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From: espie@egret.Stanford.EDU (Marc Espie)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.applications
Subject: Re: Mac's Microsoft Word
Message-ID: <1991Jan16.194832.25881@Neon.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 16 Jan 91 19:48:32 GMT
References: <1991Jan15.031444.5@csc.canterbury.ac.nz> <1991Jan14.222837.20284@mintaka.lcs.mit.edu> <662@tronsbox.xei.com>
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So... TeX has no GUI, Word has one. What does this mean ?
In particular, it means that you can do what you want with Word,
format a document in atrocious ways while believing you're doing
a great job. Nobody would be that stupid ? Well...

I've seen friends use Word to produce wonderful pile of craps.
It's so easy to change fonts, use a cute little format, underline
things, that you VERY RAPIDLY end with a page where everything
IS a special effect. You get a nice computer product, not a
readable document...

I don't believe I would be able to do better by myself, but I use
TeX (or LaTeX, or AMSTeX, depends), and most of my stuff comes out
right. There are some ``special effects'' in LaTeX, but styles
have been written by people who spent a lot of time trying to
ensure that everything would come out right (example: titles,
subtitles, captions). IF I want to add another special effect,
I've got to think about it. Mind you, I don't spend much time
trying to figure out how to program it, I spend my time laying
it out, finding exactly how it should look.

Other case in point: TeX is a logical system. If you want to
lay out a math formula, you have to say so. Because nobody
told most of the guys who use Word, they fill their texts
with ``n'' and other small formulas which look EXACTLY like
normal text (same roman-type font) and which look awful.
Also, find me a good word-processor which will lay out formulas
at least as good as TeX, where I don't have to fiddle with
blank spaces to get it exactly right (which means, of course,
that two pages latter, I'll have to do it again, for another
formula following the same logic, but NOT the same formula---you
can't always use cut/paste). It is very difficult to come up
with a consistent style with Word-like programs.
Other case: if you want to write a
big document, like a book, you're better off with TeX. If your
publisher suddenly decides it would look better the other way,
you spend two hours with TeX and voila ! With Word, you will
have to take another week. Why do you think most scientific books published
nowadays are designed with TeX or troff and not Word ?

Of course, if you already know much about document-design, you will
be able to do it with Word, and appreciate the interactivity.
The way TeX is designed, you can't do that, but you can change your
document with a few commands, and have barely any automatic mistakes
to correct.

So you have a choice: 
- you can learn TeX.
- you can learn document-formatting and use Word.
- you can learn neither and rely on your personal taste to produce
things with Word :-):-).

	Marc