[texhax] MS Word & Mathtype to TeX

[Thomas Schneider]

> But, my question is: why can't that universal and stable program be
> MS Word?

It's not stable.  It's proprietary.  It is binary so one can't write
programs to manipulate it.  The equations it produces are ugly.  It's
hard to edit (compared to Vim).  It does not separate editing from
display.  It changes in ways that force people to buy upgrades.  It's
not open source and so can't be fixed.

> Can journals not afford a new version of MS Word once every ten
> years?

Why force authors to pay for it?  Why pay for it when we can use
OpenOffice instead?  OpenOffice is now based on an international
standard.  Last I heard Word could not be a standard because parts
were not defined.

See:

http://alum.mit.edu/www/toms/latex.html

for further discussions.  Note the section "Why Use LaTeX?"  Note the
graph which shows that MS Word is ok for tiny efforts but quickly
becomes unusable with larger projects whereas LaTeX may take some
effort for small projects but it scales much better.

Tom

  Thomas D. Schneider, Ph.D.
  National Institutes of Health
  National Cancer Institute
  Gene Regulation and Chromosome Biology Laboratory
  Molecular Information Theory Group
  Frederick, Maryland  21702-1201
  http://alum.mit.edu/www/toms (permanent)