Patrick James wrote:
It does all of these these things superbly well.
most of the reviews on the App Store say that it's still not quite 100%
on this (which is what I hear at intervals from Pages-using friends)
> With respect, you have no idea what I need, and Word just about does it
(most of it) awkwardly and unreliably. I've crashed every version of Word since 6
because of the complexity of my documents (not to mention struggling to get the
damned thing to work at all in the way I want). LaTeX is the most powerful
typesetting (not WYSIWYG) tool out there (with respect to Quark and InDesign).
Suggesting that people should stop using word processors and learn Latex is not
very realistic.
Not for you maybe. But there are many people out there who disagree (eg
http://openwetware.org/wiki/Word_vs._LaTeX, even a FB page!
http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=17278906090&topic=6608). There's
also the fact that anyone who uses serious equations or necessarily
eccentric footnotes ends up learning LaTeX.
But more to the point, that's not what I said. I said roughly:
1) There are WPs. These tend to bloat and require the user to get
familiar with a lot of different palettes etc that do not easily lend
themselves to coherency beyond a certain complexity. That is
inescapable. I showed Nisus to someone a while ago and they nearly
fainted (as they put it). They all take getting used to if they have any
power.
2) There are two mark-up languages that work (of all infinite
possibilities, and real options)
a) LaTeX
b) HTML/XML variants.
There are advantages to the second set of options.
I didn't even begin to mention the actual typesetting process, on which
LaTeX beats Word into a pulp.
And I think if you're starting cold, with no practice in Word
(admittedly fairly unrealistic scenario) it's tricky to start with LaTeX
(but then you're away) whereas Word seems to me to be a very long
learning curve. I know many people who picked up LaTeX after a couple of
hours.
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