[OS X TeX] Macintouch report on TeX versus Word

[Jason Davies]

some more input, rather randomly and a question to end:

I promised as my PhD came out of the printer amidst crashes and 
errors that I would not use Word again. I survived with Nisus 
for a while then thanks to Dominic Wujastyk, got started with 
LaTeX (I'm an ancient historian)

Cambridge got very confused though they had TeX specialists. I 
asked them to impose their stylesheet but some real problems 
emerged, to the point that even now I wince as I look at some of 
the output (eg they published with every subheading numbered). 
But that was a communication problem.

I use LaTeX as much as possible but get dragged into using Track 
Changes with my Word-obsessed colleagues for editing anything 
I'm not authoring myself.

We will always be a minority! Even on the Mac platform (perhaps, 
especially in an 'easy to use' context) but there are always 
people with aesthetic sensibilities...

Gerben and the authors of TeXShop are heroes without whom I 
would never have made it.

BBEdit is the star of the show for me also (I know others like 
other editors, each to their own)

I depressingly rely on LaTex2rtf a lot these days as more people 
won't even accept pdfs -- somehow Word is the only thing they 
can read with.


Beamer is a revelation and I use it whenever possible even when 
things end up in Powerpoint (which they have to, for me, at 
times). I end up dragging the pdf into PPT. But I love what I 
can do with LaTeX and Beamer. Amazing. This is what computers 
were invented for.

Finally -- people have mentioned switching to XeTeX. How easy is 
that for someone who knows only some fairly basic LaTeX?