by menturi | 2025-05-07 02:03:03+00:00
I glanced at the document and feel as though the author is not being very convincing on the advantages of LaTeX over WYSIWYG editors like Microsoft Word or LibreOffice Writer.

> This might seem strange if you haven’t worked with markup before, but it comes with a few advantages:

> 1. You can handle your writing’s content and its presentation separately. At the start of each document, you describe the design you want. LATEX takes it from there, consistently formatting your whole text just the way you asked. Compare this to a wysiwyg system, where you constantly deal with appearances as you write. If you changed the look of a caption, were you sure to find all the other captions and do the same? If the program arranges something in a way you don’t like, is it hard to fix?

> 2. You can define your own commands, then tweak them to instantly adjust every place they’re used. For example, the \introduce and \acronym commands in the example above are my own creations. One italicizes text, and the other sets words in small caps with a bit of extra l e t t e r s p a c i n g so the characters don’t look too crowded. If I decide that I’d prefer new terms to have this look, or that acronyms should be formatted LIKE THIS, I just change the two lines that define those commands, and every instance in this book immediately takes on the new look.

> 3. Being able to save the document as plain text has its own benefits:

> • You can edit it with any basic text editor.

> • Structure is immediately visible and simple to replicate.

> • You can automate content creation using scripts and programs.

> • You can track your changes with version control software, like Git or Mercurial.

I find the author's criticisms not convincing, particularly points 1 and 2 but some aspects of point 3 as well.

"If you changed the look of a caption, were you sure to find all the other captions and do the same?" That applies equally to LaTeX as it does to Word or Writer. In Word/Writer, you can use manual bold formatting and italics formatting for emphasis in two or so places. You can also find yourself in this situation using LaTeX by using \textbf or \textit for emphasis in different places. You can avoid this by following a convention like by defining and using something like \emphasis in LaTeX and using a character style in Word.

"If the program arranges something in a way you don’t like, is it hard to fix?" From my experience, text wrap style in Word or anchors in Writer behave roughly similar to float specifiers in LaTeX (unsure if that is the correct term).

"You can define your own commands, then tweak them to instantly adjust very place they’re used." This is the essence of using styles in Word or Writer.

"You can edit it with any basic text editor." Word can be opened/extracted like a zip, and you can access the XML if you really want to mess with the markup language under the hood, though I've never seen anybody actually do this. "You can automate content creation using scripts and programs." If you feel so motivated, I don't see how this cannot apply to Word or Writer documents alike.

"You can track your changes with version control software, like Git or Mercurial." I consider how Git or Mercurial can't handle container formats as a limitation of those software more so than a limitation of the document itself.