3 ms·
Another advantage of LaTeX over WYSIWIG alternatives is its simple plaintext representation. If we can still open any documents from our time period in 200 yea
by Niten 16y ago
Another advantage of LaTeX over WYSIWIG alternatives is its simple plaintext representation. If we can still open any documents from our time period in 200 years, we'll be able to open that old LaTeX document of yours, because it's just ASCII (or Unicode in the case of XeLaTeX). And given the portability and simple requirements of the open source, exceptionally well documented TeX code base, it isn't far fetched to imagine someone could even run your documents through the actual LaTeX typesetter, if they really wanted to, 200 years or so from today.
Do you think anyone will still be able to open your documents in Adobe InDesign 200 years from now? This may not matter to everyone, but if it matters for your purposes, LaTeX has a clear advantage here.
EDIT: I'm not affiliated with the author of this article.
- michaeltwofish 16y agoWhile longevity may be important, I think there are other more interesting advantages of plaintext, namely that I can edit in my editor of choice, I can use a host of existing tools, such as sed, grep, etc, to process it, and it plays well with standard source code management systems.
- zumda 16y agoIf you ever wrote a paper with another person, you will absolutely hate Word (and other binary formats). It makes working on the paper a pain, since only one person can work on it at the same time. The ability to split a document in multiple source files and having SVN/git/etc makes it really easy to work on the document at the same time.