LaTeX vs. Word vs. Writer | Hacker News Reader

LaTeX vs. Word vs. Writer

oestrem.com

95 pointsmoxy54 comments

Although LaTeX typesets beautiful documents, using it is frankly a pain as it takes far longer to typeset a document in LaTeX than in Word or OOo Writer. You arguably have more flexibility in LaTeX, but its nature to typeset using its own sort of syntax makes documents take significantly longer to write.

And I don't think Times New Roman is a particularly bad font. Although it is overused everywhere and may cause eyesores due to this fact, the font itself is serious and a standard in many areas and thus is my second favourite font (after Helvetica.)

It's simply a question of the rate of diminishing returns when using a program such as LaTeX to typeset. I must say that I prefer Word largely for school-related documents; however, I have been known to write up a report-or-two in LaTeX as well. The final output is superior to what Word can produce, though there are few circumstances wherein it is truly worth the extra time and effort to typeset in such a program.

Agreed, LaTeX is a huge pain for anyone not familiar with programming and the sort of syntactic manipulation needed.

I have noticed that Apple's Pages, while idiosyncratic in its own bizarre ways, does fulfill a number of the author's complaints regarding other word processors, particularly when it comes to ligatures and old-style figures (the numerals with ascenders and descenders).

Is there a way to control styles from hotkey in apple pages?

If it's just a single menu command you can just use the standard way of doing it for an app on OS X: Open System Preferences, go to the Keyboard & Mouse preference pane, click on the Keyboard Shortcuts tab, click on the plus and fill out the form to add your shortcut (remember that Menu Title should be the exact title of the menu item, including any ellipses(…)).

Combining Pages with LaTeXiT (http://ktd.club.fr/programmation/latexit_en.php) is my current favorite setup. Pages takes some getting used to but after prolonged use I find it easier to use than Word or Writer. Word is a pain under OS X. LaTeXiT accepts LaTeX markup and produces a image which can be dragged into a Pages Document, perfect for sporadic equations.

Try sitting down for two hours to study the most common LaTeX typesetting commands and to learn how to write your own macros. Text documents should then be marginally slower in LaTeX than Word, and anything with equations far faster.

Ditto. Especially if become capable of using TeX-editing software like Ultra-TeX in Emacs or Vim-LaTeX, with their auto-completion features, you'll be able to write properly typeset text documents in a fraction of the time it takes to write and format them in a WYSIWYG word processor.

Also, it is much easier to combine content from many different TeX files than from Word/OO files, which makes it much easier to do things like compile lecture notes for a class or discussions notes for a project.

I view learning TeX as something like learning how to use vi or emacs. It's difficult, often painful, and hard to see the benefits in the beginning compared to †he big office suites you're used to, but once you get past the initial learning curve, you become remarkably more productive.

TextMate has a very nice LaTeX bundle that I use.

It's actually currently my favorite font. It looks awful if you stick to size-twelve nothing-special all-black formatting, but you can make it look gorgeous on a web page and keep it readable. And on print it's absolutely top-rate: used well I actually prefer it to Garamond.

And, for the record: it's better than original Times in a lot of ways. I don't think it handles numbers or the @ sign as well, but the actual characters are much more balanced.

That really depends on experience. I remember when I started out with latex that it would take me hours to do the simplest of things but now, I take notes in it in class on the fly and I can handle all the formatting immediately. Also, using latex with an inferior editor will make life excruciating. I would advise emacs with latex-mode (and in my case, several hundred lines of customizations) but vim is also a good choice. If however, you try latex with crap like notepad, nano, pico, or gedit... well, you are asking for hell and you will get it.

Is there any way to have it display the rendered page as-you-type? That would make taking notes much easier, since you could see the equations or such that you were writing as your wrote them.

(Disclaimer: I have no experience with LaTeX, and I'm not yet in college so I can't take notes using a laptop... I'm just being curious here.)

http://www.lyx.org/

Emacs running under X will do basic formatting (italic, bold, larger text, etc.) all on its own. There are packages out there that will do more elaborate previews. Googling gives: http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/auctex

I second auctex, it's preview mode is a godsend when formatting tables and formulas. It also has dozens of helpers for switxhing environments, defining and using macros, etc.

It comes with reftex, which, by itself, makes it worth learning. Reftex automatically searches bibtex files for regexps, makes cross-references easy and a lot of other useful things.

As scott_s suggested, LyX is a prominent LaTeX WYSIWYG editor. I use TeXmacs (http://texmacs.org) on Linux because I input a lot of Greek characters and do a lot of Maxima computations while taking class notes, and the ease of Ctrl-Enter makes it like Mathematica notebooks but much faster for writing. It doesn't save natively in LaTeX format like LyX does, and doesn't implement all of LaTeX, but it's an option worth considering if you're in a similar situation.

As has already been mentioned, LyX and TeXmacs are possibilities. Try plain LateX a few times before jumping for the wysiwyg option. It may be nice to see the final output immediately but the benefit of macros combined with the advanced capabilities of editors like emacs makes pure latex a breeze to work with once you get the hang of it.

The cost of learning how to write Latex documents becomes amortized over the number of times you use it. I'm at the point now where it would take me longer to produce equivalent documents in Word than using Latex. (And in the case of articles fit for print, an order of magnitude longer.)

LaTeX makes it easy to make something clean out of a bunch of text.

But when graphics enter, I'm easily stuck loosing a lot of time. For now, i tend to use tikz and will learn Inkscape, after bad experiences with dia, metapost, etc. Sure under MacOS Omnigraffle produces great output...

Good documents are not only text...

Graphics are orthogonal to a Latex document. You specify where to find the graphic, what format it's in and how to orient it. Making the graphic is outside of the Latex process, which I am fine with.

All papers I make for publication have data graphs and figures aplenty, and it would still take me longer with Word.

I agree that including figures is a strong part of LaTeX, I believe, as you have good control over it. What takes times, is drawing a diagram to illustrate something.

Resorting to external tools and inserting is OK, but you often don't have the same visual quality as the rest of the document. Here I don't know many really good tools. That's why people still take a lot of time with pstricks, TikZ and the likes!

I recently discovered graphviz to layout my graphs. (Graphs as in graph theory.)

In LaTeX you'll spend your time learning how to get it to do the right thing.

In Word, you'll spend your time coercing word to do what you want.

The difference: you learn, Word doesn't.

Oh, and Word doesn't do emacs keybindings, which is ridiculous. LaTeX you can just edit in emacs, which is wonderful.

Times New Roman was designed for small newsprint, printed as cheaply as possible on crappy paper. For that it works fairly well. At normal size, though, its schizophrenic design becomes an eyesore.

More importantly, the default Microsoft versions of Times New Roman have shitty kerning, are set not to use ligatures by default, use capitalized (“lining”) numbers, and so forth. If you redid all of the kerning tables by hand, and used a better typographic engine than MS Word, you could get Times New Roman to look passable; it’s never going to be beautiful though.

There is no doubt that LaTeX produces way more beautiful documents than Microsoft Word, even if Word defaults settings are changed.

The thing is people need a word processor that comes out of the box with professional fonts, nice alignment parameters. They sure don't want a piece of software that begs them to download fuzzy fonts and paste text from a web page without reformatting all of this...

People don't want to learn a language for writing text either. They don't want to spend hours to find this package that would looks so great drawing a horizontal line under the header.

Apple Pages is a good alternative, it's my choice for creating professional documents (and believe me, I'm a real typomaniac) without losing time with LaTeX.

If TeXMaCs were more stable it would be a pretty good step in this direction.

Between XeTeX and LyX, you can get all the nice professional fonts and kerning settings of professional desktop publishing suites, along with all the power of LaTeX. A good set of examples is shown on the Beauty of LaTeX page (http://nitens.org/taraborelli/latex).

I am surprised no one mentioned TeXmacs ( http://www.texmacs.org/ ) yet. It is a WYSIWYG editor that can both import from (works reasonably well) and export (works perfecly) to TeX.

By using it you can always do things nearly as quickly as you would using MS Word, and then fine tune things later if you know LaTeX. Every time I want to do something I think it is painful using LaTeX (like complex nested tables) that's the route I take - it works really great for me.

Some folks here might also like the fact that it is entirely written in Scheme.

Wow - thanks for this. I can't believe I'd never heard of it before. Looks like it will take the late out of Latex!

You're welcome!

I thought the same thing ("I can't believe I didn't know about this application before!") when I first heard of it 8 months ago...

Good program; this is rather similar to LyX. I suggest people try both and just go with whichever one they like better.

For writing school assignments, I looked for a system that would meet two requirements:

1. The text can be edited using vim, or at least vi-like keybindings.

2. The storage format is plain text, so any version-control system can efficiently store, diff and merge it.

OpenOffice can work on top of a single XML file, but XML diffing is not like diffing lines of code, and every accidental ^W is still interpreted as "close document". HTML kind of works, but lacks too many typesetting and document-creation features and fixing it with CSS becomes tedious. I played with Texmacs and Lyx for a little while, but eventually bit the bullet and learned LaTeX and vim-latex.

Verdict: If you were willing to invest your time in emacs or vim, learning LaTeX feel similar but easier; spending a little extra time to learn a helper package like vim-latex or AUCTeX really makes it worthwhile.

Dragging tabs and margins around in Word seem like black magic to me. I never have any good intuition about how things will reflow. Or a good sense of what makes for a good layout in the first place, frankly.

The genius of LaTeX is you can crib someone else's style, and your output will look like it was created by a typesetting genius. Personally, I don't think I could ever fiddle around with Word long enough to get output that looks as good.

Another big win with LaTeX is it lets you use an editor that's not awful. Editing your actual text in Word is pretty painful if you're used to Emacs (or other program actually designed for editing text productively).

Two responses:

(1) Lyx is a cross-platform graphical editor that spits out LaTeX, has reasonable UI for many of the interesting things you'd do in a TeX document, and has a pretty good set of preferences and controls. I used to swear by it.

(2) LaTeX is very painful to edit in, no matter what people tell you. Yes, Word does a crappy job of typesetting. But LaTeX is very 1985. You can get similar results in a visual editor with a page layout program; this is why so many people used to rave about Framemaker over Word. On the Mac, iWork's Pages.app will do a passable job; far better than Word. I've ported Quark templates to it without a problem.

> I used to swear by [LyX].

If I might ask, what do you use now?

Pages.app. We paid a couple hundred bucks for a (well-regarded) local graphic designer to build a print template for us that included typography, they delivered it in Quark, and I ported it over to Pages.

For what it's worth, I edit text in a text editor (Emacs), then use Markdown to get it into something that's easy to paste into Pages.app. I've done long-form editing in Pages.app, and I don't love it, but it's far less painful than LaTeX.

Here's what I use:

- LaTeX if the document will have a bunch of equations.

- Word for everything else.

For me, it's a question of efficiency. I find that I can typeset equations much faster with LaTeX than with Word, and I find that I can typeset general text much faster with Word than with LaTeX. The other issue is with shared documents: if I need to share an editable version of a document with somebody, there's a far better chance that they will be able to use a Word file than a LaTeX file.

I assume you've seen the plugins that'll let you typeset equations within Word using LaTeX syntax?

http://texpoint.necula.org/

Have you tried LyX? http://www.lyx.org/

I started using it a few years ago and haven't looked back.

Am I the only one who thinks ligatures and small caps are practically worthless?

In fact, I think they both hurt readability. The few cases where ligatures help, such as "f)" or "To", are better served by kerning pairs (which both Word and Writer supports).

Word and Writer have spent their development effort on things that users care about: being reasonably easy to use. And almost all of the font research of recent years has gone into screen and print readability, not style.

I think you're underestimating the limitations of LaTeX. There is more to its functionality than small caps and ligatures. While that may be the topic of this article (which does a fantastic job at weighing the pros and cons of each typesetter/processor), that still does not detract from the vast capability of LaTeX's ability to process equations, particular formats, tables, etc.

overestimating :)

Possibly (amongst people who know typography). Ligatures and similar devices remove visual clutter and make a document more readable, and small-caps are just another style of font to be used when appropriate. And Word is hellish to use when formatting a document. So many times I've been editing a proposal in Word and wished that I even could have the kind of easy control I get with CSS (and CSS is pretty basic in that support).

Try using styles in Word, it gets you the equivalent of class and tag name selectors. The UI for it is quite buried in pre-ribbon versions of Word, but there are useful defaults and you can somewhat-easily define your own inline (= character) and block (= paragraph) styles.

That's what I mean though. When you're used to having all of your styles in a simple, flexible text file, it's tedious at best to have to navigate a labyrinth of Windows dialogs.

And what's the deal with employers demanding Word docs? More than a couple times I've been told to re-submit a resume in .doc format when I provided a high-quality, preflighted PDF (which is a nice thing to have when you're applying for design positions: embeddable fonts). Dice.com only permits .doc uploads. This meant at least an hour trying to scrap together a suitable Word doc with similar layout and styling.

Hope it's a while before I have to worry about this stuff again :^)

I've been using LaTeX for years to write academic papers. Only recently have some conferences started moving to Word. This has made simultaneous editing a pain.

I've recently started exploring what it would mean to use the experimental CSS multi-column support in Webkit and Gecko to recreate the CHI template. I've had some good luck. Although, it would make life a lot easier if they supported column-span.

The latex2rtf program might help. The result looks like hell initially, compared to the PDF, but the content, styles and images are retained surprisingly well. (Equation support is weaker.) Just load the generated RTF in Word/Writer, tweak the styles and margins, and save as a .doc -- if the fix-up is simple enough for your document, you might not even need to keep a parallel Word copy.

I don't use LaTeX directly but I have used Scrivener's LaTeX/XSLT output template scheme and MacTeX with mixed success for some technical documentation.

I say "mixed success" because getting the overall document structure setup the way I wanted very error-prone. Some simple things like generating a table of contents required me to drop down into low level details. I eventually got it to do what I needed to do but for the amount of documentation I ended up writing I'm not sure it was worth the effort.

Scrivener - http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html

MacTeX - http://www.tug.org/mactex/

My preference is a bit biased since most of the documents I type up are mathematical in nature, but LaTeX wins hands down.

Yes, the learning curve is much steeper than Word for LaTeX, but doesn't everything worth knowing involve an initial period of head smacking?

Or perhaps the things that don't involve initial head smacking don't come to mind when you think of things "worth knowing".

If everything you know was learned at some point, did you have an initial period of head smacking for everything you know?

Touche. Perhaps I was a little careless in my statement.

Note that there are quite a few more examples of what LaTeX does well here: http://nitens.org/taraborelli/latex

Also included is the tex source used.

That's a beautiful wordpress theme.

Thanks :)

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