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Comment by omaranto | Hacker News Reader

Maybe Word has come of age in terms of equation editing, but has it come to age in terms of usability? I haven't used in about 10 years, but back then it crashed a lot on larger documents, and I suffered a lot from never knowing if I was inside the invisible tags or not, so I never knew when I was typing right after a list if I would start a new list item or not, or when typing next to italic text if the new text would be italic or not. I also remember that trying to move anything, like an embedded image, would move tons of other things too. I definitely found LaTeX much easier to use.

And that's excluding Word line-breaking which always looked rather poor to me: some lines were left very empty and others overcrowded. It just didn't look professional to me. Perhaps that was been fixed too.

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I don't know whether to what version you were referring to, but my guess is that you might still consider indentation and text formatting unintuitive. But it is actually easy to pick up the rules that Word uses, and there are keyboard combinations as well.

It's a personal preference, but I think it easily beats the typical LaTeX workflow for most people I know, which starts with copying an old project or some template with a ~50 line preamble and then constantly having to turn to Google for literally anything that's a bit out of the ordinary - including a lot of things that really shouldn't be extraordinary for a math software, like typesetting optimization problems, conditional expectation, argmin, table footnotes,... all of which have multiple options and most don't look great. Heck, you even need to define a theorem environment manually in the preamble to get them to look like you're used to.

Since you complain about moving around figures, in LaTeX the workflow for most users is trial-and-error multiple option combinations to get them roughly where you want them. Just check the Google autocomplete options for latex and tell me that people aren't confused by those things.

I guess that, as most things related to using software, it boils down to familiarity. You say you managed to figure out Word's rules for when text will inherit formatting of the text to the left of it and when it won't. I believe you, I imagine I would have learned them too if I kept using Word. On the other hand when I taught Linear Programming I typeset lots of optimization problems and didn't Google anything, because I already know plenty of LaTeX. I certainly have googled stuff for LaTeX and found it is a quick and painless way of figuring out how to do something. This seems like an advantage of LaTeX, not a disadvantage as you seem to think. What do you do in Word when you want to do something you don't how to do? Doesn't googling also work there? And if not, that seems like a disadvantage of Word.

Googling also works for Word, but I practically never need it there. It's just so easy to find solutions to those questions that you barely perceive them as such. I even figured out the shortcuts just by trying something that seemed to make sense (fyi: Italics is Ctrl+I, bold is Ctrl+B; changing indentation levels in a list is Alt+Shift+Arrow, getting out of the list indentation requires three times backspace, which I agree doesn't make sense, but it's easy enough to figure out within seconds of the first encounter; and yeah, you can google those if you want). In LaTeX I need to switch to a different window get to Google much more frequently, and I find that breaks my flow. I don't see how this could be framed as anyhting but a disadvantage.

Anything becomes easy if you practice it enough, but I find both the 'onboarding' as well as the 'steady-state' productivity higher in Word, because you spend next to no time looking for how stuff works and instead focus on your content. Yes, LaTeX formatting generally looks better (eg spacing, LaTeX even lets you adjust the spacing between individual characters), but looks come second to content imho.

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