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Anyone in academia needs to worry about all of these, and solutions in Word are sufficiently worse than LaTeX, which automatically updates all references, heading numbers, regenerates figures that have changed, and tracks your index for longer documents like theses.
> LaTeX input files are proprietary to LaTeX, just as .doc is Word. The only definition of LaTeX as a language is “whatever LaTeX does”. I am sorry but I don't see this point... Everybody is free to write a parser for .tex files and use it for whatever reason they want... You are not free to do so with .doc or other proprietary format...
The multitude of third-party .doc readers would seem to disprove that assertion. In any case, it's clear from the text that he uses "proprietary" to mean "specified only by the canonical implementation". In this respect, .tex qualifies but .doc no longer does, although .doc is so bizarre and complex that writing another parser from the spec is... challenging.
The biggest advantage of latex is that by (mostly) separating content from presentation, you can use revision control systems like git or svn to collaborate on papers. You can be in that final hour before the paper submission deadline, on a skype call with four authors scattered around the world, all simultaneously editing the paper (each using whatever tools they prefer), and be reasonably confident it won't all end…
I always see this claim that latex separates content from presentation, but I don't see how it's true. As the article says, \emph{hello} is implemented in terms of font commands; it entangles the semantics (emphasis) and the presentation (italicisation), and there is no way to extract the semantics of a latex document and render it in a different format the way you can with e.g. Markdown.
Though it's true that it's not enforced.
The biggest advantage of latex is that by (mostly) separating content from presentation, you can use revision control systems like git or svn to collaborate on papers. You can be in that final hour before the paper submission deadline, on a skype call with four authors scattered around the world, all simultaneously editing the paper (each using whatever tools they prefer), and be reasonably confident it won't all end…
On the web, that content and presentation are separate, that's a technically a possibility, and culturally an actuality. That is, while you have the technical tools to apply such a separation, the toolkit does not force it on you; you can choose to write html with in-place defined colors and font sizes and other style elements. That the standards are higher than that and one is expected to write clean structural HTML and specify style separately with CSS is just a cultural phenomenon.
In the LaTeX world (scientific community), separation of content and presentation is also technically feasible, but the culture that maintains it as standard is missing. Most LaTeX documents are written by scientists who just want the damn thing look as they prefer, and apply all nasty tricks that the system can offer to get at there. The more computer savvy ones engage macro writing to save them a few keystrokes, but that's far from a way of document authoring that keeps content and presentation separate.
The biggest advantage of latex is that by (mostly) separating content from presentation, you can use revision control systems like git or svn to collaborate on papers. You can be in that final hour before the paper submission deadline, on a skype call with four authors scattered around the world, all simultaneously editing the paper (each using whatever tools they prefer), and be reasonably confident it won't all end…
There is a big difference between the web (HTML + CSS) and LaTeX (LaTex + styles) worlds in terms of culture, and that defeats the idea of "separating content from presentation". On the web, that content and presentation are separate, that's a technically a possibility, and culturally an actuality. That is, while you have the technical tools to apply such a separation, the toolkit does not force it on you; you can ch…
Anyway, my point is that in the weeks/months of writing a paper, the messy mixup of content and presentation really only becomes relevant in the last two hours before the submission deadline. Up until that point, everyone is mostly using the same subset of latex, not worrying too much about the presentation part, because the coarse-grain paper layout is usually handled by the style sheet you get from the conference.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The doc (and docx) formats are actually very well documented, thanks to pressure from the EU: [MS-DOC]: Word (.doc) Binary File Format http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/cc313153(v=of... [MS-DOCX]: Word Extensions to the Office Open XML (.docx) File Format http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd773189(v=office.12...
"Very well" is a euphemism here, I assume? I worked in Windows Server when Microsoft was under the US DOJ consent decree and had to document every thing that looked at all like an API--even internal things that were just APIfied for design reasons / ease of testability / to make servicing simpler. I can say with some confidence that no one gave a shit about producing good quality docs. Without exception, people viewe…
When I started grad school, I initially used LaTeX to prepare my articles. But then my advisor tried to open one of my documents on his machine (Windows, I'm using a Mac) and some kind of weird error came up. So we spent one whole advising session with him searching for MiKTeX and installing it, whereupon my document still wouldn't load for whatever reason. Then once BibTeX got in the mix, it became even messier. Wel…
TeX sources are only for co-authors. Everybody else gets the generated pdf. Advisors et al can annotate the pdf or print-and-scribble. All my publishing venues only gave templates and required a pdf.
TeX assumes your final output is paper. That's an obsolete assumption. The math features are concerned with presentation. You can't cut a formula from TeX and paste it into Mathematica or MathCAD and have it understood. TeX doesn't understand mathematical notation; it just format it for printing.
We need to get past that.
LaTeX, and TeX, are the last gasp of a long line of development. That line starts with MIT's RUNOFF, which begat roff, nroff ("New ROFF"), troff, ditroff, psroff, and finally TeX. It's the last of the programming-language like word processing systems. TeX assumes your final output is paper. That's an obsolete assumption. The math features are concerned with presentation. You can't cut a formula from TeX and paste it…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think he understands what the word "proprietary" means. It means that the file format is secret or there are legal constraints on its use. Until recently Word documents clearly counted as prorietary, but now that microsoft has been forced to document its format to some degree .doc is listed as "controversially" proprietary on wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprietary_format Even today you will need…
The point is, are there any other applications that will render a LaTeX document correctly that aren't LaTeX itself? It's open source, but in practice the code is so complicated and large no one has ever duplicated it. It's not proprietary in the traditional sense, but if you want your LaTeX file to not be mangled, you must use LaTeX itself.
But it is Free, so why are you duplicating it? I must be missing something.