Editing the C Standard

In general complaining in such terms about a project you've just taken over doesn't seem very professional.[2] We've all been there, done that, etc. LaTeX diagnostics are atrocious. All received large projects are filled with decisions one wouldn't have made oneself, and consequences one would have avoided. But it pays to remember that any senior engineer has presumably left in their wake several large projects that befuddled and frustrated subsequent maintainers, both because of regrettable reasons, yet also for reasons that one would readily defend.

But to suggest Microsoft Word as being a superior option... I can't even begin to fathom such a comparison. I can imagine, however, how insanely frustrated and pissed I would be if I had to take over the task of managing a huge, complex Microsoft Word document. I'm also prepared to admit that there may exist a universe (in which I might be living) where Word is a defensible choice over LaTeX, and that the choice might be more akin to common religious preferences--vi vs emacs, CLI vs GUI, etc--and not something that can be strictly judged in objective terms. Hopefully that admission would give me pause before I let loose such a tirade.

[1] AFAIU, Jens Gustedt was the previous editor, both initiating and executing the switch to LaTeX. But I've never participated in the committee. I may have had a mistaken belief about who was doing the editing over the past several years.

[2] That's a comment on the article, not on the author himself. Professionals do unprofessional things all the time.

Disclaimer: I have been using LaTeX (mostly XeLaTeX) for over a decade for most of my writing, mathematical and non-mathematical, although nowadays I often do so via Markdown+pandoc. Also, at my last company we had to parse mathematical formulas typeset in LaTeX and understand their structure... it was a nightmare.

There's a lot of competitors to the first step, in the vein of having multiple tools that are plain-text files but convert to rich-text output. However, most of these tools lack good, or even any, support for the fine-tuning capabilities. Where there is competition in the fine-tuning space, the relevant tools are largely based on WYSIWYG editors--which makes sense when you consider that it's easier to fine-tune properties when you get immediate visual feedback on what the fine-tuning you're doing does to the result. But these editors don't provide an easy way to integrate in the workflows of the other tools, since the underlying formats don't really support the fine-tuning capabilities.