Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2001 16:21:11 +0100 (BST) From: Duncan Barclay <dmlb@dmlb.org> To: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG, Dan Langille <dan@langille.org> Subject: Re: Just an observation - MUA's seen in the lists Message-ID: <XFMail.010413162111.dmlb@computer.my.domain> In-Reply-To: <20010413165952.K82834@lpt.ens.fr>
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On 13-Apr-01 Rahul Siddharthan wrote: >> > 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. > Agree, but the stability/capability of the individual tools is uneven. Word is not as capable as TeX (see answer below) but it is easier to use for short documents. Word is also very buggy on documents with large numbers of embedded objects (e.g. Visio). Power point is great, Excel is great. Project is pants. We have some pet theories at work, as to why Excel and Power Point as so much more stable than Word. We think that in Excel/Power Point a cell or slide is treated as an object and the overall programme can handle many instances pretty well. However, Word is so hacked up internally (compared with TeX, it certainly doesn't treat things as a box with stuff in) that the interactions just confuse the hell out of it. > 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? Yes. > (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.) Yes, however the support is not clean. Using the special cases of the predefined types is much easier than adding your own "bookmarks". > (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. Yes. > (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. Yes, it can. But like Tex/LaTeX it depends on how well the style is set up. If the style definition is good (i.e. right leading/trailing vertical space) then Word will get it right most of the time. You can still confuse it with footnote text and it doesn't do a godd job of recognising that not breaking the page will result in one line of text. However most Word styles are not well thought out and get this wrong so most Word documents look poor. > 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. Use the poor built in TeX like in-line code, or fight with the really strange Microsoft Equation Editor. Results look like TeX. > (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). True, nil-ligature support, very poor kerning. > (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. True. Text from TeX is much nicer. Word is crap at justifying. > (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. Programmble via language selections. > 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.) Unfortunately, the rest of the business world doesn't agree :-(. I find Word acceptable for work where documents are rarely more than 50 pages. If I had to do soemthing like a PhD thesis in Word, I wouldn't bother writing it up. > R > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message Duncan --- ________________________________________________________________________ Duncan Barclay | God smiles upon the little children, dmlb@dmlb.org | the alcoholics, and the permanently stoned. dmlb@freebsd.org| Steven King To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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