[pdftex] MS Word hell, TeX heaven?

[John Culleton]

On Thursday 13 March 2003 02:10 pm, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> 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.
>
teTeX and LaTeX are not coextensive terms. 

> 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.
>
My complaints are several. First it is too wordy. Second, it assumes that your 
document falls within a small set of of types. Third, there is no single 
guide to all of LaTeX. It takes several books, most of them obsolete. 
Fourth, the various and sundry LaTeX macros can conflict with one another.
Fifth, unlike pdftex and Context, the plain TeX commands are not supported. 
 
> 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.
>

Ahem. I think plain TeX, TeXsis, pdftex and Context also do excellent math. 
And there are other math tools outside of the world of TeX, not as good as, 
but passable. I edited the LaTeX parts of an academic journal where 60%
of the articles were done in MSWord in final form. 

> One has only to look at the nightmare that is XML
Thus far I have avoided looking at it. What is it for?

> to see how fortunate we are that Knuthian common-sense
> has imbued LaTeX with its qualities of versatility
> and practicality.

Knuth did not design LaTeX, although he was aware of it when he printed the 
final version of The TeXBook.  So his common sense spreads beyond LaTeX.

\begin{rant}
There is this amazing tendency for those who use LaTeX to think that it is the
only game in TeX-town and math is the only reason for using TeX at all.
I have thus far done a Dog Breeder Directory (Plain plus an rdbms), a stack of 
sequentially numbered armbands, several romance novels with all kinds of 
cutsey page decorations, form letters with envelopes, custom hymnals for my 
choir and so on with TeX, mostly plain Tex.  TeX has many advantages over 
competing products, including such niceties as handling footnotes 
automatically, alternate layouts for the same document with a command line 
switch (Context), decent embedded indexing capability and other things I have 
mentioned before in this thread. If TeX is ever to spread beyond its current 
base then we must discard the LaTeX-only academic-only variety of tunnel 
vision. 
\end{rant}

Cheers,

John Culleton