[OS X TeX] Macintouch report on TeX versus Word

[Alex Ross]

On Jan 22, 2009, at 6:11 AM, David B. Thompson, Ph.D., P.E., D.WRE,  
CFM wrote:

> On Jan 21, 2009, at 17:30 , Alain Schremmer wrote:
>
> The fact is that this doesn't matter much to me, personally. I can  
> carry my own water (mostly) with the tools at hand and should be  
> able to finish out my career regardless of whether new tools evolve  
> to hide the underlying mark-up required to use LaTeX. But you also  
> have a valid point--if LaTeX (and TeX) are to survive this old  
> dinosaur, then more development is required for one or more meta- 
> tools that hide the details behind a (semi-) WYSIWYG shell. I  
> haven't used LyX in forever, so I have no idea how it's faring these  
> days. But something like it is required for the word-processing  
> crowd. Otherwise, I think LaTeX runs the risk of fading away as  
> those of us happy with text editors and command shells die off.

For what it's worth, there are those of us who've only learned LaTeX  
recently and yet do not trust WYSIWYG editors to produce reliable  
results.  There is a whole new generation learning to edit plain text  
and pilot the command line as we speak…