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Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

>The boss needed item 3 inserted into a numbered list of hundreds of items. The intern used a mouse to select the original 3 on the screen, then typed 4, then selected the original 4, then typed 5, then scrolled down, then selected the original 5, then typed 6, and so on. Another intern sat watching the screen to make sure there were no mistakes.

Microsoft Word has automatic numbering. Just to be sure, I opened Word, and entered a numbered list. When I inserted a new numbered item, it automatically renumbered the list. Also, converting from a numbered list to bullet points is as simple as selecting the list and clicking the bullets icon instead of the numbered list icon.

This opening anecdote makes me think the author is completely unfamiliar with Word, and is strawmanning it.

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I wonder how someone who doesn’t know how to use the automatic numbering feature will handle anything LaTeX.

1. Word has automatic numbering, true, but it's not necessarily designed for the sort that was used in this paper.

2. From the article:

> Note added 2020.12.07: ... Each item in the list looked like a flush-left paragraph, like the paragraphs in this blog post, adjacent to the left margin.

They were numbering paragraphs, not line items, and lines that wrapped were supposed to be left-justified. I don't think this is a strawman.

3. MS Word would have a fit with skipping a number before "They" in the sentence above, and assigning number 3 and not 1 to this paragraph.

4. There are other cases when you need to separately label Article 1/Section A/Clause I etc. in a hierarchy; the numbered list tabulation and hopefully semantic Heading 1/Heading 2/Heading 3 styles and tables of contents in Word can handle this for your use case, but be prepared for frustration if you want something a little different than what the UI is designed to help you build.

>They were numbering paragraphs, not line items, and lines that wrapped were supposed to be left-justified. I don't think this is a strawman.

Word allows you to adjust the indentation on numbered lists so that the text in a paragraph is flush with the left margin. In Word 365 there are at least two ways to do this:

1. View -> Show -> [check Ruler] -> [Adjust the indentation on the ruler]

2. Layout -> Paragraph -> [click lower right arrow] Paragraph Settings -> Indentation -> change Special from (hanging) to (none), or change the "By:" value to 0

So the author's motivating example doesn't seem to be a particularly fair criticism of Word.

But only about 10% of Word users are aware of this feature (granted, the other 90% wouldn’t enjoy LaTeX either). And if you see another document where this is done, you still don’t know how to do that yourself.

It's not a critisism on the possibility of doing this in Word. It's the critisism that at least three people (the document creator and two interns) did not use it, either due to ignorance or because Word has frequent problems with automatic lists. Either way, this is a problem with Word.

For me, Word and LaTeX are on par. Styles, referencing, formula, macros, auto-layout are possible in both. However real-world use is different because Word is the lowest common denominator and thus mostly only the basic features actually get used. Because everybody experienced the horror of automatic features at least once.

Automatic numbering in Word is a nightmare. A separate list created pages before will continue its numbering onto a new list several pages behind. I always type lists as #1,#2,#3 as a crosshatch+digit does not call automatic numbering. Even if you turn it off, a collaborator might turn it back on, resulting in chaos.

In using Word with long documents, I'm reminded of pilots' early criticism of Airbus software, "What's it doing now?"

You'll be glad to learn that Word has included a "Restart List" option for 13 years or more (was relabeled to "Restart Numbering" at some point)

I swear this whole thread could be best described as:

"Geeks that have read 2000 man pages about LaTex and have never bothered to browse Word docs complain about missing feature in Word that is actually in Word since the last millenium" :-))

Word lets you change the styles of every level of indention in an outline/list, including, for example, by left-justifying list items instead of indenting them on subsequent lines.

If that is the case, part of the problem is the article's author was comparing a potentially complex example of numbering in Word with a trivial example of numbering in LaTeX. That trivial case in LaTeX led me to question the whole premise of the article since the example seemed to be cherry picking end users who didn't know how to use Word, or at least a case where the person who setup the document didn't know how to use Word and the editors did not have the authority to fix the issue properly.

I run into all sorts of problems with Word's automatic numbering when I try to leave space, insert images, tables, or a make sublist. And it's never clear to me what the issue is.

LaTeX seems much more predictable. I have a file with my custom commands and styles that I `\input` and use always use consistent style. Nothing too crazy. But I also never try to do anything too crazy in Word, either.

Given that he's apparently relaying something that actually happened, Bernstein can't be strawmanning it. In fact he can't be strawmanning it at all, as Microsoft Word doesn't make arguments or claims. You appear to mean something more like "Bernstein is incorrectly portraying how Microsoft Word works." But as I said Bernstein presents this story as something that actually happened, not a hypothetical example, so I guess what you actually mean is "I suspect Bernstein is making up this story"?

Regardless, Bernstein does in fact address this criticism in the note added yesterday. Yes, it has automatic list numbering, but in order to achieve the desired formatting, the users had, instead of altering the formatting appropriately, removed this automatic numbering, because Microsoft Word doesn't make these sorts of distinctions clear and explicit.

> the users had, instead of altering the formatting appropriately, removed this automatic numbering, because Microsoft Word doesn't make these sorts of distinctions clear and explicit.

You can get into much worse situations than this once you leave the "happy path" in LaTeX.

If the argument that people who use Word that don't really know how to use it can end up using it inefficient ways, then doesn't it even more apply to Latex. I could probably come up with an anecdote about someone who tried to use Latex but spent hours trying to figure out how to get the format they wanted and got frustrating trying to debug their scripts.

If we want to compare tools, we should not compare expert users of one tool with novices of another tool.

Is there a single serious LaTeX user that doesn't have a story of losing hours of time because they didn't understand some of the internals well enough? I've probably lost days before.

Honestly I never lost anything in latex.

If you have never run into problems with macros expanding in the wrong sort of environment then you have probably not used it very extensively. If you have run into the problem of switching commands because of their fragile-ness then is it true that you never lost any time debugging?

Ah I never used the macros, just the standard commands and using pre styled layouts.

That would explain it :-)

But I guess it’s not easy to save work in latex when in macro mode?

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