[texhax] MS Word & Mathtype to TeX

[Mark Hale]

You do realize that you are writing to a group of people who have put
forth the effort to learn how to use this system, and, generally, are
very happy with it. I know of no one in any technical field (including
linguistics, my field) who has put forth the effort to learn TeX and
then opted to use something like Word as their document preparation
system. Your hesitation to put forth the effort that we have all already
invested to learn how to get one's computer to do something this useful
says more about you than it does about TeX, I'm afraid. It's hard, but
it just isn't THAT hard.

Mark

On Mon, Dec 19, 2011 at 7:20 PM,  <cornwall_5 at comcast.net> wrote:
> First: wow! Thank you all for all your long detailed and varied responses!
>
>
>
> I and my best friend (who does practically no word processing)
>
> suffer under terrible lack of compatibility problems with many other pieces
> of software and hardware
>
> (video editing; most difficult of all is capturing: digitizing analog video
> and audio).
>
> By comparison, I consider MS Word very stable. I currently still use the
> 2000 version,
>
> since I cannot afford an upgrade.
>
>
>
> I've just come to accept it as a natural and unavoidable part of the great
> technical difficulty and complexity of technology.  Nevertheless...
>
>
>
>>As  I have already mentioned I have a certain bias towards TeX.  It does
>> require
> a certain effort to master but modern TeX editors/IDEs make this
> process easier.
>
>
>
> It is that bewildering mess of strange filenames with file endings (like .gz
> ??)
>
> that cannot be opened by any program on my (Windows-based) computer
>
> NOT by any program it tries to locate out on the internet
>
> that has put me off from TeX,
>
> that has caused me to download TeX half a dozen times in the past 20 years,
>
> give up, get no farther than that, then delete it from my computer.
>
>
>
> If you think I am asking a lot of questions and making a lot of responses
> now,
>
> if I were to get into this whole TeX thing
>
> I'd be contacting the TeX support group TWENTY times as often with
> questions,
>
> even just to find something if you direct me to a help menu or help log.
>
>
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