NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #3/NN_1993_3.iso/spool/comp/text/tex/15260

Text File | 1993-01-21 | 2.9 KB | 56 lines

Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Path: sparky!uunet!mcsun!chsun!bernina!wilde
From: [e-mail] (Erik Wilde)
Subject: Re: HELP : why is TeX better ?
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Organization: Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich, CH
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Distribution: comp.text.tex
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1993 17:08:24 GMT
Lines: 42

In my opinion, the most important feature of LaTeX is the possibility
of specifying the logical structure of a document instead of the
layout. The layout is automatically derived from the logical structure
and layout rules, and that's the way things should work. Unfortunately,
many people are impressed by pseudo-wysiwyg-interfaces which enable
them to play around with the layout. I think that layout is disturbing
when you only care about content, and I was happily using a LaTeX-based
SGML-System for years. Now I have a Mac on my desk and all the people
around me are using word, but I looked at it for a few days and now
I'm even more convinced that any document processing program that does
not separate logical and layout structures is badly designed.
And, if people are not seeing that only logical structure matters if
you write documents (that does not count for fancy looking papers, but
I'm speaking about writing documents, not playing around with fonts
and spacing), you can still say that TeX is the most powerful formatting
engine you can use. Look at the way TeX breaks paragraphs into lines
(ever seen a nicer and more flexible model for doing that?) and then
look at the crap that often comes out of word! The word programmers
couldn't even resist inserting spaces between letters of one word when
the line is very loose. That's not only ugly, it's against every rule
of typography. The word fonts are incredible, and besides that, word
should be awarded a price for the most fucked up user interface (at
least for word 5.0 on the mac). Not only can you delete every menu
item, you can also move them around to whereever you want them, the
effect is that you can only use your own word, every other copy of it
is simply unusable.
Well, I could go on for hundreds of lines, it's a shame that most
people only look on how fancy it looks on the screen, not on what it is
made for and how it does its job.
The moral is: If someone is really looking for high quality output
and is not a mouse-addict, LaTeX (or, if you want a nicer interface
to it, the publisher) is the product of choice. Word and similar
products are nice to demonstrate (if they don't crash, what word is
doing routinely to me), but they fail if you want to use them for
writing documents.
I hope this helps,

Erik Wilde ([e-mail])
  Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zuerich)
  Laboratory of Computer Engineering and Networks (TIK)
  ETH-Zentrum, ETZ G61.2, CH - 8092 Zuerich
  Phone: [phone]  Fax: [phone]