Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2001 16:59:52 +0200 From: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> To: Dan Langille <dan@langille.org> Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Just an observation - MUA's seen in the lists Message-ID: <20010413165952.K82834@lpt.ens.fr> In-Reply-To: <200104131436.f3DEa3e07944@ns1.unixathome.org>; from dan@langille.org on Fri, Apr 13, 2001 at 10:35:56AM -0400 References: <SAK.2001.04.13.fqqdcoqq@support10> <200104131436.f3DEa3e07944@ns1.unixathome.org>
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> > Or many of us are at work in a Windows only shop as the desktops,
> > and our webservers are nix. [Flame War --- As M$ office is just about the
> > best office product out there ].
>
> [What's this white spirits sitting by my desk? /me throws it away]
>
> Agree. There is no other office suite worth the same.
To all ye office users:
I have some questions about MS Word. I never use it myself, but I
know people who do, and it seems to me that they have a hard time
doing some very basic things which TeX/LaTeX have done since the
1980s. Or maybe Word does do all this but users don't know it?
(1) Does it do automatic section numbering / equation numbering /
figure numbering, etc?
(2) Can you attach labels to the section/equation/etc so that you can
refer to these using the label, and in the final printed document the
correct reference number is automatically used? (For example, if
I refer to figure 8 and I insert another figure earlier, the
reference will automatically change to figure 9.)
(3) Can you have an "unbreakable space"? For instance, in referring
to Mr. Bush, you don't want the line to be broken like this: Mr.
Bush -- so you put an unbreakable space there rather than a normal
space.
(4) Does it treat section headings intelligently at page breaks? I
have seen word documents where the section heading was at the bottom
of one page and the section started at the top of the next page.
These are the things I'm doubtful about. There are plenty of things
I'm not doubtful about: Word doesn't do them, at least not in any
word document I've seen.
(1) Math: Word's support for equations is rudimentary at best.
(2) Ligatures: Traditionally, certain letter combinations
(fi, fl, ff, ffi, ffl) are printed as single units. TeX does this
when using its native font family (computer modern) and other
fonts which support it (eg most postscript fonts support the fl
and fi ligatures).
(3) Paragraph-level formatting: TeX formats text a paragraph at a
time, to avoid ugly effects like "ladders" that could happen when
you do things a line at a time. Adobe introduced that in some of
their DTP software much later. Word doesn't do it.
(4) Spacing after full stops: in English language text, traditionally
one leaves a bit of extra space after a full stop. TeX does this,
using some simple rules to recognise a full stop. On the rare
occasions it gets this wrong, you can overrule it.
End result: TeX/LaTeX documents are consistently beautiful to look at:
you have to try rather hard to screw them up. MS Word documents are
almost always hideous. You can argue that Word is not meant to be
publication-quality stuff, but unfortunately that's what many people
do use it for. Besides, I prefer even an ordinary letter to be nicely
typeset, and LaTeX lets me do that without compromising on ease of
use. (For those who must have their point&click, there's LyX.)
R
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