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I am very confused by the implication that TeX or LaTeX make it easy to create a document that looks exactly the way you want. Unless you want it to look like a
by reeses 13y ago
I am very confused by the implication that TeX or LaTeX make it easy to create a document that looks exactly the way you want. Unless you want it to look like a paper presented to a publication that has a mandatory style, and a package is available with that style, it's just not true.
And that is almost the whole point. Most people are idiots about how to present written material, so TeX and friends make those decisions for us. It's especially frustrating when you have to dink with floats, because now you're second-guessing TeX, and it exacts a high price.
I've used TeX for over 25 years and I'm comfortable saying that I could produce documents of a similar quality, with better support for collaboration, with Word.
I still use TeX for many projects but the Word style capability is great.
Markdown still sucks, though. :)
- nhaehnle 13y agowith better support for collaboration, with Word How? This is an honest question. I wouldn't use Word anyway, but I am just not aware of anything that could come close to Git + LaTeX in terms of collaboration support.
- reeses 13y agoFair question. I've been doing projects with people who have no technical background to speak of, but immense domain knowledge. They wrote their theses in word (god help them), published in journals that required submissions in word (there are more and more of the things), and include a lot of figures in their papers or grant proposals. Sharepoint helps a lot with collaboration, but even word's basic change tracking and commenting facilities are good for people working around a document via email, Dropbox, or even git. Word still creates those weird situations for which it is infamous, but they are generally rare. Also, word has become much more stable, even with larger documents.