[OS X TeX] Re: Macintouch report on TeX versus Word

[Alain Schremmer]

On Jan 25, 2009, at 11:42 AM, Adam M. Goldstein wrote:

> A book printed on acid-free paper with almost any ink of the sort  
> used for books generally and protected from accident (fire, flood,  
> abuse, etc) can be expected to last 100 years, easily, still even  
> in pristine condition. 150 years is a cutoff point for many  
> libraries---when a book reaches that age, it is checked to see if  
> it needs special preservation or is of special value. Many will  
> not, and few that are well-taken-care of will. Even paperbacks will  
> last 20 or 30, although they will be yellowing and probably falling  
> apart. Most digital media become obsolete within a few years, just  
> as a normal development of technology; CD's are physically fragile,  
> for instance, their center holes cracking from having been loaded  
> too many times, or from having been taken in and out of their  
> containers too many times. These problems can be surmounted, of  
> course. They scratch easily as well.
>
> The plain text format of LaTeX input is indeed far superior to Word  
> and other proprietary formats. I think that anything in some form  
> of SGML would be pretty good too, although much less good on the  
> human-readable front. Still, with intuitive enough tags, a printout  
> might still be understandable, even if there no machines to  
> interpret the code and display it as it was meant to be.

Exactly what I wanted to say!

Grateful regards
--schremmer