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Office word processor designed for basic documents can't compete with academic/technical typesetting tool for academic/technical applications? I think Word is

Office word processor designed for basic documents can't compete with academic/technical typesetting tool for academic/technical applications? I think Word is a pretty mediocre product and has some ludicrous limitations. But really - this is just as nonsensical from the other side. Word and LaTeX not comparable tools and they're not designed for the same job. Comparing them makes as much sense as comparing a bicycle with a skateboard.

com2kid 6y ago
> I think Word is a pretty mediocre product and has some ludicrous limitations. But really - this is just as nonsensical from the other side. I wrote a ~200 page (digital) textbook on 3d Modeling using Word. Word is incredibly customizable, I had hotkeys setup to do everything I wanted, figures and diagrams manages themselves rather well, and I was easily able to get into a state of flow using Word. Now it took several days to get Word that customized, but having seen what it can do, I will not call it mediocre. However hot Word tip of the century is, and has always been, put all images inside a text box, they'll behave the way you expect then, and behave bizarrely otherwise. Should be noted I wasn't doing any typesetting or any such thing, just writing the document, I understand that beyond just writing, LaTeX is a far superior tool.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
  I've used MS Word over very many years and I'm happy to say that it is a far better product now than it ever was in terms of reliability and doing what it's supposed to do. I'd even call it... good. But that is now, and the number of times I've been burned in the past and watched other people being burned, and the distress it is caused those who just want to get their job done and the time wasted; those memories fade slowly.
  - bdamm 6y ago
    This. Word is decent until it becomes a crashing, byzantine reformatting mess. Then it becomes some kind of obscene torture device as bug states propagate with the documents and restarting only brings inescapable anxiety.
- MegaDeKay 6y ago
  I'm right (write?) there with you. I routinely write documents hundreds of pages long in Word that are filled with cross-references, figures, complex tables, and Visio objects. Word is very solid (though it wasn't always so) and maintains really good performance even with large documents. Cutting and pasting massive amounts of content from one place to another in the document can be done with more or less reckless abandon. My hot Word tip is to use Styles. My other hot Word tip is to use cross-references. If you type "See Figure 3-1" in full, you're doing it wrong. If anyone from Microsoft is reading this, please fix a) the unreadable text in the Styles drop-down selection list in dark mode and b) stop asking my if the large amount of data I put on the clipboard should be available to other apps when I exit Word. With SSDs, this anachronism takes me far longer to read and click No to vs. just saving the damn clipboard content without asking me.
  - davidgay 6y ago
    > My hot Word tip is to use Styles. Wow. That was my hot tip for Word 1.0 too. I felt they did a rather too good job of hiding them subsequently.
    - blackoil 6y ago
      For me, Styles take about 50% of space on Home ribbon, so I wouldn't say they are hiding it.
  - viraptor 6y ago
    > My hot Word tip is to use Styles. This works great with your own document or small experienced group. But let any "normal" person do any changes... and you're back to local modifications. And is actually hard to figure out what was done ad-hoc and what via styles.
    - tomjen3 6y ago
      "Restricted editing" -> "Limit formatting to a selection of styles" Done.
- chalst 6y ago
  > However hot Word tip of the century is, and has always been, put all images inside a text box, they'll behave the way you expect then, and behave bizarrely otherwise. This points to the real criticism of Word: that its internal representation of text is quite different to its appearance (i.e. WYSIWYG does not imply WYSIWYM) and if you make even a little use of its advanced features and reedit, you will quite likely get a document that behaves perversely. I have quite often seen Word users give up on reformatting a section, cut and paste it into another application and then cut and paste-back-without-styling so that they can reformat from scratch.
  - oblio 6y ago
    The can generally use Format Painter for that. Or they could just use a style, which overrides local settings.
    - chalst 6y ago
      Quite a few of the properties a run of text might have are not controlled by styles, and Format Painter makes gives a uniform format for all the selected text: if you go this route, you still might have lots of hand reformatting to do. The point I was making is that the more of Word's advanced features you use, the more of these kinds of mismatch you risk encountering.
- pintxo 6y ago
  Did they fix this bug, where images in text-boxes where omitted from the automatically generated figure list? This caught me off-guard during my thesis.
- tpoacher 6y ago
  I don't think people are saying it can't be done. I think people are saying if you value your time or care about the risk of failure, you wouldn't do it like that.
- turtles_ 6y ago
  Downside with pictures in text boxes - you can't put footnotes in text boxes so if you need to cite pictures with any of the referencing styles that use footnotes that makes it a no go. It's an awkward and arbitrary limitation that ruins Word for a surprisingly common use case
- jonathanstrange 6y ago
  How do you get rid of Word's insistence to select text that I do not want to be selected? That is the one feature of Word that drives me nuts as a LaTeX and markdown user. I'm sure there must be a setting to change it somewhere, though. Right?
CharlesW 6y ago
I heartily agree with everything the parent says other than "Word is a pretty mediocre product". Advanced functionality like field codes allow you to get surprisingly deep. A comparison of FrameMaker and Latex would be a more interesting exercise, I think.
josephcsible 6y ago
I think the point is that a lot of people use Word for jobs that LaTeX is designed for.
svat 6y ago
This is not “from the other side”. Note that, despite the editorialized title of the HN submission here (Measuring "efficiency" in document prepration: Microsoft Word vs. LaTex), what the link contains is primarily a criticism of a paper that did compare the (what you called) “not comparable tools”, but did so very poorly. The criticism is sound, so whether LaTeX is in fact better along some dimension than Word is secondary, IMO. And if (as you say) comparing them is nonsensical in the first place, then that would only strengthen criticism of the paper.
tasogare 6y ago
Latex is pretty mediocre on a lot of fronts too: almost any operation outside writing ASCII text or equations requires to search the web for a package or a specific tricky use of commands (the last comically long of such commands I have to use was to insert a normally looking tilde in text), which make working with it painfully slow. In Word you can just input text (including code points outside the BMP) and it will works out of the box.
- rualca 6y ago
  > Latex is pretty mediocre on a lot of fronts too: almost any operation outside writing ASCII text or equations requires to search the web for a package or a specific tricky use of commands (...), which make working with it painfully slow. The only issue you're referring is discoverability of extensions from a newbie's standpoint. Most of the extra features I used only required a single command in the preamble to get everything to work out-of-the-box. And I mean everything. > In Word you can just input text (including code points outside the BMP) and it will works out of the box. ...except when it does not. I mean, the very basic task of getting numbered headings in Word is still mind-numbingly arcane for some reason, or to get images to play nice with their captions so that they break in the same page.
  - wwn_se 6y ago
    Latex with an editor as good as Intellij is for java (or perhaps VisualStudio for C#) would make it so much better. I have mostly used online latex tools since setting up the pipeline is simply too much work for the medium projects I have done.
  - roel_v 6y ago
    "The only issue you're referring is discoverability of extensions from a newbie's standpoint." shrug I can also say "the only issue you're referring to is discoverability of the advanced features of Word". "I mean, the very basic task of getting numbered headings in Word is still mind-numbingly arcane for some reason," You literally right-click on the "Heading 1" style in a brand new Word document, select "Modify" (as in "modify this style", quite obvious), under "Format" click on "Numbering" and select one of several numbering styles. I spend more time looking up how to do Markdown numbered headings markup than that - and that's not a complaint, I don't spend a lot of time on that at all. Look, I dislike non-semantic markup too. But all the whining about how if only those Word using idiots would just switch to Latex and all would be well in the world is getting old, and not only that, it's just wrong. Yes it's easy to make a pdf that looks like the default ugly Latex style, but beyond that, it's a massive time sink for even the tiniest modifications. All of these tools suck, some just suck a bit less for specific jobs than others. Claiming that Latex is 'superior' to Word is like saying that a tractor is superior to a bicycle because you can't pull a plow with a bicycle. I mean, sure, that's true - but there are many more criteria for judging modes of transport, just as there are multiple for document preparation systems, and Word wins on some criteria and Latex on others.
knolan 6y ago
They absolutely are comparable. They are the primary tool many academics use to prepare papers. In engineering I’d say it’s a 50:50 split between those using one or the other. Most students use Word while the exceptional ones have already embraced LaTeX.

com2kid 6y ago

> I think Word is a pretty mediocre product and has some ludicrous limitations. But really - this is just as nonsensical from the other side. I wrote a ~200 page (digital) textbook on 3d Modeling using Word. Word is incredibly customizable, I had hotkeys setup to do everything I wanted, figures and diagrams manages themselves rather well, and I was easily able to get into a state of flow using Word. Now it took several days to get Word that customized, but having seen what it can do, I will not call it mediocre. However hot Word tip of the century is, and has always been, put all images inside a text box, they'll behave the way you expect then, and behave bizarrely otherwise. Should be noted I wasn't doing any typesetting or any such thing, just writing the document, I understand that beyond just writing, LaTeX is a far superior tool.

throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
I've used MS Word over very many years and I'm happy to say that it is a far better product now than it ever was in terms of reliability and doing what it's supposed to do. I'd even call it... good. But that is now, and the number of times I've been burned in the past and watched other people being burned, and the distress it is caused those who just want to get their job done and the time wasted; those memories fade slowly.
- bdamm 6y ago
  This. Word is decent until it becomes a crashing, byzantine reformatting mess. Then it becomes some kind of obscene torture device as bug states propagate with the documents and restarting only brings inescapable anxiety.
MegaDeKay 6y ago
I'm right (write?) there with you. I routinely write documents hundreds of pages long in Word that are filled with cross-references, figures, complex tables, and Visio objects. Word is very solid (though it wasn't always so) and maintains really good performance even with large documents. Cutting and pasting massive amounts of content from one place to another in the document can be done with more or less reckless abandon. My hot Word tip is to use Styles. My other hot Word tip is to use cross-references. If you type "See Figure 3-1" in full, you're doing it wrong. If anyone from Microsoft is reading this, please fix a) the unreadable text in the Styles drop-down selection list in dark mode and b) stop asking my if the large amount of data I put on the clipboard should be available to other apps when I exit Word. With SSDs, this anachronism takes me far longer to read and click No to vs. just saving the damn clipboard content without asking me.
- davidgay 6y ago
  > My hot Word tip is to use Styles. Wow. That was my hot tip for Word 1.0 too. I felt they did a rather too good job of hiding them subsequently.
  - blackoil 6y ago
    For me, Styles take about 50% of space on Home ribbon, so I wouldn't say they are hiding it.
- viraptor 6y ago
  > My hot Word tip is to use Styles. This works great with your own document or small experienced group. But let any "normal" person do any changes... and you're back to local modifications. And is actually hard to figure out what was done ad-hoc and what via styles.
  - tomjen3 6y ago
    "Restricted editing" -> "Limit formatting to a selection of styles" Done.
chalst 6y ago
> However hot Word tip of the century is, and has always been, put all images inside a text box, they'll behave the way you expect then, and behave bizarrely otherwise. This points to the real criticism of Word: that its internal representation of text is quite different to its appearance (i.e. WYSIWYG does not imply WYSIWYM) and if you make even a little use of its advanced features and reedit, you will quite likely get a document that behaves perversely. I have quite often seen Word users give up on reformatting a section, cut and paste it into another application and then cut and paste-back-without-styling so that they can reformat from scratch.
- oblio 6y ago
  The can generally use Format Painter for that. Or they could just use a style, which overrides local settings.
  - chalst 6y ago
    Quite a few of the properties a run of text might have are not controlled by styles, and Format Painter makes gives a uniform format for all the selected text: if you go this route, you still might have lots of hand reformatting to do. The point I was making is that the more of Word's advanced features you use, the more of these kinds of mismatch you risk encountering.
pintxo 6y ago
Did they fix this bug, where images in text-boxes where omitted from the automatically generated figure list? This caught me off-guard during my thesis.
tpoacher 6y ago
I don't think people are saying it can't be done. I think people are saying if you value your time or care about the risk of failure, you wouldn't do it like that.
turtles_ 6y ago
Downside with pictures in text boxes - you can't put footnotes in text boxes so if you need to cite pictures with any of the referencing styles that use footnotes that makes it a no go. It's an awkward and arbitrary limitation that ruins Word for a surprisingly common use case
jonathanstrange 6y ago
How do you get rid of Word's insistence to select text that I do not want to be selected? That is the one feature of Word that drives me nuts as a LaTeX and markdown user. I'm sure there must be a setting to change it somewhere, though. Right?

CharlesW 6y ago

I heartily agree with everything the parent says other than "Word is a pretty mediocre product". Advanced functionality like field codes allow you to get surprisingly deep. A comparison of FrameMaker and Latex would be a more interesting exercise, I think.

josephcsible 6y ago

I think the point is that a lot of people use Word for jobs that LaTeX is designed for.

svat 6y ago

This is not “from the other side”. Note that, despite the editorialized title of the HN submission here (Measuring "efficiency" in document prepration: Microsoft Word vs. LaTex), what the link contains is primarily a criticism of a paper that did compare the (what you called) “not comparable tools”, but did so very poorly. The criticism is sound, so whether LaTeX is in fact better along some dimension than Word is secondary, IMO. And if (as you say) comparing them is nonsensical in the first place, then that would only strengthen criticism of the paper.

tasogare 6y ago

Latex is pretty mediocre on a lot of fronts too: almost any operation outside writing ASCII text or equations requires to search the web for a package or a specific tricky use of commands (the last comically long of such commands I have to use was to insert a normally looking tilde in text), which make working with it painfully slow. In Word you can just input text (including code points outside the BMP) and it will works out of the box.

rualca 6y ago
> Latex is pretty mediocre on a lot of fronts too: almost any operation outside writing ASCII text or equations requires to search the web for a package or a specific tricky use of commands (...), which make working with it painfully slow. The only issue you're referring is discoverability of extensions from a newbie's standpoint. Most of the extra features I used only required a single command in the preamble to get everything to work out-of-the-box. And I mean everything. > In Word you can just input text (including code points outside the BMP) and it will works out of the box. ...except when it does not. I mean, the very basic task of getting numbered headings in Word is still mind-numbingly arcane for some reason, or to get images to play nice with their captions so that they break in the same page.
- wwn_se 6y ago
  Latex with an editor as good as Intellij is for java (or perhaps VisualStudio for C#) would make it so much better. I have mostly used online latex tools since setting up the pipeline is simply too much work for the medium projects I have done.
- roel_v 6y ago
  "The only issue you're referring is discoverability of extensions from a newbie's standpoint." shrug I can also say "the only issue you're referring to is discoverability of the advanced features of Word". "I mean, the very basic task of getting numbered headings in Word is still mind-numbingly arcane for some reason," You literally right-click on the "Heading 1" style in a brand new Word document, select "Modify" (as in "modify this style", quite obvious), under "Format" click on "Numbering" and select one of several numbering styles. I spend more time looking up how to do Markdown numbered headings markup than that - and that's not a complaint, I don't spend a lot of time on that at all. Look, I dislike non-semantic markup too. But all the whining about how if only those Word using idiots would just switch to Latex and all would be well in the world is getting old, and not only that, it's just wrong. Yes it's easy to make a pdf that looks like the default ugly Latex style, but beyond that, it's a massive time sink for even the tiniest modifications. All of these tools suck, some just suck a bit less for specific jobs than others. Claiming that Latex is 'superior' to Word is like saying that a tractor is superior to a bicycle because you can't pull a plow with a bicycle. I mean, sure, that's true - but there are many more criteria for judging modes of transport, just as there are multiple for document preparation systems, and Word wins on some criteria and Latex on others.

knolan 6y ago

They absolutely are comparable. They are the primary tool many academics use to prepare papers. In engineering I’d say it’s a 50:50 split between those using one or the other. Most students use Word while the exceptional ones have already embraced LaTeX.