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Side note: why do these questions always ask about their mothers or grandmothers? Do they believe that women will naturally have a more difficult time understanding than fathers and grandfathers?
2. Grandmothers are stereotyped as giving a damn about what their grandkids are up to.
3. Grandfathers are stereotyped as just nodding sagely as if they did understand, even when they don't.
However, moving from Word to LaTeX is a bit like leaving one bad relationship for another. Word beats your documents up constantly: splitting paragraphs, applying random styles, auto-numbering lists like a toddler with a calculator, positioning figures anywhere but where you want them, and so on forever. Getting even slightly complex results out of it is a constant struggle. LaTeX doesn't do any of that: your document will be represented perfectly every time; every semantically significant structural element will just work as it should; and you never have to think about presentation at all. It's intoxicating, working with such an elegant tool. But fail to treat it right, get even one tiny backslash in the wrong place, and you get nothing useful, just a screenful of errors.
If this were a movie, LaTeX would be played by Penelope Cruz: she'd take eight hours to do her make up before a dinner date, bewitch all the other diners with her beauty, and then dump her drink on the hero and storm out of the restaurant when he accidentally makes eye contact with the waitress. Word would be Cathy Bates, beating the shit out of some poor writer with a hammer.
As the current top answer implies, it's really rather easy to explain LaTeX to anyone who a) has some concept of a printing press and movable type and b) understands that computers can be used to automate manual labor.
I love LaTeX. I still don't quite know how to pronounce it, but it's perfect for someone like me. I like to focus on what I'm saying more than what it looks like. I get the exact same satisfaction out of using Lilypond for music notation instead of Sibelius, Finale, etc. What's really great is that if I ever need to write myself a short paper that includes math equations, graphics, and staff paper snippets, I can do…
I've always pronounced it "Lah-tech", though some people insist it is "Lay-tech".
As the current top answer implies, it's really rather easy to explain LaTeX to anyone who a) has some concept of a printing press and movable type and b) understands that computers can be used to automate manual labor.
Re LaTeX: The new crop of online LaTeX editors are making it easier to use, taking away the installation/setup barriers amongst other things. I helped to develop https://www.writelatex.com to try to find a way to bring the language online to an Etherpad-like frontend.
I still never had this good an answer for what LaTeX is though - wish I'd thought to ask...
As the current top answer implies, it's really rather easy to explain LaTeX to anyone who a) has some concept of a printing press and movable type and b) understands that computers can be used to automate manual labor.
It may be pedantic, but that seems more like a description of TeX to me. That said, I have no idea how to describe LaTeX in an easily accessible manner.
As the current top answer implies, it's really rather easy to explain LaTeX to anyone who a) has some concept of a printing press and movable type and b) understands that computers can be used to automate manual labor.
These answers don't explain why LaTex is something different / better than Microsoft Word or Publisher.
Side note: why do these questions always ask about their mothers or grandmothers? Do they believe that women will naturally have a more difficult time understanding than fathers and grandfathers?
So I still hope to find the right words to explain why such _programming_ writing is remakably good, while simply typing formatted text with a computer is something different.
A long explanation would be boring to her I guess. So I still hope for some enligthening words. Perhaps here?