I’m referring to a handful of occasions when I’ve needed an author to check some little detail, or a proof-reader to go through a text.
LATEXIT WORD WINDOWS
Here’s lesson #1 today: just because Windows doesn’t automatically know which program to use, doesn’t mean that there is no program to use).Įdit: Judging from the many comments I’ve received about this parenthesis - most of them along the lines of “What kind of an idiot sends LaTeX files to ordinary people?!?” - I think a clarification is in place. (True story: most of the people I have sent LaTeX files to, have complained that they could not open them. Already this is a concept which is foreign to most people who have gotten used to the modern point-and-click way of doing things. There is no one particular “LaTeX editor” - any editor which can open and save plain text files without messing them up by adding Microsoft’s secret codes at the end, can be used. First of all, there is no icon on you desktop saying “LaTeX” which you can click on to bring up the LaTeX program. LaTeX is a different beast: it is a “typesetting environment” rather than a word processor. You type a “b”, select bold/italic, and that’s what you see on the screen and on the paper you eventually print out. The principle is WYSIWYG - “what you see is what you get”. They are both parts of huge pieces of software, “Office Suites”, with several integrated applications in addition to the word processor: a spreadsheet program, a presentation program, a drawing program, a database application, etc. Some hold that the use of the same word in “Word Processor” and “Food Processor” is no coincidence, and anyone who has been met by a screenful of random characters from a ruined Word file will be likely to agree.
LATEXIT WORD CODE
Oh yes, and it’s free, both as in beer - you don’t pay for it - and as in speech - the source code is open, the file format is open, so you don’t need a particular program to view its files (there are at least three word processors which natively use the same file format, and countless others which can read it).īoth of the “W” programs are so called Word Processors.
LATEXIT WORD FREE
is the flagship of the open source movement: a free equivalent to Word, which boasts an almost perfect and seamless conversion filter, so that you can edit almost any word file interchangeably in Word and Writer without ever noticing.
MS Word probably needs no presentation: the omnipresent causer of headaches over lost or corrupted files the producer of hoardes of ~WRL2354.TMP files in some hidden system directory (look in C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\MicrosoftOffice if you don’t believe me) and the single most influential spreader of bad typographical taste in a hundred years, since the previous low point in the late nineteenth century. That led to a discussion about various hyphenation algorithms, and this time, I have decided to turn on automatic hyphenation in all three programs, using the default settings. In the former test, I had deliberately turned off hyphenation. I will also go more in detail with the points of comparison, not just considering the crude parameters such as font size and page margins, but also taking into account the finer typographical details.
Now it’s time for the next round of tests, this time including another application in the comparison: the “typesetting environment” LaTeX.
LATEXIT WORD SOFTWARE
The purpose then was to demonstrate that Word isn’t necessarily such a bad piece of software - it’s just not always used in a way which is likely to give nice results: most people don’t change the default settings of Times New Roman/Arial and ragged right margin, and they apply formatting manually for each new element, which is bound to lead to inconsistencies. I’ve earlier performed a little test, comparing two files: one produced with MS Word, the other with Writer.
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