Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!taumet!mike From: mike@taumet.com (Michael S. Ball) Newsgroups: comp.text.tex Subject: Re: Comparing word processors with TeX Message-ID: <614@taumet.com> Date: 23 Feb 91 21:53:39 GMT References: <18200@gremlin.nrtc.northrop.com> Reply-To: mike@taumet.UUCP (Michael S. Ball) Organization: Taumetric Corporation, San Diego Lines: 41 In article <18200@gremlin.nrtc.northrop.com> jslee@nrtc.nrtc.northrop.com (John Lee ) writes: > >Yes, I know it's not fair to word processors (like Word, WordPerfect, >Macwrite, etc) to attempt to compare them to TeX, but when faced with >the question: > > Why should I have to tolerate the fickleness of TeX when > I can use Word or WordPerfect? The best reasons to use Tex are that it a) simplifies some part of the job which you are doing b) produces higher quality output, and you care about it. We have found the first to be true, particularly for longer documents with significant structure. The arguments for a markup language for long documents are well known, and I won't repeat them. Using our Laserjet II printer, the output produced by Tex is significantly higher in quality than that produced by WordPerfect with Bitstream fonts. I don't know why that is, but it's quite noticable. For anything with equations WordPerfect isn't even close. My friends who do desktop publishing on Mac's and PC's regularly Oh and Ah over our Tex output, even though we paid very little attention to anything but writing the document (an advantage of a markup language.) On the other hand, we use WordPefect for letters, short reports, and similar documents which aren't worth the trouble of using Tex. A completely separate reason applies only if you consider documents to have a high archival value in an electronic form. When was the last time you tried to recover some old wordstar files? What? you don't still have wordstar around? How about MacWrite 10 years from now? My TeX files are still going to be there in ordinary ASCII, and I can edit out the markup if I need to. Of course, this is only a concern for major pieces of documentation. -- Michael S. Ball mike@taumet.com TauMetric Corporation (619)697-7607