Sorry, lost the original. I will try to recreate it: The big advantages of TeX are: (1) The purpose of TeX was and is to lower the labor and cost of high qual

Sorry, lost the original. I will try to recreate it: The big advantages of TeX are: (1) The purpose of TeX was and is to lower the labor and cost of high quality document preparation of heavily mathematical material and to permit authors to prepare such documents themselves. For such work, TeX is and near the beginning long has been the very welcome, highly respected, unchallenged international standard. For people writing such documents, TeX is nearly essential. Before TeX, just the 'typing' could be more work than the work the typing was communicating. Before TeX, preparation of documents with mathematical material was grim for authors, typists, publishers, etc. (2) The TeX software has produced almost exactly the same output from the same input on nearly any computer over decades. (3) The software is essentially totally free of bugs. (4) Knuth's documentation is exemplary. In a sense, TeX is yet another word processing text markup language; the big differences are high quality output, especially of mathematical material, and the macro language. For more, TeX was not to cut new ground in graphical arts; instead, essentially TeX looked backwards, not forwards, in that the documents were and are to be essentially just black marks on white paper much like huge examples going back 100+ years on the shelves of the research libraries. TeX was to ease the production of such documents and not to produce different documents. So, TeX is not for just everything that can be put on paper, a screen, a cereal box, or a billboard; it is not for animated foils, animated movies, interactive user interfaces, engineering drawing, Web pages, routine text documents, routine e-mail, etc. TeX is not for average customers of Apple or Microsoft Word or some high end graphical arts software from Adobe. Criticisms of TeX seem mostly to be from people who don't need TeX. For people who really need TeX, the criticisms are from not very important down to irrelevant.