[pdftex] MS Word hell, TeX heaven?

[Sebastian Rahtz]

If I may play devil's advocate:

> A big advantage of (La)TeX over Word for large documents is that one can
> use a file versioning system (such as CVS) to really cooperate with many
> people, and work on the same files. 

I think you'll find that Word users work very well collaboratively;
they have some excellent software support for annotating documents. 
some people use Word precisely because this sort of support is so good.

> In addition, this cooperation works
> on every platform, not just Windows.

or Mac. 

> Other large-scale advantages are:
> - scriptable: it's easy to make automatic reports, with high
>   typographical quality and rich features.

most decent publishing systems allow that

> - scalable: (La)TeX documents can be stored in data bases as simple
>   text, which adds all the scalability and configurability that
>   databases bring.

I'd argue that LaTeX is spectacularly bad for storing in databases,
because of the interdependency caused by macros and catcodes. How
can you store a fragment sensibly like
 \emax=\h_a
when you don't have the definitions for the macros, or know
that I have changed the meaning of _?

> - searchable: it's easy to search over a big archive of (La)TeX
>   documents.
no, it isn't, for the same reason as above.

> - perenniality: one can be sure to be able to access (La)TeX archives at
>   any time in the distant future.

thats an argument in favour of any text format.

which of these advantages is not also true of RTF?

**********
Of course, I am just being awkward. But I feel a little
embarassed by fervent declarations that LaTeX is the ultimate
great and good markup scheme. It is not, for many reasons. It's a
workable, but increasingly fragile, authoring interface to the TeX
engine; we don't have to feel ashamed of it, but equally we should
recognize its limitations.

The 25 years of TeX recognizes the strength of
TeX-the-typesetting-engine, not LaTeX.....
-- 
Sebastian Rahtz <sebastian.rahtz at computing-services.oxford.ac.uk>
OUCS