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Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

Oh, for the love of... Join the 21st century and write your papers in Word, with readable fonts, like everyone else.

21st century Word could still learn some lessons from 20th-century TeX (and 19th-century typography, in general). Any Word document I ever tried to create is plagued with bad kerning and bad geometry, and the defaults are basically guaranteed to give you bad-looking results.

Word is the wrong tool for the job unless you're looking to do something simple, like print out a shopping list. XeTeX FTW, or Pages, or pretty much anything else, even Excel, is a better choice.

Note that if you use Xe(La)TeX, for example, you get all the goodness and flexibility of LaTeX to structure and manage your document, along with the ability to seamlessly use all the same fonts you could use in Word etc.

Go, learn some (scientific) typography, then try Word, then come again.

Word is not bad at fixing my grammar, but once you start to know things that look decent, you will see the way word fails.

For one thing, it still can't make hyphenations correctly, it doesn't allow you to use small caps correctly, and I don't think it has support for lower case/old style letters.

All in all no big issues unless you are happy with documents that just look of.

Word's defaults are crappy and you need to go to the second tab on the font dialog to fix them, but it is capable of doing proper small caps and lower case/old style numerals.¹

I don't do hyphenation or full justification in Word so I can't speak to that, but despite being a long-time LaTeX user, for most of my writing, I prefer working in Word (not least of why is that it's the expected format for most non-technical writing which is the majority of my writing).

¹ I assume that you meant numerals and not letters.

Try TeXmacs (www.texmacs.org), which, despite the name would make one think that it descends from TeX and Emacs, is related to TeX only for the typographical quality and to Emacs for the extensibility. It has the ease of use of a word processor and it is controllable through an own native macro system and Scheme Lisp.

That is extremely field-dependent.

I doubt many CS papers are written in Word, and I doubt many.. I don't know, archeology reports are written not in Word.

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