3 ms·

There is an unstated premise here that is very important: you care, or don't, about the final appearance of the document. When people argue that latex gets out

There is an unstated premise here that is very important: you care, or don't, about the final appearance of the document. When people argue that latex gets out of the way, the road being spoken of is the one leading to a beautiful document, so the author is expected to care about the final appearance. LaTeX and Word both come with learning costs, the initial effort in to just bang out some words is clearly higher in LaTeX, but they will look good from the start. Yes, if you don't much care about the looks of the end result, Word is more expedient, but then so is notepad.

chrisfinazzo 8y ago
Of course, his comparison shots w/ LaTeX and LibreOffice are misleading. While it's understandable to show what CM and the global style template look like, I don't think I've seen anyone - save for people writing package documentation - deliver using that formatting. Tl;dr, That is ugly.
- SiempreViernes 8y ago
  What sort of documents do you look at? Lots of actual reports are in the "basically default" template; I googled for "us annual car deaths", and followed the first "institutional" result found, clicking around to find an actual, recent*, report. The first I found was in "basically default" style: https://www.iihs.org/frontend/iihs/documents/masterfiledocs.ashx?id=2166 https://www.iihs.org/frontend/iihs/documents/masterfiledocs.... Next, I googled "russian pension reform pdf", and in the top three hits there were two reports with various levels of depressing Word defaults, and one that I'll give be benefit of the doubt and say was actually a conversion from a web page. I'd say this is a fairly typical look for any report that isn't super official or actually a magazine trying to sell something.
  - chrisfinazzo 8y ago
    Most of the time, it's CV's, Thesis papers, dissertations, that sort of thing. Really just looking for interesting ideas and packages I might want to "borrow" :). My current CV (and one other supporting document) started out as creatures of Word, so trying to keep to the format was a primary goal. The IIHS report honestly isn't bad looking. To my eyes, it could be done in TeX or Word depending on how complicated the styles actually are.
Fomite 8y ago
I think it's actually not 'beautiful' but 'consistent'. LaTeX formatted documents, in my experience, have a higher mean appearance to them, but almost no variance - they are all very same-y. They're always fine, but rare is the LaTeX document I encounter that has actual artistry to it. Especially as people tend to work off templates for very understandable reasons.
- SiempreViernes 8y ago
  Honestly, it's pretty rare to encounter any document that has actual artistry to it. The one I think of directly is a book about making books, though a few journals do good templates too.
  - Fomite 8y ago
    I get the occasional really nicely done CV.

chrisfinazzo 8y ago

Of course, his comparison shots w/ LaTeX and LibreOffice are misleading. While it's understandable to show what CM and the global style template look like, I don't think I've seen anyone - save for people writing package documentation - deliver using that formatting. Tl;dr, That is ugly.

SiempreViernes 8y ago
What sort of documents do you look at? Lots of actual reports are in the "basically default" template; I googled for "us annual car deaths", and followed the first "institutional" result found, clicking around to find an actual, recent*, report. The first I found was in "basically default" style: https://www.iihs.org/frontend/iihs/documents/masterfiledocs.ashx?id=2166 https://www.iihs.org/frontend/iihs/documents/masterfiledocs.... Next, I googled "russian pension reform pdf", and in the top three hits there were two reports with various levels of depressing Word defaults, and one that I'll give be benefit of the doubt and say was actually a conversion from a web page. I'd say this is a fairly typical look for any report that isn't super official or actually a magazine trying to sell something.
- chrisfinazzo 8y ago
  Most of the time, it's CV's, Thesis papers, dissertations, that sort of thing. Really just looking for interesting ideas and packages I might want to "borrow" :). My current CV (and one other supporting document) started out as creatures of Word, so trying to keep to the format was a primary goal. The IIHS report honestly isn't bad looking. To my eyes, it could be done in TeX or Word depending on how complicated the styles actually are.

Fomite 8y ago

I think it's actually not 'beautiful' but 'consistent'. LaTeX formatted documents, in my experience, have a higher mean appearance to them, but almost no variance - they are all very same-y. They're always fine, but rare is the LaTeX document I encounter that has actual artistry to it. Especially as people tend to work off templates for very understandable reasons.

SiempreViernes 8y ago
Honestly, it's pretty rare to encounter any document that has actual artistry to it. The one I think of directly is a book about making books, though a few journals do good templates too.
- Fomite 8y ago
  I get the occasional really nicely done CV.