdit (Apple's WordPad/Notepad equivalent) also has this.
So Office 2010 can render text as pretty as Apple's most basic text editor. All I can say is: about farking time!
Re:I'll bid this (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd say the odds of MS Word replacing LaTeX are about the same as Microsoft releasing the source to Word so we can fix problems and add features as we need them.
I'm not sure how it is in other industries, but many IEEE conferences and journals accept LaTeX, pdf, or a doc file (they provide a template).
As a result, nobody in my school department ever tried to figure out how to use LaTeX (well, I did, but that's because I'm already a geek who has no problem with the learning curve and would rather just have a better tool). I'm not saying this is the norm even in other EE departments, and I know LaTeX is by far the default in academia. However, I'm pointing out that the switch has begun before microsoft even bothered offering those features.
Re:Apples to Oranges (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't know anyone who was holding onto TeX based purely on its support for Advanced Typographic features of OpenType.
At the risk of stating the obvious, that's probably because TeX doesn't have any advanced support for OpenType. This has been a major thorn in its side for years, because while its typography was always better than Windows 3.1 TrueType, modern professional grade fonts are pretty much all distributed as OpenType now, and the visual quality you can get with the likes of Adobe InDesign using them is substantially better than you can get from TeX unless you really have a thing for Computer Modern.
This has started to change since the arrival of XeTeX and XeLaTeX/fontspec/etc, but TeX's layout engine just isn't cut out to handle them: for example, a lot of the spacing for the maths is semi-fixed for Computer Modern and needs a lot of micro-adjustment to get good results with fonts that have significantly difference dimensions. Despite the hard work of a few key volunteers, even the state of the art in the TeX world isn't really there yet, which rather defeats the point of using TeX-based tools in the first place.
Of course, none of this changes the view that everyone here seems to agree on: Word isn't going to take over TeX's market any time soon. Adding nice OpenType feature support is one small step in that direction, but to present any sort of interest at all to TeX users who value presentation and/or ease of use, you'd need much better H&J, much more efficient handling of equations and diagrams, and much better long/formal document support, to name but a few things (and leaving aside the mark-up vs. WYSIWYG debate).
Re:Ligatures? (Score:2, Interesting)
More importantly, what use do ligatures have in modern times? If you're writing by hand, fine, it might be quicker to write several characters in one stroke.
Why do computers even have support for ligatures at all? What's the point? I'm not trolling, I just don't understand the necessity. What do ligatures add, why would you choose to use the "fi" ligature instead of the characters "f" and "i"?
Re:Low (Score:4, Interesting)
Part of the reason is that Latex is not just about formulas. It's also about styles, lists, bibliography, cross referencing within your doc, etc, which WYSIWYG has not been able to get right so far, and for the needs of power-users, I suspect it never will. I use both, and I still struggle to get Word lists to do what I want
Yes, but remember that Microsoft has gained dominance in many areas just by providing "good enough" software with the MS name.
Lots of people considered Lotus 123 superior to MS Excel. Lots of people considered WordPerfect superior to MS Word... What happened to those markets?
Now that I've spent time on the Tex learning curve, and I can typically get it to do what I want, why would I want to get on another learning curve?
Now, think of the guy who just gets into college in 2011 and has the option of learning LaTeX or continue using MS Word, which he has already used for years to do High School papers and other stuff...
Will he want to get on another (much steeper!) learning curve, or will he just figure out the "advanced typesetting" menus of Word 2010?
Re:Ligatures? (Score:5, Interesting)
Ligatures are mostly decorative these days --- the original reason for them was to handle kerns which intruded into other characters, hence the existence of fi and fl --- also Gutenberg used optional / alternate ligatures to facilitate evening out the spacing of his lines, but that fell by the wayside, and has yet to be reasonably automated (though that was one of the intents of the HZ algorithm which URW developed and Aldus licensed to use in what became Adobe InDesign).
I make extensive use of Zapfino's ligatures in a small ``Peace on Earth'' card which the TeX User's Group mailed out one year:
http://www.tug.org/texshowcase/peace_on_earth.pdf [tug.org]
More discussion of them in:
http://www.tug.org/texshowcase/onetype.pdf [tug.org]
which is a companion piece to the broadside:
http://mysite.verizon.net/william_franklin_adams/portfolio/typography/typefaceterminology.pdf [verizon.net]
William
Excel bug in biology (Score:2, Interesting)
I remember reading somewhere about a bug in excel where a nomenclature for genes was substituted for dates. They had alphanumeric codes for genes and codes like "apr03" were automatically replaced by "April-03-2007" or something like that. It seems that thousands of experiments in DNA sequencing had to be redone, because they had saved all the data in excel spreadsheets and had no backups.
Re:Wrong question (Score:5, Interesting)
There is not a question about Word taking over from LaTeX in academia since Word already dominates academia.
Dominates is perhaps too strong a term. I've helped several friends to get Masters/PhD theses written up using LaTeX, after they gave up on Word out of frustration. The screwed-up cross-references and so on have bitten more than one of my other friends firmly in the backside. My usual example, unfortunate as it was, was that one friend submitted her thesis written using Word, only to discover that every single cross-reference was off by a page, and nearly had it sent back as a result.
Those friends were all studying humanities, languages and other arts subjects rather than maths or CompSci, BTW, and none of them had any difficulty using LaTeX once they'd been shown the basics for half an hour.
Re:Low (Score:3, Interesting)
What do professional publishers use for copy when they don't use Quark or InDesign for layout? Of the handful of print shops I've consulted for, Quark, InDesign, and good ole PDF is all they take.
I've witnessed/helped the migration of lawfirms from WordPerfect to MS Word in the Southeast and Southwest over the years (about a decade ago). I've never seen a law firm use any other application for documents. From divorce, real estate, maritime, and criminal, they're pretty consistent. Even to the use of Timeslips for billable time. You can't get much more professional than that.
Re:As soon as Word is non WYSIWYG (Score:3, Interesting)
LyX isn't too bad as a middle-ground between text-based and WYSIWYG.
I still prefer VIM though.
Re:Low (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Much more than you think leaves Word & Co. (Score:3, Interesting)
If I had to publish a book that actually looks good, though, neither Word nor TeX would be the right tool for the job.
Re:Biology (Score:3, Interesting)
Postscript is a turing equivalent programming language too. I wouldn't recommend anyone do statistics with their printer either.
Re:Much more than you think leaves Word & Co. (Score:3, Interesting)
My reasons for using LaTeX (as if anyone cares) (Score:3, Interesting)
In this economy, it is unconscionable to get theory students "hooked" on commercial software like Word, Mathematica, or Matlab, when there are free alternatives. I've been out of grad school for about six years now, and haven't had a full-time job for four, which means no one is going to buy me pricey software. I am still maintaining a somewhat active research program in the hopes of jumping back into academia, so thank goodness that all of my graduate work was in C, rather than in Mathematica like my undergraduate work. This doesn't make as much difference to an unemployed experimentalist, of course-- software is probably the least expensive thing they lack-- but for a mathematician or theoretical physicist it makes all the difference.
I don't really care so much about how purty LaTeX looks, and in fact I often have to wrestle with it to get it to do what I want instead of what it wants. But I like that it lets me type in equations quickly (so much so that I often do algebraic derivation scratchwork on LaTeX, rather than on paper), I like that I can define elaborate macros (I use \def; none of this \newcommand stuff for me), and I like that my documents are completely transparent, being plain text files, and I can edit them anywhere.
Re:Much more than you think leaves Word & Co. (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually I know of one publisher which uses Word from start to finish. And the quality of typesetting is sadly evident. Fortunately they have the sense usually to use a ragged right edge.
The more I work with LaTeX on books, the happier I am with it. It really is a good program.
Re:Much more than you think leaves Word & Co. (Score:3, Interesting)
Who? I'm writing a book with LaTeX and I want to make sure that publisher isn't on my "potential publishers" list.