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Comment by chadcmulligan | Hacker News Reader

Something I've wondered, and the Tex users here can probably answer - why not just use Acrobat or Word for math? Does it not support something?

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Microsoft recently improved the math notation support in Word. You can press [alt]+[=] on Windows or [control]+[=] on OSX to enter "Math Mode" and begin typing mathematical characters. Word tries to guess what you mean as you type, and it's still much more cumbersome that typing plain-text code in (La)TeX; you still have to reach for a mouse for some notation.

Here's what it looks like if you're interested:

https://org.coloradomesa.edu/~mapierce2/mathsampleguide

Not even close, these are not plaintext based so you can't track changes with git, let alone automatic generation of formulas.

Word has track changes, though not the math support it seems.

In typical Microsoft fashion it has enough to check the box but not enough to actually be useful.

Does it generate diffs/patches that ultimately can be used to reconstruct the document? Can I take a document and apply a patch and get exactly the same as you get? Can I reorder and edit patches? The answer is no.

Interesting, I didn't know Tex users would want those sort of facilities. I've used Word with track changes in enterprise environments and it does the job, I've never had to use patches for it though (and wouldn't).

For enterprise environments, where demands usually are low to non-existent, Word does fine. In academic environments, when journals are involved, when a document is being worked on by several people simultaneously (in varying meanings of that word) and when data may come from several different outside sources, it is massively inadequate.

I think there is demand of these features for Word users in the enterprise. Version tracking or reusing templates is huge productivity boost and also helps reducing mistakes. It is only that enterprise users have never thought of that because they don't know it is even possible.

Word with integrated git-like history would be a godsend if someone could develop it. As it is, it's easier to either cripple along with track changes and friends or teach everyone how to use Markdown or LaTeX.

.docx files are a zip folder of plaintext XML files. Theoretically they could be tracked with git if you unzip/zip every commit/checkout.

I actually tried to hash .docx files to keep track of them. Turns out there are random timestamp data that the resulting file is different every time

This doesn't work well when XML is not hand-edited, but rather a dump of some in-memory structure - there are many cases where e.g. order is not important, so it can be essentially random during serialization, and that then shows up as spurious diffs.

Word doesn't support many things in math mode, and entering it is overall slower and more fragile.

But you can just use the same syntax as LaTeX. Or a simplified version. Or use the GUI. It really isn't as bad as it seems at first glance.

The LaTeX input for Word equation editor makes it a lot faster, but it is still quite limited and often doesn't do what you expect for more complicated things. It makes the easy things easier, but the hard things harder.

...no, you can't. Sure, for a few one liners it works OK, but it's not like an embedded latex environment. At all. I've used it extensively.

As far as speed, even for simple stuff the real time formatting gets in the way constantly compared to just writing text in a latex file.

LaTeX is an art form. The output is perfect, based only on the code used to make it. Typesetting mathematical expressions or even creating complex diagrams using a library such as `tkz-euclide` is just code. There is no WYSIWYG. No invisible bold spaces[1]. No forgetting which changes you made to try to get it to look right. Everything is right there in the code.

(I am aware of the difference between LaTeX and TeX; I likely haven't used TeX directly but the comparisons here should still work fine.)

There is a huge difference in workflow between generating a document from a complete code file and iterating on a final result with incremental tweaks. That is why I cannot use Acrobat, Word, Google Docs, etc. for creating papers that I would use LaTeX for. It is just not the same, and it is not the workflow I desire.

[1]: https://xkcd.com/2109/

One of the most important things I've found for making LaTeX documents is do not worry about what it looks like until you're almost done. Otherwise you fall into the rabbit hole of adjusting things for hours to find your work is wasted anyway because you changed that page later.

But once the text is done, it's really nice to work with, and you never "accidentally break the whole document by adding a table" - at least not irrecoverably.

TeX output is not perfect. There is no baseline grid for example. Like this: https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/49720/body...

Also, pushing figure around to nice places can be so frustrating that people settle for less than perfect layout.

I simply don't like those binary formats. I can't use sed, grep, etc. with .docx files. My workflow for doing notes is primarily CLI-based, and thus using Word/Libreoffice is something I avoid if possible and if it makes sense.

Another pro is that I can use git for tracking changes

> why not just use Acrobat

Does Acrobat have any typesetting capabilities? I thought another app did that and just finalised through Acrobat.

There's acrobat editor, though its more limited than I assumed it seems.

Adobe's Acrobat editor is painful and barely usable even for ordinary prose. There's no way I'd try it for math. To be fair though, it does not seem intended for heavy-duty editing - it's more for: someone gave me this PDF, I don't have the source document, I need to make some little tweaks directly to the PDF.

Yeah Acrobat and ABBYY editors are really only useful as a last resort when you don't have time to recreate someone's PDF but you really need a couple words changed.

But they are life-savers when that's your situation.

Some more points, collaboration using e.g. git and its ecosystem, a representation that does not force you to use proprietary software (not sure about libre office for formulae), the ability to easily produce tex files by other scripts, e.g. to compile maths exercises from a set of templates.

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