[texhax] TeX v. Word, etc.

[Victor Ivrii]

On 8/21/06, Michael Barr <mbarr at math.mcgill.ca> wrote:
> I have never actually used Word, but I remember my wife giving up trying
> to read a Word 4.2 file in Word 5.1 (I think it was).  At that point, they
> maintained some compatibility with the previous version but if your file
> was from two versions early, it was useless.  This was before rtf, I think
> (anyway, I didn't know about it) and she wasn't interested, because her
> customers weren't (she is a free-lance translator) in word to TeX or
> anything like that.  Eventually, she found someone who still had Word 5.0
> and could read the 4.2 file and send it back to her and she was able to
> read that.  The formatting was not perfect but the text was there.
>
> I fully expect that my papers will still be usable 50 years from now, long
> after I have passed my use-by date.


Recently I was forced to deal with two MSW files containing math high
school problems... I must confess that MSW is an easy, intuitive,
great product... in comparison with built-in equations and graphics
editors. so, what actually are we discussing: pure MSW (which is
simply very bad, IMHO) or MSW with all the extensions (which is much
worse)




>
> Now imagine if the files had been in Word 1.0.
>
> On Mon, 21 Aug 2006, Tom Schneider wrote:
>
> > > Take a Word file from 20 years ago and try to read it with any
> > > software around today.
> >
> > Can anyone give some real examples where you actually try this and
> > report what happened?  We struggled at one point merely to get a Wordy
> > file from PC to the Mac (and failed).  Could the file be read by
> > OpenOffice?  If so it could be exported as RTF [Really Terrible
> > Format] and then converted with rtf2latex.
> >
> > http://www.ccrnp.ncifcrf.gov/~toms/papers/primer/italian/
> >
> > > I recently took a paper of mine from 1986, written for an early
> > > version of Latex2.
> >
> > I did a similar translation from Troff to Latex2e ...
> >
> > http://www.ccrnp.ncifcrf.gov/~toms/papers/schneider1986/
> >
> > Tom
> >
> >   Dr. Thomas D. Schneider
> >   National Institutes of Health
> >   National Cancer Institute
> >   Center for Cancer Research Nanobiology Program
> >   Molecular Information Theory Group
> >   Frederick, Maryland  21702-1201
> >   toms at ncifcrf.gov
> >   permanent email: toms at alum.mit.edu (use only if first address fails)
> >   http://www.ccrnp.ncifcrf.gov/~toms/
> >
>
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-- 
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Victor Ivrii, Department of Mathematics, University of Toronto