[OS X TeX] Macintouch report on TeX versus Word

[Alain Schremmer]

On Jan 19, 2009, at 6:28 PM, David Derbes wrote:

> My experience is a little different, but it may be worth reporting.
>
> I have transcribed two books (Freeman Dyson's "Advanced Quantum  
> Mechanics" and Lillian Lieber's "The Einstein Theory of  
> Relativity"). The first was, after I posted it to the arXiv, picked  
> up by World Scientific. They are used to LaTeX and had no trouble  
> at all making such adaptations as they wished to my LaTeX source.  
> The second was going to be reset laboriously into Quark. The guy  
> that was going to do it wanted USD 8 a page, which would have been  
> ruinously expensive to the publishers. I volunteered to do whatever  
> they wanted. It was a little time consuming but not really terrible  
> (had to put proof marks in and learn how to do that; had to change  
> the font for pagination, and so on.)
>
> I think that the publishers of the world (whether or not they do  
> mathematics) would save themselves a lot of time, money and grief  
> were they to set a few of their team to learn LaTeX. I was told by  
> my main liaison at the Lieber publishers that most typesetters he  
> was familiar with were "terrified" of LaTeX. I find this astounding.

  My colleagues complain that students are "terrified" of  
mathematics. But these are facts and facts need be explained and  
dealt with. Medical doctors cannot avoid the fact that their patients  
are ill. Math teachers can and we do blame our students for being  
"terrified" of mathematics.

> God only knows what time and money have been wasted by people  
> wrestling with the capricious behavior of various releases of Word.

No doubt about that. And, more generally, untold billions are being  
wasted annually because the obviously right thing to do is not being  
done:

http://plus.maths.org/latestnews/jan-apr09/innumeracy/index.html?nl=1

Regards
--schremmer