[pdftex] MS Word hell, TeX heaven?

[James Haefner]

ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk wrote:
> On Thu, 13 Mar 2003, Magnus Lie Hetland wrote:
> 

> 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.  

I have to agree with Prof. Ripley: for every Word disaster, you can find a TeX 
disaster.  Ultimately, it's an aesthetic decision: the aesthetics of the output 
and the aesthetics of the activity of writing.  Like most tex users, I do 
mathematics and programming.  MS Word math output has improved but is still no 
match for tex; as a programmer "tex-ing" feels better for input than the 
WYSIWYG/drop-down-menu approach.  Moreover, with tex/latex, I have a choice in 
the editor, and so far I have not discovered keystroke definitions in Word for 
basic editor movements that I need/want in an editor (e.g., page scrolling with 
the cursor fixed).  (I haven't found alternative editors in Unix or MS that 
"save as Word doc" to be 100% compatible with all Word features, but I may be 
wrong.)

For those that want or have to operate in both worlds, there are new versions of 
the promising MS applications to inter-convert:  Word2Tex and Tex2Word at:

http://www.word2tex.com

(And yes, of course, being MS-based, they are not free, but there is an academic 
discount.)

Jim Haefner
-- 
James W. Haefner             Email: jhaefner at biology.usu.edu
Dept Biology/Ecology Center  Voice: 435-797-3553
Utah State University        FAX:   435-797-1575
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