Typesetting and word processors comes up again

Someone compares OpenOffice.org Writer and Word. Again.

Much discussion is made of styles, while I scream at the screen¹ LyX, you fools!.

I am therefore gratified when much of the inevitable discussion was about Word processors being a really shitty vehicle for a retro-fitted document styling technique, and dozens of people pipe up with um, LaTeX? and hey, ever heard of LyX?.

I really don't understand why people use Word to write any kind of lengthy document. LyX is better at styling, output (PDF anyone?), figures, maths, referencing, footnotes, URLs, document size (both in KB and managing 300-page docs), TOCs and indices, and is free, cross-platform, and mature. Word is expensive, functionally pointless, and fails to do the job².

Bloody-minded stubbornness?

¹ Poetic license: I didn't scream at all.

² The number of times I watched the figures in Lisa's final-year report just disappear from a Word document stored on the hard drive was truly amazing. I have no faith at all in Word being able to safely serialise a document to disk and load it again in the same condition.
PS. like the cool numbered footnotes?

Posted at 2004-05-05 11:02:22 by Richard • Link to Typesetting and wo…
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