[pdftex] MS Word hell, TeX heaven?

[Timothy Murphy]

On Thu, Mar 13, 2003 at 01:11:34PM +0100, Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
> 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.

How can you say that LaTeX is "increasingly fragile"?
I find it astonishingly solid and completely reliable.
teTeX is just about the most reliable program I know.

The complaints I see about LaTeX (from within the TeX community)
are all of the form that you can't do something in LaTeX
which I would never want to do anyway,
and which I can't really imagine any of my colleagues wanting to do either.

For some reason the pointy-heads won't admit
that 95% of the people using LaTeX are using it for math,
for which it is not just the best tool, 
it is the only tool for the job.

In light of the sad passing of Michael Downes,
I'd add that amsmath does almost everything
anyone could want in the math line,
and does it simply and effectively.

One has only to look at the nightmare that is XML
to see how fortunate we are that Knuthian common-sense
has imbued LaTeX with its qualities of versatility
and practicality.





-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail: tim at maths.tcd.ie
tel: 086-233 6090
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland