[OS X TeX] TeX and the wild wild world out there

[Anthony Morton]

> Not sure 'acceptable' and 'ugly as hell' fit together.... I just 
> assessed a PhD thesis which had lots of fairly simple maths in it -- 
> mostly set theory type stuff, very few subscripts, no fractions, 
> integrals, roots etc. Because the thesis was prepared in Word the 
> maths was, as you say, ugly as hell; however, to my eyes that makes it 
> unacceptable as it's actually very hard to read. It's a BIT LIKE 
> WRITING ALL YOUR THESIS BODY TEXT IN MONOSPACED CAPS.

Yep.  I think what we really have is two very different attitudes to 
maths.  Some of us really care about the maths and want it to look its 
best, so we use TeX because we can't stand to see a beautiful theorem 
marred by being typeset in Word.  Others really don't care about the 
maths so much but need it to support whatever other work it is they're 
doing, so they don't necessarily care very much how it looks.  These 
others will be drawn to Word because they're likely already familiar 
with it, and will tend to regard their TeXing colleagues as being 
overly precious about aesthetics.

This at least may explain why I see so many engineering papers in Word 
but still find most mathematicians and physicists I come across using 
TeX.

Tony M.
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