Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2001 10:00:37 -0700 From: "Freddie Cash" <fcash@bigfoot.com> To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Just an observation - MUA's seen in the lists Message-ID: <3AD6CE45.5872.383AAA1@localhost> In-Reply-To: <20010413165952.K82834@lpt.ens.fr> References: <200104131436.f3DEa3e07944@ns1.unixathome.org>; from dan@langille.org on Fri, Apr 13, 2001 at 10:35:56AM -0400
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On 13 Apr 2001, at 16:59, 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.
> 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?
[snip]
WordPerfect 7+ does this. Just finished a couple of papers for
school that used all but the label feature. The nice thing is that
even when it does something automatically, you can go into Reveal
Codes to see what it did, and customise it to the way you work.
> 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.
Word *really* lacks in this area. WordPerfect is great for this.
Did all my Stats notes in WP8, and have nice equations, while the guy
next to me tried using Word 97, and gave up after the first month.
> (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.
You *can* do this in word, but there's no indication of where the
formatting starts and stops. WordPerfect does this beautifully,
though. And you can copy word/line/paragraph/page/document level
formatting between areas.
> (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.
Word can be set up to do this via auto-correct. However, it is
*very* hard to change a document from 1-space to 2-spaces after a
full-stop without reading through the document correcting things like
"Dr. So-and-so".
> 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
Word isn't meant for anything more difficult than writing the
occasional letter. Unless you want to spend gregarious amounts of
money on courses to learn all the intricacies of how to make Word
annoy you less. :)
> 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.)
Cheers,
Freddie
fcash@bigfoot.com
Reject complexity, embrace simplicity, and leave your
ego at the door.
- Colonel Kernel @ http://dualboot.net
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