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If you ever want easy-to-update, high quality documents, LaTeX is what you want. You simply see the difference between word and LaTeX. With microtype, you can e

If you ever want easy-to-update, high quality documents, LaTeX is what you want. You simply see the difference between word and LaTeX. With microtype, you can easily reproduce the quality of highly paid typography-experts.

JorgeGT 9y ago
Not to speak about versioning! I can easily git diff my LaTeX plain text files, but doing so with Word files...
- raarts 9y ago
  Versioning is where the Microsoft world, and probably all graphical word processors suck big-time. The world of pain I go through when I have to collaborate with partners in government or defence, sending back and forth word files from various word versions and tracking comments and changes leaves me losing the will to live. Oh if we would only have the GitHub GUI for Office files!
  - _acme 9y ago
    Word itself provides a compare function that works very well, and there are alternative tools that also provide versioning functionality that can be combined with various document management tools, essentially providing GitHub for Word files (see, e.g., Interwoven iManage, etc.).
    - raarts 9y ago
      Unless you work with different Word versions, and different people across different organisations and send Word documents back and forth, trying to keep a workflow going... Also commenting sucks, in some versions replies add a comment (which renumbers them all..), and in the next version the comment numbers are not displayed. It's a mess really. Add-ons like iManage are relatively useless if you work with multiple orgs.
TylerE 9y ago
With a caveat... LaTeX is great for a lot of things... but you might want to look at ConteXt too. While it's less sophisticated in many ways, but way way more advanced in others, like color-handling and inline figures and images, and better support for advanced PDF features. It's also a little bit lower level... whereas LaTeX has a lot of opinionated defaults, ConteXt tends to expose a few more of the primatives. Basically - if LaTeX is the better Word, ConteXt is the alternative InDesign. https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/4987/why-should-i-be-interested-in-context https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/4987/why-should-i-be...

JorgeGT 9y ago

Not to speak about versioning! I can easily git diff my LaTeX plain text files, but doing so with Word files...

raarts 9y ago
Versioning is where the Microsoft world, and probably all graphical word processors suck big-time. The world of pain I go through when I have to collaborate with partners in government or defence, sending back and forth word files from various word versions and tracking comments and changes leaves me losing the will to live. Oh if we would only have the GitHub GUI for Office files!
- _acme 9y ago
  Word itself provides a compare function that works very well, and there are alternative tools that also provide versioning functionality that can be combined with various document management tools, essentially providing GitHub for Word files (see, e.g., Interwoven iManage, etc.).
  - raarts 9y ago
    Unless you work with different Word versions, and different people across different organisations and send Word documents back and forth, trying to keep a workflow going... Also commenting sucks, in some versions replies add a comment (which renumbers them all..), and in the next version the comment numbers are not displayed. It's a mess really. Add-ons like iManage are relatively useless if you work with multiple orgs.

TylerE 9y ago

With a caveat... LaTeX is great for a lot of things... but you might want to look at ConteXt too. While it's less sophisticated in many ways, but way way more advanced in others, like color-handling and inline figures and images, and better support for advanced PDF features. It's also a little bit lower level... whereas LaTeX has a lot of opinionated defaults, ConteXt tends to expose a few more of the primatives. Basically - if LaTeX is the better Word, ConteXt is the alternative InDesign. https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/4987/why-should-i-be-interested-in-context https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/4987/why-should-i-be...