[timlatim]

Text-based workflow has one significant advantage over GUI-based design: diffability. This enables patch-based collaboration: you can easily share your diff with others, review changes line-by-line, resolve conflicts between concurrent modifications, etc.

Personally, I'm much more comfortable working on large documents in LaTeX compared to Word because I can see every change I make and easily revise/revert it. It's too easy to unintentionally hit some shortcut or button in a WYSIWYG editor that subtly changes the document and not realize it until much later, when the undo stack is useless.

[0xbadcafebee]

Word can show you every change you made, as well as tools like Confluence (which is just a version-controlled WYSIWYG Wiki), and let you diff/revert individual changes.

GUI design diffing is pretty simple too: you collapse a flowchart into a DAG and then diff the changes between two copies of the DAG. It's how you troubleshoot DAG-based software bugs. We could also just make a better way to diff GUI changes, if we tried. It's not nuclear physics...

If people started using GUIs more, then they'd find new problems, sure, but then they'd just make solutions for them. There isn't a problem we can't solve. Except for the problem of changing a culture, like a culture of text. Culture is the hardest thing in the universe to change.

[bionsystem]

I've written quite a bit of powershell to automate stuff in Word in our docs (pdf generation, hyperlink creation and verification, etc), and I second this. It is awful to work with. I'd much rather have latex, markdown or anything else than WYSIWYG.