[OS X TeX] TeX and the wild wild world out there

[Victor Ivrii]

On 11/29/06, Bruno Voisin <bvoisin at mac.com> wrote:
> Le 29 nov. 06 à 11:56, Anthony Morton a écrit :
>
> > All that's happened is that Word has evolved to where it can
> > produce acceptable math typesetting.  It's still ugly as hell but
> > at least it's legible.
>
> I know Victor won't agree, but personally I find <http://
> www.unicode.org/notes/tn28/UTN28-PlainTextMath.pdf>  encouraging --> both regarding content, and as an indication of what Word 2007 can
> produce. (It was mentioned earlier here starting from <http://tug.org/
> pipermail/macostex-archives/2006-September/024217.html>.)


Nothing complex. No graphics (sorry I have not seen any M$W document
with a slope  straight line looking as a straight line rather than
saw). However for a sake of arguments I am ready to agree that M$W2007
(is it for Mac? Linux? any other Unix?) and especially M$W2077 can
produce beauuuutiful results. And decent M$PP presentation. The
problem however is that with TeX result varies from good to excellent.
To produce something ugly one needs to work hard.
On the other hand, with M$W, M$PP one can easily produce really ugly
output and the majority of the users do this. Well, however some are
skillful enough to produce great outputs. [I have seen one in the
Royal Ontario Museum between Honest Lawyer and Three-Head
Firebreathing Dragon]. But absolute majority of M$W are not that good.



>From my referee report to some paper: "Finally, while I know it was
produced by LaTeX, I cannot get rid off impression that it was
produced by M$W". :-)

Similarly I know that many reasonable people use The Bat! or even M$
Outluck Excess for mailing, but looking at my spamagent file (used to
store X-Mailer of all spam-identified messages) I see 10% of Bats and
89.9% of M$ Outluck.

One of the reasons that M$W is crawling into realms of TeX is that
1) many (La)TeX users use as a template their first articles
2) which in turn were copied from the article of their supervisors
GOTO 1






-- 
========================
Victor Ivrii, Department of Mathematics, University of Toronto
http://www.math.toronto.edu/ivrii
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