Steve Litt <sl...@...> writes:
I'm not really sure I agree that it's as easy to do semantic
markup in MS Word is in Latex. There are a number of issues
First, it's much easier not to use styles. Personally, I always used
styles, but I'm the only one I know how does that. When I put
together documents from groups of people it's always a mess
because people used their personal formatting. Want a header?
Increase font size and make bold. Furthermore, when copying
between documents in MS Word, the result is not always as
expected, even if styles are used consistently. On the other
hand, I never had problem putting together documents
from groups of people in Latex. MS Word
also tends to make anything into a style. Often document
templates have both a 'normal' style and a 'body' style,
and if you just write you never know which style is used. Take
for example the IEEE MS Word template. There are
hundreds of styles in that which makes it very
hard to use. And try to switch back and forth between
a single column an multicolumn document in
MS Word. In Latex it's just changing a single option.
In my opinion, when I started using MS Word many
year ago it was more geared toward using styles.
But MS seems to have accepted that nobody uses
styles, and made it more and more difficult to use
styles, while easier to use finger painting. In Latex you
can write a document focusing on the contents without
any thoughts to formatting, and the result is good. In
MS Word that is just impossible (for example, MS Word
has no mechanism for automatic placement of floats).
