Unfortunately, X > Y shows up too commonly online, which really serves as a call to declare partisan allegiance rather than an invitation for discourse. LaTeX

Unfortunately, X > Y shows up too commonly online, which really serves as a call to declare partisan allegiance rather than an invitation for discourse. LaTeX is superior to Office how? To my eyes, LaTeX produces more attractive typesetting than Microsoft Word does, and it behaves better in most version control software (though you have to remember to manually wrap your lines if you use an editor that does soft wrapping and you don't want a one-word change to mark the entire paragraph-in-a-line as modified). However, Word is certainly easier to use, and tasks such as inserting an image inline can be done through a few clicks rather than Googling to determine the best package for floating images, creating some code, and continually recompiling into dvi to see if the result is acceptable (and then copying and pasting the ur-example into new documents for the rest of time). (Perhaps an actual competent LaTeX programmer would disagree with the above, but that's how I and most of the people I know use it). I prefer LaTeX over Word (or OpenOffice, since I run Linux), but this is because I tend to create documents in plain text first, and if I decide they need to be presentable it's easy to throw some boilerplate around that text and produce a nice-looking document. But is it superior? I really don't even know what that means.