[pdftex] MS Word hell, TeX heaven?

[Herman Bruyninckx]

On Thu, 13 Mar 2003 ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk wrote:

[...]
> > Yes -- good point. Opening old Word files can easily be quite
> > unpleasant.
>
> So can opening old LaTeX files, BTW.  Try opening the files for a book
> written prior to LaTeX2e and see if the style files for the fonts,
> graphics inclusion, references etc are still around and can be made to
> work.
At least you _can_ open them, and recover all the _contents_. Maybe not
the exact style or layout or whatever eye candy, but the content is
there.

[...]
> I'm afraid I find these arguments pretty specious.  People do write
> scholarly books and theses in Word and with modern versions it is quite
> reliable.  I would not choose to use it, because I do not like the look of
> its results and I prefer to work on Unix/Linux.  But designing and laying
> out a book in LaTeX is not `heaven' and there are plenty of dreadful
> examples on my bookshelf.  With 3 books over the last 9 years, one with
> four editions (and about 20 printings), I am only two well aware of the
> costs.

I agree. But I repeat: my argument was about the perenniality of the
_content_.

Herman

-- 
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