Re: Ubuntu vs. Debian (was Re: Introduction)
For me the main advantages of LaTeX over Word is the easy incorporation
of references, citations and numbering figures and tables. Offcourse
Word is also able to do this, but with a lot more trouble. Something
like 'headings' always want to do things differently then the author. I
wrote several thesises in Word during my study. After too many
workarounds I got sick of it, and put some effort in learning LaTeX
(RTFM!). The use of LaTeX is without borders! If you are used to MS, try
MiKTeX.. If you put some efforts in it, you will never us word again,
especially when your in science!
Jean-Paul
===============
Miles Fidelman wrote:
> Chris Bannister wrote:
> Oh come on. At the company we just left, we generated 2-3 proposals a
> month, each at 25 pages or so, using Word. There are lots of reasons
> to dislike Word, but get real, it's usable
> and it works.
Just looking at the number of word documents produced every day, yes,
Word seems to work. There are even reports of people having accomplished
the task of generating long and complex documents using word. I know one
guy who wrote a ca. 200 pages scientific review paper with coauthors
scattered around the globe.
In the end it worked, but it was a horrible experience. Just two points:
- after the paper was edited by one of the coauthors, the equations
could not be changed any more and were not displayed correctly. (The
coauthor used a different version of word)
- the paper was stored on a 'network drive' on a server with a raid.
When the network was down for 10s. Word corrupted the file and could not
restore it. Despite the fact that a reasonable autosave interval was
set, no usable backup could be recovered. The document had to be
recreated from the last valid print out.
(All that the linux users experienced during the 10s was a temporary
freeze of network access, no data loss or corruption!)
The problem with the corrupted files might have been avoided by a better
backup strategy, but that requires efforts outside of word. With LaTeX
on linux, no extra efforts are required for protecting your documents
from the OS or from the editor failing to properly 'autosave' the
documents in a way that they are usable.
(I am no expert for word, so I can't really tell why the 'autosave'
didn't work in this case. From all that I could tell from the settings,
the document should have been saved every 5 or 10 minutes, but this was
evidently not the case. What probably happened is that the autosave
kicked in when the file was already corrupted and therefore saved a
corrupted copy of the corrupted file.)
YMMV, but IMHO reliability on top of usabilitiy are so poor, that no one
should use word for productive work.
[The irony in this story is that fact that this guy still laughs at me
using such 'exotic' software as LaTeX. ]
I guess that almost all word users have had their 'disasters' of this or
other type. The interesting thing is, that most will still stick to it,
trying to work around the limitations (like rotating documents like
text1.doc, text2.doc etc. in order to have more backups once word
corrupts their files or upgrading to the latest version of word just to
be able to share their documents etc.) instead of using a better
software in the first place.
Johannes
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