5 ms·
If you use Windows, Apple secretly hates you.
by rollypolly 14y ago
If you use Windows, Apple secretly hates you.
- sophacles 14y agoTo be fair, MS Office on Mac has a tendency to fail in extremely frustrating ways too... (Seriously, section references, picture captions/references, toc, all just stop working at a certain document size, if at all, not to mention the freeze at a 100pp thing).
- gjulianm 14y agoI know that maybe you do work that is impossible to do in other suite than Office, but, did you try LaTeX? It manages all the references incredibly good, picture captions, TOC... it requires more work than Office, but I think is more rewarding.
- sophacles 14y agoWe regularly use LaTeX when it is internal to our group, but a lot of our partners won't use anything but word. Fortunately it is only a small number of documents that reach the limits with them, but unfortunately they take a disproportionate amount of the joint effort :/. For internal stuff, and papers where our group has sole authorship (and some enlightened partners) we have a very nice set of scripts for auto-generating git repos with all the latex styles and generic skeletons for us.
- bitwize 14y agoYeah, good luck getting LaTeX to be accepted for interdepartmental correspondence, let alone inter-company. Also, Word can track revision history on each document. What's the equivalent for LaTeX? A git repo? The upshot of network effects is that if you work for anybody but yourself, a Windows PC with a moderately recent Microsoft Office is a requirement.
- nknight 14y agoWell, maybe in whatever line of work you've chosen, or just whatever big company you've decided to work for, but it's never been a requirement for me.
- gjulianm 14y agoIf the correspondence does not need to be editable, PDF is the best option, with even less problems than Word or OpenOffice formats. And LaTeX has built-in support for it. I agree with revision history, Word probably manages it pretty good. But git repos aren't a bad option if you are used to them. I personally use Dropbox, so I have a simple revision history without problems. Anyways, I didn't say LaTeX was the perfect solution, that's why I said that he maybe had some impediment to use it instead of Office.
- EricDeb 14y agoI think LaTeX is built for perfectionist, pedantic academics. That is not to say I don't secretly love it, but after spending hours battling the program trying to get it to look right, I usually end up asking myself what's the point?
- dubya 14y agoThat sounds like a LaTeX koan. If you really must use LaTeX, eventually you reach the state of just writing the content and to heck with the formatting, or you go nuts and learn to write a proper style file. You are pretty certain not to volunteer to write up the department newsletter with lots of pictures from the spring picnic.
- hristov 14y agoBut that is not really fair is it. Apple is not supposed to have good Windows software to do Microsoft a favor. They should have good Windows software to do themselves a favor. Because people will be more likely to use their devices. And if the Windows software is excellent, Windows users will consider an Apple for their next computer. Now a Windows user hears about all the hoopla about how great Apple interfaces are, looks at iTunes and says "that cannot be true".
- sophacles 14y agoMy point was more that a company that makes an operating system probably puts it's best devs on the software for that OS. Further, there is probably not a lot of institutional knowledge of the other supported os. Lastly, there is probably some difficulty in getting good applicants with ".Net guys, come work at Apple", or "Objective-C dev? MS is hiring!". It reads like "come work for the enemy".
- pluies_public 14y agoNot so secretly apparently.