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"There are several reasons why one should prefer LaTeX to a WYSIWYG word processor like Microsoft Word: portability, lightness, security are just a few of them"
by dutchflyboy 17y ago
"There are several reasons why one should prefer LaTeX to a WYSIWYG word processor like Microsoft Word: portability, lightness, security are just a few of them"
I agree with most points but seriously, lightness? Have you ever downloaded it? The program is about 750MB (Source: http://www.tug.org/protext/ http://www.tug.org/protext/), and that's for software without an elegant UI. To compare, the ENTIRE office package is around the 500MB, that's Word+Excel+Outlook+OneNote+Groove.It does produce very nice results, but it isn't light (in terms of space).
- eru 17y agoYes. Though you get a lot of packages in that 750MB. And editing your code (as opposed to compiling) is a 'light' operation.
- vog 17y agoThis comparison is not fair. You're free to download just the LaTeX core and the most important packages. Add a decent Editor/IDE such as Kyle or TeXnicCenter, and you're still in the range of 50-100 MB. The 750 MB of the total LaTeX package should be compared to the size of Word along with all macros and plugins that are available for Word.
- pmiller2 17y agoI think you're overlooking the fact that a good bit of that 750 MB is documentation for languages you probably can't read and don't care about. Take that stuff out and you can get things down to ~250 MB, of which the binaries, style files, and fonts take up ~50 MB (figures are based on my personal Ubuntu install). Given what LaTeX actually does, I'd say that's quite reasonable.