LaTeX vs Writer vs Word

eyolf · 2007-09-14 10:01:30

Back in May, I wrote an article with a fairly detailed comparison between the output of the same document in LaTeX, Writer, and Word, using the exact same layout, to see what the differences really are (most of the comparisons of this kind I've seen before have used different fonts, different page layout etc, which doesn't really give much of a basis for a comparison).
Anyway, the other day, it ended up on reddit.org, and I was reminded of it. Now that TeXlive is a hot topic, I figured I might as well post the link here too:

http://oestrem.com/thingstwice/?p=65

Feel free to comment

iphitus · 2007-09-14 10:20:37

Good article!

LaTeX is great... though I never cease to be amazed at how ridiculously big it is. Couldn't it be any smaller?

Also worth mentioning, for those too lazy to work with the syntax of LaTeX at a low level, there's always Lyx, a QT gui.

James

eyolf · 2007-09-14 10:35:04

You're a fast reader :-)

About size: I suppose one could strip down the core functions of LaTeX to a fairly slim package, but then one would have to go to ctan and follow more or less up-to-date installation instructions every time one needed a new package. I love TeXLive so far -- every package I've ever had trouble installing is there already. Great!

fana-m · 2007-10-17 11:19:57

Hi, i didn't read the whole story,
but that what i'f read and saw, was nice.

As a addition i can give a small story of a friend of mine,
who made under Linux a writer odt, opend it under osX writer to edit (the layout was messed up), and the to print it under Win writer (the layout was messed up again) all was done under the same version of writer

The second freaky thing happen to him was also under Linux ooo running on Ubuntu
2pc's [same Ubuntu] = [same writer version] != [uneven layout]

Personal he uses LaTeX ^^ as me.

For me i prefer LaTeX, caus the pseydo wysiwig editors dont to the things i want to do.
Ok, they have some nice features, but nothing compared to latex in the end.

as an example
you want you want 3 words spread over the page [left aligned; centered; right aligned]
i dont know how this can fast be done in writer or word...
only via an tabular...
make tabulat 1row 3cols; click 1st col; align left; type; click 2nd col; center; type; click 3rd col; align right; type
and in 60% the cases the tabular will be messed up on anything you do...

in LaTeX you have your .tex
and type "bla \hfill bla \hfill bla \hfill\\"
in my opinion thats a bit faster ^^

i can write about many more things i dislike on word and writer... but i will stop flaming ^^

what i can say is that all ppl who have some time left and want to try something "new"
should install texlive and kile ( a really good editor for LaTeX files)
if you got warm with LaTeX you wont use anymore writer or word.

fanam

dolby · 2007-10-17 11:51:28

im a *tex complete newbie. i had only seen it til now in slackware installation discs and recently when texlive moved to community and the posts about it here.
i installed it recently but havent had the chance to mess with it yet.
i got a couple of questions though.
should a user interested only in editing enhanced text files like .doc etc quite frequently bother with *tex ?
and also besides the texlive-docs package is there any place online to find help and info about how to use it? preferably in a "for dummies" how to sort of article?

Last edited by dolby (2007-10-17 11:51:57)

lucke · 2007-10-17 12:17:01

A truly interesting read. Thanks, eyolf.

Haven't gotten to the end yet, but so far I've noticed one spelling error: "intervension" instead of "intervention". By the bye, Wordpress doesn't support ligatures ;-(

Another spelling mistake: there is no such word as "endresult".

Last edited by lucke (2007-10-17 12:34:32)

vacant · 2007-10-17 12:20:52

I've used LyX for some time. Last year my wife did an English Literature and had to write essays, with quotations, bibliographies etc. Being quite a technophobe she wasn't looking forward to doing all this in Open Office (to write a new letter, she tends to delete text from old letters so her address remains in the right place) so I set her up with LyX and told her she no longer needed to worry about extra spaces, blank lines, rulers, page breaks.

She soon got used to it and, completely unprompted, other people on her course asked her how on earth she'd managed to produce such perfect results.

When my son was doing A levels I suggested he used LyX as he was having difficulty inserting equations. Yesterday, now in his 3rd year undergraduate Physics, he emailed to ask "what was that program for doing equations?"

Shame we're not on qt4 yet as that is holding LyX back at 1.4.3. As I'm running Skype, so had qt4 anyway, I built LyX 1.5.2 which looks far nicer.

Sigi · 2007-10-17 12:47:56

Nice read. I just wrote my bachelor thesis and it looks great, every single one of the 140 pages (A4) It was my third work in LaTeX...

sergejx · 2007-10-17 16:08:04

dolby wrote:

and also besides the texlive-docs package is there any place online to find help and info about how to use it? preferably in a "for dummies" how to sort of article?

I learned LaTeX from book The not so Short Introduction to LaTeX. It is also awailable in different languages.

eyolf · 2007-10-19 17:12:43

@dolby: That depends on what you mean by "only interested in editing enhanced text files like .doc".
If it means that you frequently get .doc files from your friends, or that you write short stuff where the way the document looks is irrelevant, then: no, you don't need to bother about LaTeX. it can be a hassle to work with, especially if you want to depart from the defaults, and for short documents, it may be overkill to use LaTeX.
On the other hand, if you do care about how your work looks (which you should), and if you're not afraid to learn some tags, then I'd recommend having a closer look at it. Especially, as has been mentioned, through LyX, which removes all the hassle from sight.
Or in other words: with LyX, there is no excuse for continuing to edit "enhanced text files like .doc" :-)

@lucke: Thanks for the corrections.

@sergej (&dolby): The not so short introduction is part of the texlive-core-doc package.

Stefan Husmann · 2007-10-23 12:07:11

Hello,

very good article. I use LaTeX at home for everything for a number of years now, and have to use MS Word at work, and I didn't dare to believe that there are wordprocessors arount whose microtypographical issues are even worse than in Word.

A remark to ligatures. In some languages - i.e. german - ligatures are to be avoided in some circumstances. These circumstances are strongly dependent from context and grammar and therefore it is difficulty to have an algorithm for it. But in LaTeX the author at least can correct this by hand.

broch · 2007-10-24 01:11:50

I only read this:

Ligatures
But wait: there's more. Some letter combinations are more difficult than others. The letter "f" is particularly troublesome, and therefore, there's a long tradition — back to Gutenberg, actually — of making special characters for the combinations "fi" "fl" and "ff" (and "ffi" and "ffl") — so called ligatures. Most fonts actually have these, but again, W&W doesn't use them. This is a consequence of the WYSIWYG paradigm:

which is not true.
as both oo writer and word handle ligatures pretty well.
However one of linux DTP (scribus) or text proseccors can handle all possible ligatures and glyphs. Best would be to try OTF fonts with some ligatures simply missing under linux even though inDesign handles these well.
Compare InDesign CS3 and latex

SmallCaps is another mistake.
1) under linux there are two ways for oo writer to properly handle SmallCaps
-method one: open writer, select "Character" tool, within a font select SmallCaps
-method two (assuming that you ever used PS fonts and you know how to handle them)
edit *.afm file and change "FamilyName" to let's say FontNameSC
now install font with spadmin and there you have it

All fonts that I have:
FF Quadraat, Dante, Stempel Garamond, Andrade, Haarlemmer, Verdigris, FF Maiola and so on and so for, that support SC are properly handled by oo Writer.

The only thing I don't like about Writer is OTF font (OTF are PS based, OTT fonts (TT based) are handled o.k.) issue (simply not visible under openoffice) which (handling OTF fonts) is an open request since 2002.

LateX is obviously more than word processor but much less than real DTP and it is nowhere close to professional (and expensive) InDesign, and as free tool does not really compete well against scribus.

bzklrm · 2007-10-24 03:12:30

broch wrote:

LateX is obviously more than word processor but much less than real DTP and it is nowhere close to professional (and expensive) InDesign, and as free tool does not really compete well against scribus.

I wouldn't want to have to write a whole book with scribus, though. The whole point of LaTeX is to enable the user to focus on the content, by dissociating it from the layout (which WYSIWYG, WP or DTPs, do not do, by definition). Scribus and LaTeX are just different tools for different tasks. Word processors and LaTeX, OTOH, provide different approaches to the same task.

broch · 2007-10-24 04:11:26

well, I am not discussing personal preferences. De gustibus non est disputandum.
Anyway, content has nothing to do with tool used for writing.

eyolf · 2007-10-24 08:12:47

broch wrote:

I only read this:
Ligatures
But wait: there's more. Some letter combinations are more difficult than others. The letter "f" is particularly troublesome, and therefore, there's a long tradition — back to Gutenberg, actually — of making special characters for the combinations "fi" "fl" and "ff" (and "ffi" and "ffl") — so called ligatures. Most fonts actually have these, but again, W&W doesn't use them. This is a consequence of the WYSIWYG paradigm:
which is not true.
as both oo writer and word handle ligatures pretty well.

No, they don't. You can of course insert the ligature characters directly, but the "fi" ligature will not be handled as the characters "f" and "i" and will thus misbehave in certain situations. Besides, you will have to insert every one of them manually.
Or did I misunderstand what you meant?

However one of linux DTP (scribus) or text proseccors can handle all possible ligatures and glyphs. Best would be to try OTF fonts with some ligatures simply missing under linux even though inDesign handles these well.
Compare InDesign CS3 and latex

Sure, there are other programs which do this, but that was not the topic of the article. Nor was it: "can this be done in Linux?" :-)

SmallCaps is another mistake.
1) under linux there are two ways for oo writer to properly handle SmallCaps
-method one: open writer, select "Character" tool, within a font select SmallCaps
-method two (assuming that you ever used PS fonts and you know how to handle them)
edit *.afm file and change "FamilyName" to let's say FontNameSC
now install font with spadmin and there you have it

Your method one is the one that is discussed in the article. As it is said there, that is not really a true Small Caps solution, but a workaround which only gives decent results.
Method two is hardly an option for most users, and again requires a lot of manual labour. Again: you can of course use all these characters, but it is not integrated in the work-flow the application offers.

broch · 2007-10-24 15:41:12

No, they don't. You can of course insert the ligature characters directly, but the "fi" ligature will not be handled as the characters "f" and "i" and will thus misbehave in certain situations. Besides, you will have to insert every one of them manually.
Or did I misunderstand what you meant?

No, you can insert these from keyboard
here:
ligatures:
http://img85.imageshack.us/my.php?image … resjh7.png
here small caps
http://img231.imageshack.us/my.php?imag … apslm5.png
here are ornaments (also from keyboard)
http://img223.imageshack.us/my.php?imag … ntscb2.png

all from keyboard. If you pay attention to the font names then you will realize that these are not fakes but real fonts.

So true SmallCaps are the ones that are in fact included in font information. I don't think that i need explanation what SC or ligatures are

Below is a last picture with true and fake SmallCaps
first line true, second line fake (extimated by Writer engine) small caps.
http://img233.imageshack.us/my.php?imag … akeab9.png

Difference is quite obvious. So I don't need LateX to make ligatures, SC, ornaments accessible in Writer and all this from keyboard.

Last edited by broch (2007-10-24 15:50:08)

eyolf · 2007-10-24 16:45:35

That's still what I would call "manual input". A true handling of ligatures would be when the application recognizes the relevant letter combinations (e.g. "f" and "l") and automatically replaces them with the ligature ("fl") while still treating it as separate characters (so that the cursor can be placed between the letters, and the spell-checker will recognize the word), unless overridden by the user (e.g. in a word like "selfless", where one might not want a ligature). All of this is provided for in the font, and programs like InDesign and Scribus use this information, but Word and Writer do not.
With your solution, Writer doesn't know that "fl" consists of two letters; to Writer, it's just a glyph in a font, and it can't process it, just print it.

broch · 2007-10-24 17:36:12

Most fonts actually have these, but again, W&W doesn't use them.

incorrect statement: word and Writer can use ligatures
It is pretty easy to make Word automatically replace ff letters with ligature
Whether one wants to set ligatures to replace letters automatically is another question.

If they exist for the font in question, they are usually supplied in a separate font file, but neither Word nor Writer can handle them directly. Instead, they solve this by taking the capital letters and scaling them down.

is also incorrect because Word and Writer can use true SC. That is because this (Small Caps) is font property not a magic in LateX.

The same goes to numerals. Check out HI Mercury for example. I can introduce numerals without any problem if these are included in the font.

I am not saying that Word or Writer are DTP tools. Not even close, but you are looking at the font instead of editing capabilities.

Instead of suggesting that LateX handles fonts better, I would suggest to show where LateX really shines.

Font handling was a problem in the past, but currently this is not an issue.

eyolf · 2007-10-24 22:08:44

Last post from me on this issue, which is now going in circles.

broch wrote:

Most fonts actually have these, but again, W&W doesn't use them.
incorrect statement: word and Writer can use ligatures
It is pretty easy to make Word automatically replace ff letters with ligature

Yes, YOU can use them, just as you can use any glyph available in any font that W&W can read. That is not an issue. The question is if the word processors themselves use the information that is available in the fonts: that "ff" is equivalent to "f" + "f" etc. As I said before, if you replace all "f" + "f" with "ff", either from another font file or from the font itself, W&W no longer knows about the original characters and can no longer process the word.

If they exist for the font in question, they are usually supplied in a separate font file, but neither Word nor Writer can handle them directly. Instead, they solve this by taking the capital letters and scaling them down.
is also incorrect because Word and Writer can use true SC. That is because this (Small Caps) is font property not a magic in LateX.

The same goes for SC: You can of course switch fonts manually (or, for that matter, semi-manually, though styles, etc.) and insert true small caps, but again that's you doing it, and not W&W, even the information needed to do it is available: if you leave it to the program, what you'll get is the scaled-down capitals.

The same goes to numerals. Check out HI Mercury for example. I can introduce numerals without any problem if these are included in the font.

Again: yes, you can of course insert them, but Writer will no longer know that it's a "3" -- you can not use them in numbered lists, etc.

broch · 2007-10-25 01:23:29

You clearly stated in your paper that Word or Writer can't use SC (giving an example). This is not true. You stated that Writer and Word can use only fake SC (you never have said that you want specific way of inserting SC, you stated that this is impossible). That is not true.
Now you are stating that this is about specific way of inserting SC.
Truth is that selecting in Writer small caps from pull down menu is easier than selecting in the same Writer fake sc from character format/font effect

In your whole pdf file there is nothing about the way something is handled. You simply state that this is not possible

Most fonts don't contain any small caps. If they exist for the font in question, they are usually supplied in a separate font file, but neither Word nor Writer can handle them directly.

in this example:
http://img231.imageshack.us/my.php?imag … apslm5.png
Writer using directly AbsaraSansTF-SC (check font name) without editing character/format. Basically, it looks like you have one font from Adobe and your conclusions are based on this one example.

You are making too many "corrections" now as this discussion goes then it was general inability to handle something, now it is specific way of handling something.

So is it Word or Writer professional editing tool? Nope. This is not a goal for Word/Writer. Still in contrast to your writing, both can handle fonts. Pretty well in fact. From your writing seems obvious that you really have not looked well into word/writer font handling. You assumed something which may be truth in past.

I would be more interesting to compare LateX with scribus or another free DTP tool.

tomk · 2007-10-26 09:18:00

Two points from a FA's perspective:
1. If this is going to become a two-person disagreement, about an issue that is not specifically relevant to Arch, please do it privately.
2. broch - if you would find a LateX/scribus/other DTP comparison more interesting, you should go ahead and do it.

arooaroo · 2007-11-19 21:38:28

Some interesting Latex links:

http://nitens.org/taraborelli/latex
http://www.osnews.com/story.php/10766/L … e-for-you/
http://www.andy-roberts.net/misc/latex/index.html

dolby · 2007-11-20 05:24:51

i might as well add this howto for dummies series started by polishlinux http://polishlinux.org/tex/latex-the-basics-part-i/
seems to start from abc, so im gonna keep an eye for the next parts

Xilon · 2007-11-20 09:07:32

I found this article on wikibooks useful http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Latex . Good as a reference.

arooaroo · 2007-11-20 09:55:58

The wikibook was actually based on my tutorials (another plug They've added a fair bit more since then. They're getting permission from several authors to combine guides/tutorials into one mega-resource. Do contribute to the effort, if anyone's interested!

Arch Linux

#1 2007-09-14 10:01:30

LaTeX vs Writer vs Word

#2 2007-09-14 10:20:37

Re: LaTeX vs Writer vs Word

#3 2007-09-14 10:35:04

Re: LaTeX vs Writer vs Word

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Re: LaTeX vs Writer vs Word

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