Why LaTex is Superior to Office
If you are a regular reader, you probably saw me mentioning LaTex at various times. I always praise it as the superior solution - one above and beyond the traditional, word processing products. So let me take a minute of your time and explain exactly why I choose to use LaTex, and why you should consider learning it.
Output Quality
The most striking difference between text produced by Word or Open Office and LaTex is the quality of the output. You have to keep in mind that LaTex is not just a mere word processor - it is a typesetting software. It does kerning, hyphenation and all the tricks used by professional typesetters who work in professional publishing industry. This means that your text is always beautifully justified and balanced across the page. Please compare the two screen shots below. This is some random Lorem Ipsum text in MS word:
sample produced in MS Word
Now compare it to the same text sample generated by LaTex:
sample produced in LaTex
They look similar, but you will notice that the LaTex sample just flows better, and looks more professional. Let’s see what happens when I contract some of the words to create really long expressions, and justify the text in word:
justified text in Word
You might be familiar with this situation. Word does not know how to break words across line with hyphens. Nor does it know how to use kerning to bring some letters closer together, and push other ones apart to avoid creating huge white space gaps. LaTex does both:
sample of the same justified text in LaTex
The difference is striking. On one had you have ugly gaps, on the other you have nicely flowing, justified text. Which one do you like more? You be the judge. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. I could show you many cases in which LaTex beats conventional word processing in placing figures, floating text around images, displaying mathematical formulas and etc.
Transparency of Markup
When you write LaTex you work with plain text files. You simply add markup commands to your text. This is very much like writing HTML - just with more features, and more powerful parser on the receiving end. So what do I mean by transparency? You simply always see what is going on. For example, consider the following LaTex code:
Plain Text. \textbf{Bold} Text.
The \textbf command is the equivalent of the HTML <strong> - it makes the text boldface. You clearly see what is going on - the text between braces will be bold, while the text outside will be plain. Word on the other hand utilizes hidden markup. Yes, there are markup characters in word! You can actually see some of them: such as paragraph breaks, tabs, section breaks and etc. Other ones, such as boldface, and font tags are hidden. But they are there. Consider the following situation:
Hidden formating in Word
Note that when I backspace too close to the boldface text, all of a sudden I find myself typing in bold again. This happens because the symbol that ends the boldface “tag” was inserted directly to the left of the space following the word Bold. Deleting that space, deleted the markup symbol, throwing me back into boldface mode.
When I taught a Fluency in Technology course at MSU this was one of the consistent issues that frustrated the students to no end. All the faculty members I talked to noticed the same thing. We know why this happens - but an average person takes it as a weird software quirk, a bug, or some sort of failing on their part. If you ever see someone struggling with Word, look for this moment:
Word paragraph formating quirks
Ask the user what do they think happen, and how do they feel about it. Reactions will likely range from disbelief to death threats addressed at Bill Gates. But this is the same exact problem that I illustrated above. Some hidden formating symbol gets deleted, and messes up all your paragraph format. How to avoid situations like this one? You can control it by being careful with what you format, and where do you put white space. But if someone gives you a file, there is really no way of clearly identifying issues like this.
In LaTex, markup is transparent. There are no nasty surprises. You match the opening brace to the closing brace, or \begin statement to \end statement - and it’s easy to see if one is missing. It saves a lot of frustration.
Ease of Modifying Styles
This is something that happens to you when you try to publish a paper. You write a really long document using one citation and formating style, and then you find out the journal requires a completely different style. So for example, you may need to two columns, different spacing between paragraphs, different ordering of bibliographic references, different style for figure captions and etc. If you are using word, chances are that once you change the font, the margins, the column layout and paragraph spacing, all your figures will end up in weird unexpected places. You may need to move them around manually. Same goes for your page breaks, section breaks and etc. You probably have a lot of work ahead of you.
In LaTex you will usually only have to edit few lines in your preamble. If you are changing to a known style such as IEEE for example you can simply download appropriate templates, toss them to your project directory and add one or two lines to your document - for example:
\documentclass[peerreview]{IEEEtran} \bibliographystyle{IEEEtran}
Or something among those lines. The rest is done by the parser and typesetting engine. It will move around the figures as appropriate, format the text the way it should be, change the the way bibliography and table of contents is displayed and etc. It’s easy, and requires almost no manual tweaking, unless you were doing something very complex and specific. As opposed to word - it just works.
Ease of Debugging
Most of issues with a LaTex document can be fixed by analytical process of analogous to debugging code. The markup language has a strict syntax, and most mistakes will generate errors, and force you to deal with the immediately. A LaTex user usually problems such as:
- What is causing the error in this particular line of text
- What commands do I use to make this line up properly
- Did I miss a closing brace or an end statement here?
- What do I need to put in the preamble to change the spacing and text flow here
All of these problems are analytical problems that can be solved by careful elimination process, or researched via googling the error messages, or warnings and by reading extensive documentation available online. Word users on the other hand, tend to struggle with OMG WTF kind of issues:
- Why does my whole paragraph loose formating when I hit backspace (see above)
- How the hell did this embedded object get corrupted?
- I put some section breaks in the document and now my paging is all messed up
- Why does word merge these tables when I paste them?
- OMG! Everything breaks when I paste this into the multi-column section!
The only way you can debug weird formating issues in Word is by trial and error, and hitting undo many times, until you get it right. You can’t study the code and find out what you did wrong because most formating marks in your text are hidden, and handled internally. Documentation is usually lacking, and chances of finding good hits via google are directly proportional to how well can you describe the issue in a short search phrase.
No Vendor Lock In
Microsoft makes Office to make a profit. They want to lock you into their platform because they want your money. And unless we can make ODF the national standard, they will tweak their file formats with every edition, release half assed API’s and specs and do everything to make interoperability difficult. Open Office and other products will always be playing catchup. ODF is the only way out of the lock in - but the things don’t look so great on this front. My hunch tells me that Microsoft will succeed pushing their OpenXML specification (which, btw is neither Open, nor a specification - more of an incomplete set of purposefully confusing notes with a restrictive license attacked) as the de-facto format in the upcoming years.
So thanks, but no thanks! LaTex is completely open, and well documented. It has been ported to virtually every platform and architecture. And it does not require a bloated, slow editor to use. You can edit your documents in vim, emacs, notepad, or even Eclipse. You are not tied to a single company, and you are not tied to a single editor. You can pick and choose. And choice, ladies and gentlemen is an essential component of freedom, and individualism.
Don’t listen to the people who talk about the paradox of choice. If you feel paralyzed and unable to make a decision when faced with plethora of different choices, then you are probably either a indecisive person to begin with, a lazy bum who doesn’t want to do the research, or a brainwashed zombie-sheep. Some people all all of the above. Majority of people are at least one of those. But you and me - we are different. If you read this far in this long post, you are probably at least little bit intrigued by LaTex. And so you probably embrace choice and freedom. LaTex gives you that in the same way using ODF format does. The only difference is that ODF is currently supported by very few Office applications - while LaTex does not require any specialized tools. Just a text editor and the phraser/compiler.
Designed for Excellence
Tex the core of the language was designed by Donald Knuth - a man who made some impressive contributions of the field of theoretical Computer Science, and is hailed by many as a living legend. He is considered a father of algorithm analysis. The man is a genius, and he wrote Tex because he was disappointed by all the publishing software that existed at the time.
Tex was then embellished, and improved by Leslie Lamport (who also has impressive set of contributions of the field) becoming LaTex. Quite an impressive pedigree if you look at it. The system was designed by some of the most brilliant people in our field, to be the be-all-and-end-all of document preparation and publishing. Then it was released into the wild as an open source project, to be picked apart by millions of eyes and hands.
Word on the other hand… It was designed to compete and emulate Bravo - the first original WYSIWYG text editor for Xerox Alto. It was initially developed by Charles Simonyi and Richard Bridie. Simonyi was hired to work at Xerox directly from Stanford, and his crowning achievement before Word was development of the mentioned Bravo editor. Brodie was a code jokey who also worked on Bravo, and more recently a professional poker player. Since then it was slaved over by hundreds of developers on tight schedules, high pressure work environment, and conflicting goals of maintaining backwards compatibility, while preventing interoperability with 3rd party software. It’s not an impressive pedigree. Also, if you think about it, Word has all the qualifying prerequisites for a genuine OMG! WTF??? monster of a corporate monster of a project. One of those that you’d be likely to see on The Daily WTF.
I don’t know about you, but I’d rather go with the open source system designed by legends, than by kludge worthy, proprietary, corporate monstrosity. But that’s just me.
Mature and Stable
LaTex is still in active development (at least last time I checked) but the software is mature and stable. The development process is slow and steady. The current releases of the software are rock solid - I have never, ever encountered, or even heard about an issue with the compiler/parser software. The markup language is throughly documented, and widely used. Whenever you need to do something fancy, chances are that someone already did that before you and either published a complete package or at least a well documented solution online.
Office on the other hand is in constant flux. Each version tweaks the file formats, changes the menus, adds more useless functions, and more bloat. Software is unstable, and prone to crashes, and corrupting the binary files for no reason. Because of the poor design it is used by malware writers as an infection vector.
Open office, while more secure is plagued by the same set of issues. It’s a big application that is constantly changing, trying to catch up to the industry leader. Bugs abound, and interoperability with MS Office is still not where it should be.
Unfortunately, Latex is not for everyone
All of that said, LaTex is not for everyone. The learning curve is steep compared to Word or Open Office. You can’t just pick up LaTex by messing around with the UI. You have to understand the syntax, and learn it’s basic rules before you do anything. Users should at least have basic understanding or programming, markup languages, compiling and debugging software. Thus, it’s probably not something that you’d just give to a novice computer user. It’s a tool for technologically competent people who would rather work with a well documented document preparation system with strict, transparent markup syntax, rather than with quirky, buggy and unstable WYSIWYG setup.
LaTex is not something that would find much use in a corporate office environment. Who is LaTex for?
- College Students - there is no better software for writing essays, term papers, presentations, and research papers
- Grad Students - I wrote my Master’s thesis in LaTex. I can’t imagine doing anything like that in Word. It would be a suicide. Don’t do it to yourself. Use the proper tool for this task - that tool is LaTex.
- Writers - LaTex was designed for publishing, and there is no other tool that will produce high quality almost-ready-to-print documents out of your manuscripts
- Scientists and Researchers - no other tool makes it so easy to write research papers, books and journal articles
- Professors - in the past I used LaTex to generate great looking multiple choice exams, lecture presentation slides, lecture notes and etc..
- Developers - you want great looking documentation and user manual? This is the tool for you. LaTex can also output to HTML so you can easily create googlable online copies of all your documents.
- You - if you read this far, you probably have what it takes to try it, and use it well.
I don’t know if any of this convinces anyone. But those are some of my reasons for using it. Please feel free to add your reasons if you happen to be a LaTex user. And if you are not, check it out. It’s worth it. Don’t forget to let me know what you think of it once you try it.
If you guys want, I could run few introductory articles teaching basics of LaTex here on this blog. For example, if you are to lazy (or busy) to research it on your own, but you wouldn’t mind seeing some simple examples, and code samples here, please let me know.
Related Posts:
July 17th, 2007 at 8:02 am (5256) [Quote]
I realize this is intended as LaTeX advocacy, but you do sugar-coat the LaTeX story quite a bit. Five of my biggest problems with LaTeX:
It’s a “full-blown” programming language, yet clearly wasn’t designed to be at all good in that job. Standard control flow like loops and if-then can be used in LaTeX, but it’s ridiculously complex, difficult to learn, and nigh-impossible to maintain. (A good markup language along with python or ruby integration for typesetting information like length calculations would be much much easier.)
Despite your claims about being able to recast the same source using a different template, LaTeX does not actually provide a clear separation between logical and physical formatting. In theory I suppose you could hide most of the physical formatting behind “logical” macros, but in practice that’s just not how the language is used. Our understanding of markup (and electronic text in general) has matured quite a bit since TeX was developed. A more typographically-sophisticated CSS would work better.
LaTeX doesn’t have many “bugs” according to the standard definition, but it’s still very very crap as far as software goes. Its command-line interface is absurdly idiosyncratic and inflexible; its output and return values are insultingly difficult to parse and process, and it tries to impose an utterly archaic workflow on you: debugging during the actual processing pass. And what on earth are we doing using a tool that sometimes needs multiple passes over a document, but requires the user to figure out how many and invoke them all manually? It is the most un-unixy standard unix utility I can think of.
The TeX layout algorithm has some fundamental architectural limitations based on the assumptions in place at the time it was designed. As far as I know, all TeX modules are still required to build a page at a time and then move on, which prevents clever re-jiggering of layouts across multiple pages. Ask any researcher how much time they’ve spent making tiny changes on early pages of a document trying to get LaTeX to reflow a paper to fit within some page limit. If TeX could analyze the entire document at once it could work itself to adjust spacings so that a paper made ideal use of space. (Other typographical tweaks, like rhythm-matching across pages, would also be possible.)
Tweaking layouts is *really* *really* hard. Been a steady LaTeX user for a decade? Think you’re okay at it? Write a resumé template from scratch. I don’t know anyone in my department who could do that in less than a day.
Of course, only the last of these complaints contradicts your thesis that LaTeX is a better tool than Word. But it is a disappointment that a better tool than LaTeX has not yet been developed.
Posted usingJuly 17th, 2007 at 10:27 am (5258) [Quote]
Well, most people “abuse” Microsoft Office.
EXAMPLE 1
How many people do you know that waste time typing a document in word only to attach it to an email? Why not just type it in your email client?
EXAMPLE 2
Most people don’t use any typesetting at all. Notepad would serve them just fine. For those that need a few more features could use Wordpad which support RTF (both programs are included with Windows).
EXAMPLE 3
I can’t tell you how many PowerPoint slide docs I have that are actually company forms. WTF! I think LaTeX would be the better choice here. Convert to a PDF and you have a non-editable document, suitable for company use (well, some of us know how to crack a PDF).
EXAMPLE 4
Excel as graph paper. We see the people that use Excel for the sole purpose of making pretty lists. Sure, it works well, but do you really need an expensive suite like Office to create them? No. Open Office will certainly meet that requirement. Heck, it can even crunch numbers!
I am one of those sick people that still hasn’t left the eighties. I like my CLI text editors (vi is my preferred program). I even send all my emails in plain text (no HTML). When I have the need for “fancy” typesetting, I pull out Open Office. For my everyday note taking and documentation, I still use vi. Not pretty, but it works.
I was never a math or English major, so I had no need for anything like LaTeX. My only exposure to LaTeX is assisting the engineers I support. I think it is still major overkill for the work I do. If I ever decide to publish anything, I will have a professional do the layout.
I think people need to get back to basics. Learn how to write (communicate) first. After you have mastered this, learn to make it pretty.
Posted usingJuly 17th, 2007 at 10:41 am (5260) [Quote]
I agree with most of it. It is what it is - there are quirks, and idiosyncrasies in every piece of software ever written. I just prefer to deal with LaTex quirks than Word quirks because they are usually more transparent, documented and discussed.
And yes - the separation of display and logic is not clear - and writing the packages and style files I mentioned is not easy or straightforward. But it can be done - and when it’s done, it works well in most cases.
Is it time for a replacement? Hell yes. I’d love to see a competing document preparation based on mother technology emerge now. The problem is - no one seems to be working on one at the moment. There seems to be a shortage of brilliant people who would find themselves in the same predicament Knuth did at the time - being disappointed with available solutions.
People now seem to be content with the current WYSIWYG trend. Those who are not, use LaTex for better or for worse. It’s the best we have at the moment. And I personally find it better than word. Not a perfect solution - not by a long shot. But a better one, nevertheless.
Btw, resumes are just about the only think I still use word for. Why? Because when I send people a resume in PDF format they look at me like I’m from space. HR people are not very keen on PDF - it confuses and frightens them. Also, they sometimes like to edit out personal information, trim things down, or reformat stuff when they pass them upstream to the powers that be. So .doc is the de-facto HR standard for resumes.
Posted usingJuly 17th, 2007 at 10:58 am (5261) [Quote]
Craig - you are a 100% correct. People use office for everything these days - even when a different format would be more appropriate.
I’m going to write a long rant on this topic at some point, but the flexibility of plain text is very underestimated these days. Office files are harder to search, harder to modify, harder to sort, harder to filter, harder to concatenate, harder to split into parts, harder to parse programaticaly and harder to index, and more prone to corruption. Why do we insist on using them?
Oh, and I agree. Email should be plain text. Period. There is no reason to have HTML and images inside of email messages. The only things these features are good for is spam, chain letters, and corporate advertising and newsletters. We can totally live without the first two, and the last two would be better off sending in plain text anyway.
Posted usingJuly 17th, 2007 at 12:15 pm (5262) [Quote]
I couldn’t disagree more…. Why would a college student care for the visual quality of some term paper? OpenOffice + PDF export is about as easy as pie and looks good enough. Writers/Professors: do you know how hard it is to get LaTex to do what you want? It typesets beatifully but AUTOMATICALLY… try getting it to do custom typesetting and well….you’re in for a world of frustration… It’s way easier to just use OpenOffice/Word for typesetting quizzes and Scribus for writing.
Posted usingJuly 17th, 2007 at 12:59 pm (5263) [Quote]
ikaruga - but it’s the good kind of frustration. It’s the “I will figure this out if it kills me” kind of frustration. Same frustration you get when writing software - its frustrating when you can’t figure out what causing some specific error, or side effect. But once you figure it out, it’s very rewarding.
I don’t mind debugging, fighting with the compiler, researching ways to accomplish the desired effect. I’m a programmer - this is what I do best. So yes - doing custom stuff is not easy, or straightforward, but it’s interesting and rewarding in a way.
Posted usingJuly 17th, 2007 at 1:48 pm (5264) [Quote]
I happen to greatly enjoy the “I will figure this out if it kills me” kind of frustration. Suppose that is why some people like things like programming or mathematics and others don’t. for me it is more than very rewarding, it is a serious mystical psychedelic like experience, The AH HA!! experience Martin Gardner wrote about.
Luke write about what you enjoy what you feel passionately about and this is a great blog a wonderful argument for the use of latex. I’d love to read more and its obvious Latex is one of your passions. I’ve been meaning to install latex on my ubuntu partition, I’ve used it some in windows. So for the convenience of ubuntu readers
July 17th, 2007 at 2:06 pm (5265) [Quote]
I’m with Luke on this one. While in school, I wrote several mathematics papers using LaTex and they all were visually stunning and a breeze to compose. Using generic word processing software to write technical papers is a total pain and produces almost unreadable documents. I know that the office suites have improved their abilities to write mathematical and engineering documents in the past few years, but I’ll use LaTeX any day of the week.
Posted usingJuly 17th, 2007 at 5:20 pm (5268) [Quote]
Have I already mentionned docbook as an alternative ?
Docbook has many of the “nice features” of LaTeX (it is text based, in fact XML, so much of the arguments of your post holds true for Docbook as well).
It clearly separates content and rendering, as you type the XML file and the XSLT processor will generate the formatted text (actually some will even generate a LaTeX output !!)
It is open, standardized and well documented.
Posted using Debian IceWeasel 2.0.0.3 onJuly 17th, 2007 at 7:03 pm (5271) [Quote]
Yeah, I think I remember you mentioning it a while ago. I really need to try it out.
Posted usingJuly 17th, 2007 at 7:33 pm (5272) [Quote]
What’s with comparing MS Word and LaTeX. Word is a word processor–bloated, to be sure, but just a word processor. LaTeX is for typesetting. While it has a bit of a learning curve–it is, as pointed out above, a programming language–it’s free and gives professional typesetting results in the tight hands. Just like Quark, InDesign, PageMaker, FrameMaker, and a host of other commercial WYSIWYG page layout tools. Not to mention the open-source WYSIWYG layout program, Scribus.
But to compare the two is missing the point that they’re two different breeds. That goes for any of the flavors of TeX and Word.
As for LaTeX and the WYSIWYGs … LaTeX is used by few professional book designers and layout artists as compared to those using Quark and InDesign. That’s not to say it can’t do as good a job–tho’, again, the learning curve for real competency in LaTeX is high–as Quark and the rest. But the plain fact is that most professional book design and layout is done in Quark and InDesign. It will be interesting to see whether that changes anytime soon.
Stephen Tiano, Book Designer, Page Compositor & Layout Artist
Posted usingwebsite: http://www.tianodesign.com
blog: http://www.tianodesign.com/blog
July 17th, 2007 at 7:45 pm (5273) [Quote]
True. You are right, they are different tools. But, for me LaTex replaced word in most aspects - so this was my angle here.
Comparing apples and oranges sometimes does have merits - both are fruits, both have similar shape, and etc. And despite being very different, and usually being used with different meals, one can have clear preference of one above the other.
Personally, I think that any time you need a nicely formated text, you should be typesetting. All the other situations that do not require typesetting can be handled with just plain text or maybe HTML…
Posted usingJuly 18th, 2007 at 1:59 pm (5281) [Quote]
When you guys say “a good kind of frustration” you’re a minority in that one…. the rest of the world doesn’t see the value in the trade-off (time for stunning visual quality). I’ll give you an example: you’re just a regular corporate Joe with a report due asap. There’s no point spending precious time tweaking Latex to your liking when OO or Word will do just fine…. (On the other hand, if you’re the type that doesn’t mind mastering Latex in your spare time, that’s another story…)
Posted usingJuly 18th, 2007 at 4:53 pm (5283) [Quote]
I say use the right tool for the job, ikaruga, and I think that is what Luke is saying too. There are occasions where LaTex is the right tool and there are occasions where a simple text file will suffice. In my mind there is nothing wrong with office applications per se, i myself use Open office tho I use it seldom and then only for documents I download online or e-mail attachments people send me where OO or microsoft office is the only way i can view them.
Posted usingJuly 18th, 2007 at 6:52 pm (5286) [Quote]
ikaruga I think I mentioned that I consider LaTex in a corporate and big business environment as a bad idea. I do not recommend using it. As you put it a “regular corporate Joe with a report due asap” should stay the hell away from LaTex. That report will probably need to be reviewed and edited by managers and etc so it definitely should be written in Word.
But if you are a researcher and you frequently submit papers to IEEE conferences, it might be a good idea to take the time and develop a nice IEEE compliant template for your papers, abstracts and etc.
Starhawk is right - for each job there is a tool that is appropriate for it. I’m just saying that for some jobs, LaTex is better than word. For others (your average Joe scenario) - not so much.
Posted usingJuly 21st, 2007 at 7:50 am (5372) [Quote]
ikagura Yeah, LaTeX won’t work too well in a corporate world because of compatibility issues. This whole conversation, unfortunately, doesn’t really have much relevance for the poor folks stuck in corporate environments. It’s really for academic types and writers–people who want control over their writing projects from beginning to end.
That said, if you put a day or two into learning LaTeX + a speedy text editor, you can whip off nice business letters and documents in half the time that it takes to do them in Word. (Even form letters and mail merge type stuff.) And LaTeX converts much more nicely to html than does Word.
Once you’ve gotten the plain text bug, you start to see everything in a new light. You realize that somewhere, sometime, the big software companies took a terrible turn, convincing people that bloated, badly formatted, locked-down, inaccessible, binary(!?!) proprietary documents were somehow the only way to deal with text on the computer.
One example. Let’s say you have all your text files in a folder hierarchy. In a matter of seconds, you can search and pull up all the lines in all these files containing a particular word (e.g., “pumpkin”). This search feature existed 30 years ago for plain text files. Yet for Word docs, it’s still a relatively “new” and still very inefficient and clunky option in the most modern operating systems (OS X, Vista, etc.).
Posted usingJuly 21st, 2007 at 3:07 pm (5381) [Quote]
Yup. And when businesses moved to those locked inflexible blocked formats, they instantly lost the ability to easily search and sort data. They thought they were getting power (ie Excel formulas and sorting tools) but really, it was a tradeoff.
We traded the ease of searching and manipulating large batches of data for relative ease of searching and sorting files on file-by-file basis.
Posted usingJuly 25th, 2007 at 10:14 pm (5427) [Quote]
TeX and LaTeX are the only workable options for mathematics. The important thing isn’t the difference between wysiwyg and wysiwym, although wysiwym is certainly a lot faster and more certain when you know what you are doing. The fundamental difference is that TeX does layout properly - especially for mathematics which is very demanding in this respect. Whereas word and all the others generate unreadible badly spaced garbage.
I personally believe that a great opportunity was missed when HTML was invented. Donald Knuth did an absolutely brilliant job of analysing what was required to do markup properly. He completely solved the problem for all time! His model based on boxes linked with flexible glue dealt with spacing issues and layout issues perfectly. It was a fantastic achievement.
Yet all of that work was completely disregarded by HTML which used an inadequate simplistic formatting model instead. While HTML has been extended repeatedly the flawed original design of HTML means that no extension of it will ever do half as good a job as TeX does at formatting layout properly.
For example no extension of HTML will ever do as good a job in formatting mathematics as TeX. Look at MATHML, a bastard child that should have been drowned at birth. MATHML is a crap language which alone has been responsible for putting mathematics on the web back 20 years. Not only is the syntax atrocious and practically unusable, but I’ve never seen any MATHML application generate anything other than awful ugly mathematical typsetting.
What really gets me annoyed is that the HTML model is being pushed as a standard everywhere - even off the web. Hence document formats are being XMLised. ODF is standard. Yet ODF is built on MATHML which is based on HTML syntax. It is a nightmare.
The problem seems to be that computer science types never seem to LISTEN when we say that TeX and LaTeX are PERFECT answers to the problem of mathematical typesetting. The message just seems to go in one ear and out the other. Some know-it-all will tell us that it we can’t possibly be serious about using latex because it doesn’t handle loops properly, or because it requires multiple passes, or because it can’t be linked to a live database, or some other ridiculous reason that completely misses the point.
LaTeX does mathematics - PERFECTLY. Nothing else does. These other things we simply don’t care about - especially not if they come at the price of destroying that ability to typeset marvellously beautiful equations which you can bear to read without wanting to hurl your laptop through your office window.
Yet the message never seems to sink in. You can almost hear them thinking - poor deluded mathematicians - stuck in the dark ages. They think they like LaTeX but they can’t be serious. We have to get them using something modern with tags and angle brackets instead. So now we end up in the ridiculous situation that the INTERNATIONAL STANDARD for documents containing mathematics is ODF with MATHML, a standard which the majority of mathematicians believe is absolutely unworkable horrible useless complete and utter total crap.
Posted usingJuly 25th, 2007 at 10:48 pm (5428) [Quote]
Ian, I hear what you are saying but I don’t agree with your characterization of Computer Science people as XML obsessed, LaTex haters.
Computer Science involves tons of math, and writing long (boring) papers with formulas, formal proofs and etc. We appreciate LaTex because we run into the same exact crap that math people do.
Software Engineering on the other hand concerns itself with being Agile, Xtreme, putting shit on rails, and adding XML to every single application in sight.
At most universities the undergraduate curriculum contains a mix of both. Some schools lean one way or the other, but in most cases the goal is to teach students as much CS theory as they can handle, but at the same time train them for a job in the software development industry.
But in general, Computer Scientists are the people who design new innovative approaches, algorithms and paradigms, while software engineers are the people who abuse the hell out of them.
Sadly, software engineers usually love buzzwords and new exciting stuff. And unfortunately they are the people who design and develop the tools for us to use.
Posted usingJuly 26th, 2007 at 6:48 am (5435) [Quote]
Let’s take this again from the top. Word is Ni>not a typesetting tool. It’s a word processor. TeX, in all its flavors, is a programming language for typesetting. If programming is your bag and you use some form of TeX to make books, go with God.
But being a book designer and layout artist, and having typeset math textbooks and other books heavy with equations, I’ve typeset beautiful math using Quark with the Mathable XTension and even humble PageMaker with MathType for my equations.
TeX is just another brand of screwdriver. They’re tools, boys. When you do such work to earn a living, you use the tool that suits you. This is as productive as platform wars.
Posted usingJuly 26th, 2007 at 9:36 am (5436) [Quote]
I’d like to second Stephen’s point about LaTeX being one among many tools. In the same way, many GUI tools, such as Quark and Photoshop, are every bit as user-unfriendly as LaTeX.
IMHO, what I think people are trying to suggest here is that it’s a tool that should be more widely used. A lot of people in the corporate and (non-scientific) academic world aren’t even aware of its existence as an alternative. Not that all of them would benefit from it, to be sure. But some might find it a more flexible and powerful alternative to MS Word, at least.
And I don’t believe LaTeX is just for mathematicians. As someone who writes articles and books, LaTeX affords me elegant, global control over the organization and layout of my documents. No more fiddling with those buggy and abolutely impossible MS Word styles! And indexing and footnotes are an absolute delight.
Face it: Word processing is inevitable. Most people won’t give a d*mn about LaTeX–and rightly so. Most people use their computers as glorified typewriters, calculators, and communications devices (and, increasingly, media players).
(I confess: I do the same, except I’d like to think that my pimped out Vim, LaTeX, and Mutt combo is a typewriter on steroids, a typewriter that would fail every performance enhancement drug test in the world.)
Here are my peeves:
1) Academic and corporate institutions that enforce the use of Word. (E.g., school dissertation layout specifications generally presuppose word processing software.)
Posted using2) The lack of awareness of open source alternatives–i.e., the people who give you a blank, uncomprehending stare if you say you don’t use Word.
3) The idea that one should get powerful, professional results without having to learn anything.
4) Word pros who think they are at the cutting edge of typesetting technology because they fill their documents with fancy fonts.
5) The myth that Word is user-friendly.
July 26th, 2007 at 10:33 am (5437) [Quote]
Stephen Tiano said:
Stephen, I don’t doubt that Quark and Page Maker are great tools. However, unless you are in publishing business, you are probably very unlikely to use them. Why?
Quark Press 7, Full - $749.00
Mathable 2.0 - $589.00
Adobe Page Maker - $499.00
MathType - $95
LaTex - free
Producing professionally looking documents without shelling out close to $1k on software - priceless
LaTex is not only really good at what it does, but it is also free, and available on just about any platform. I’m sure you could get similar, or better results with Quark but the price tag might be prohibitive for some.
Matt said:
I LOL’d. This is 100% true and goes for every kind of technology - not just typesetting. It’s the “but why do I have to learn this, isn’t that why we have IT for?” attitude that kills me.
Matt said:
I think some of the examples in this post clearly illustrated that Word is anything but friendly.
Posted usingJuly 26th, 2007 at 11:02 am (5439) [Quote]
Ian H
Hell yeah i agree glad somebody said that.
Luke I’ve always consider CS to be Math. It grew out of Computation theory and mathematical logic and has its roots in prehistory (Euclid’s gcd was known well before Euclid’s mathematical holy book.) To be sure modern computer science has areas of intersection with many disciplines outside of what is considered traditional mathematics, even ranging into psychology (AI) biology (genetic algorithms) and even philosophy (The Object oriented craze and complexity theory are after all very philosophical.) But the same is true for Math and meta logic no subject exist in isolation.
I suppose there will always be some “hostility” between the pure math crowd and the more pragmatic engineering crowd. SO I’m going to have to add your quote below to the better known quotes i collect on this clash of two cultures, lmao
hell yeah i agree with ya tho i’ve probably been on both sides of that fence. lol
Stephen Tiano I’ve already said use the right tool. Whatever works for ya dude. My problem with Quark and stuff like that is it cost money
La Tex doesn’t it’s simple as that. Being a being a book designer and layout artist you probably have the need for software like that and by all means use it. In your case its a business expense someone maybe you or your company is paying.
And Matt I agree wholeheartedly with every damn thing ya said. In fact your first point really hits the nail on the head:
Corporation I can perhaps understand tho not agree with but Academic institutions not using more open standards now that really gets to me. To quote danah boyd totally out of context (LOL):
Academia should not be perpetuating the status quo academia should be challenging it. I would raise absolute hell if i were in college and documents were crammed down my throat in MS office format. I raised hell over less when i was in college, I am after all a product of the 60’s. The younger generations just seem to me to lack the motivation to care about things or perhaps More accurately to act upon their ideals. Clearly not all do so this is overly general forgive me for that. But people need to not just accept social injustices but to challenge things raise hell and even go to jail if necessary. Hopefully jail wouldn’t be necessary over a format issue but nonetheless it is a serious issue tho in my mind.
Posted usingJuly 26th, 2007 at 11:15 am (5440) [Quote]
Luke i agree 100%
Exactly my point in my last comment which your spam filter must of ate. lol. And no complex piece of software or technology is completely user friendly they all have a learning curve. I imagine some cave men were upset they had to learn how to work with flint and make baskets outta weeds, oh wel lsuch is life. lol
Posted usingJuly 26th, 2007 at 11:30 am (5441) [Quote]
Starhawk - ditto on the academia point. It’s stupid to enforce something like that. Fortunately, at my school most instructors didn’t care what format you submit your papers in.
Those who would require physical submission of hard copies would usually be impressed by the pleasing aesthetic look of my work. Those who preferred electronic submission usually didn’t mind. I guess I got lucky?
Oh, and btw - if you insert more than 2 links into the comment you automatically get held in moderation queue because Wordpress thinks you are link flooding. I can probably change that to 3 or 4 links per comment.
Posted usingOctober 18th, 2007 at 10:04 pm (6598)