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hfkwer | 2 years ago

The appeal of word isn't the WYSIWYG aspect. It's that... it. just. works. You want a table? There's only one way to make a table, and it works. You want to insert an image? It f*cking works. You want to format running headers a certain way? Believe it or not, it works! No weird incompatibilities between packages. No delving through the depth of 1990-era latex library code to figure out where the weird space comes from. Everything just works! And there's documentation online! Written for humans!

Trust me, writing code is not the issue with latex. I've written C++ code for embedded MCUs. I've taught python to undergrads. The pain does not even compare.

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chungy|2 years ago

The disadvantage of Word is that it has absolutely terrible output and quite a lot of use cases are hard or impossible to use in it.

Don't let the name fool you. TeXmacs won't make you write (La)TeX. You'll get tables that work, images that work, hyperlinks that work, running headers that work, math that works, kerning that words, hyphenation and justification that work. (From math forward are major failure points in Word)

eldaisfish|2 years ago

>The disadvantage of Word is that it has absolutely terrible output

This is a moot point if most people are reluctant to pick up latex and those who do are greeted by often unreadable, esoteric code that produces error messages such as "badness". This is the problem with latex and its derivatives, not their output.

kaba0|2 years ago

For anything more complex, world utterly fails when you inadvertently edit a column of that table, that will break page 533 beyond recognition.

hfkwer|2 years ago

Do you have anything to contribute beyond rehashing memes? I can have a go at it too: better not miss a bracket on line 2000 of your document, otherwise latex will complain about a runaway argument in a different file and you'll have to sift through the whole thing to find where the error is.