Hacker News Reader

Comment by theparanoid | Hacker News Reader

I thought Latex was superior to Word in every way than I had a colleague that knew Word. Word if you learn it is just fine generating a ToC or autonumbering sections, figures, and tables.

In practice, Markdown is better than either for documentation that isn't printed. It's easier to edit, can be viewed with a plain text editor, and has a minimal learning curve.

View on HN

> I thought Latex was superior to Word in every way than I had a colleague that knew Word. Word if you learn it is just fine generating a ToC or autonumbering sections, figures, and tables.

No, it doesn't work well even if you know what you're doing. It's much better than when blindly trying to hack your way through, but there are still so many weird quirks it does which you always have to spend a lot of time on.

I would say it works well if you know what you are doing, but in a shared document there is always some dumb ass in the team that does some manual formatting like using the bold-button instead of changing header type, or remove a link from an image. Then the all the references and indexes are beyond repair with the only way to salvage the document is to slowly, meticulously and painfully go through it in this outline-view and try to identify what should be a header and what should not.

If only there was a way to create a Word document that forbids manual formatting it could actually be usable.

"Word if you learn it is just fine generating a ToC or autonumbering sections, figures, and tables." : but can it do this? -- [Common Lisp Quick Reference](http://clqr.boundp.org/clqr-a4-booklet-all.pdf)

Wow, that's beautifully set!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com