[pdftex] MS Word hell, TeX heaven?

[Herman Bruyninckx]

On Thu, 13 Mar 2003, Magnus Lie Hetland wrote:

> >     > I suppose these data don't support your hypothesis, but I've
> >     > actually written a 600 page book in Word -- though I must admit
> >     > each chapter was a separate file ;)
> >
A big advantage of (La)TeX over Word for large documents is that one can
use a file versioning system (such as CVS) to really cooperate with many
people, and work on the same files. In addition, this cooperation works
on every platform, not just Windows.

Other large-scale advantages are:
- scriptable: it's easy to make automatic reports, with high
  typographical quality and rich features.
- scalable: (La)TeX documents can be stored in data bases as simple
  text, which adds all the scalability and configurability that
  databases bring.
- searchable: it's easy to search over a big archive of (La)TeX
  documents.
- perenniality: one can be sure to be able to access (La)TeX archives at
  any time in the distant future.

Herman Bruyninckx

-- 
  K.U.Leuven, Mechanical Engineering, Robotics Research Group
<http://people.mech.kuleuven.ac.be/~bruyninc> Tel: +32 16 322480