Comments on: LaTeX vs. Word vs. Writer

By: Markus Schabel

Markus Schabel — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:27:19 +0000

I find this pretty interesting. I’m writing almost anything with LaTeX and I’m always impressed by the results.

It would be interesting to make the same analysis with eBook readers. I’ve just purchased a nook (which is a great gadget), and noticed that it doesn’t display any ligatures (at least in ePub books, I haven’t tried PDF yet, but I think it will be the same).

Since eBooks are used for reading (that means static text, no need for WYSIWYG) I think the display mechanisms need some work to achieve good readable text. However, often printed books are also missing these “prettyfiers”.

So why do eBook readers work with ePub or PDF instead of LaTeX? ;-)

By: Eyolf Østrem

Eyolf Østrem — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 22:31:33 +0000

I’ll have to check this out. I know I had some problems with the special characters not being embedded properly, so that viewing it with Adobe Acrobat, they wouldn’t show, whereas any native linux pdf viewer had no problem with the files. It sounds like what you describe.
If that is the case, it is a depressing testimony of the shallowness of the internet: the article (and the file) has been online for a couple of years now, with quite a few daily views, but you’re the first person to mention this…

By: Confused

Confused — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:45:09 +0000

I am confused. Is there something wrong with your PDF sample? The LaTeX sample is absolutely terrible — no small caps, broken font weighting in the title, bad weights for italics, no ligatures, no real ellipses. Essentially all of the things you cite in your article are not seen in the PDF. The worst thing is, I know from previous use that your explanation of LaTeX’s functionality is what I ought to be seeing.

By: Destillat #11 | duetsch.info - Open Source, Wet-, Web-, Software

Destillat #11 | duetsch.info - Open Source, Wet-, Web-, Software — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 12:16:47 +0000

[...] LaTeX vs. Word vs. Writer [...]

By: waruna

waruna — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 10:03:17 +0000

Thank you for the insightful article. I am a Latex user myself and thoroughly enjoy the proper use of typography. Currently, I am using Latex on Mac(OS X), Linux and Windows platforms however I wish I could just stick with my operating system of choice i.e. Linux. My problem using Latex on Linux (Ubuntu 9.10) is that the package handling. I wish there is a automatic mechanism to download the unavailable packages from CTAN without much of a user intervention. I know that MikTex for Linux does just that but it is on Beta for far too long. Could you point me to a site where I can find a tool for this purpose. I hate manually adding missing packages, every time I compile a tex file?

By: wisnu arnould

wisnu arnould — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 08:29:21 +0000

Yes, Latex is more powerful for me to write any kind of journal and research paper, thanks to my prof in Gunadarma

By: wp-popular.com » Blog Archive » Nicely typeset WordPress theme

wp-popular.com » Blog Archive » Nicely typeset WordPress theme — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 08:12:32 +0000

[...] See the rest here: Nicely typeset WordPress theme [...]

By: latexlover

latexlover — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 06:29:36 +0000

How did you get the nice latex design on your website.

I am always dismayed at HTML and happy to see some good typography online.

By: Eyolf Østrem

Eyolf Østrem — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 17:44:56 +0000

I meant what I wrote: Word is the worst thing that has happened since the late nineteenth century. There was some really bad typography around a hundred years ago, and there is now, thanks – among other things – to Word.

By: Peter

Peter — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 17:22:49 +0000

I only just started to read this article so I cannot yet comment on the whole, but I just wanted to set something straight. You write that MS Word is “the single most influential spreader of bad typographical taste since the late nineteenth century.” However, the nineteenth century was between 1801 and 1900, and MS Word was still a century away in that period. Obviously you meant the “twentieth century”, which ran from 1901 to 2000. This is a mistake many people make, so I wanted to point this out so that hopefully someone who will read this will avoid this mistake in the future.

By: Mica

Mica — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 00:12:38 +0000

I agree, latex is most excellent.

I have finally come up with a system for my own personal writing that leaves the source clean and readable as plain text, then i move into latex-xelatex-context for type setting.

I write my stuff in markdown or multimarkdown (one could easily use reST as well, or textile, or any other plain text markup), then use pandoc or the multimarkdown bundle to convert into TeX. From there I just edit the TeX file until i am satisfied with the result. This has worked out very well for me, as markdown is very readable, I don’t use many image (or any images at all, though latex and markdown handle them very well.).

You missed one other thing that latex is good with: source control. While you have to use an extra program (I use git, but there are tons of other choices). Word has a “track” changes feature, but this quick bloats the file size, leaving the document somewhat unusable after only a few revisions. If you are making many revisions, or maintain documents that are edited frequently, latex + revision control is awesome.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 05:59:22 +0000

Ah, full justification. Never mind.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 05:52:56 +0000

How did you get the word processor line layout to look so good? Word and writer always give me disgusting, uneven line endings on the right side of the page. Is there some setting you can apply for (relatively) beautiful output?
But really good article and analysis.

By: Twitter Trackbacks for things twice ? Blog Archive ? LaTeX vs. Word vs. Writer [oestrem.com] on Topsy.com

Tue, 01 Sep 2009 04:05:49 +0000

[...] things twice ? Blog Archive ? LaTeX vs. Word vs. Writer oestrem.com/thingstwice/2007/05/latex-vs-word-vs-writer – view page – cached I’ve earlier performed a little test, comparing two files: one produced with MS Word, the other with OpenOffice.org Writer. The purpose then was to demonstrate that Word isn’t necessarily such a bad piece of software — it’s just not always used in a way which is likely to give nice results: most people don’t change the default settings of Times New Roman/Arial and ragged right margin, and they apply formatting manually for each new element, which is bound to lead to inconsistencies. — From the page [...]

By: Jason

Jason — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 11:23:18 +0000

The last word processor I used was WordPerfect 6.0 for DOS. It has all been
LaTeX and, occasionally, HTML since then, with excellent results.

For a recent introduction to LaTeX, see
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/documentation/beginlatex/html/

Both Emacs and Vim are great text editors.

It isn’t surprising that the typographic quality of TeX/LaTeX is still ahead
of that of word processors.

As a final note, being blind, and using a braille display and synthetic speech
to access a computer, I don’t care for a wysiwyg editor. With a markup
language such as LaTeX, I can proofread my writing accurately, since I can
read exactly the codes that will determine the final formatting, many of which
are concerned with structure rather than apperance anyway.

If you find the LaTeX commands distracting, perhaps there is an editor that
can selectively hide and expose the markup, as WordPerfect for DOS used to do
with its “reveal codes” mode.