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Comment by honorious | Hacker News Reader

I have been using LaTex for many years and I like it, but what's stopping other document editing software (like Word) to reach the same level of quality of results? LaTex has been around forever, but nobody else is close to that quality.

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I think that the best answer is that nothing's stopping them, but no one is demanding it. Word's type-setting is good enough for most, and so Microsoft has no particular reason to make that aspect of it better (but don't get me wrong—I am no Word apologist, and use LaTeX almost exclusively).

Even on modern hardware it takes quite a while to compile a latex document (seconds!). Word basically has to compile the entire document with every key you click in order to show you the WYSIWYG interface.

A lot of that, though, is actually loading LaTeX packages itself.

TeX underneath is really very speedy; on my several year old laptop it can compile several hundred pages in around half a second (and pdftex takes around twice as long).

I believe it's also possible to perform optimal line breaking algorithms incrementally, so you wouldn't have to reset the whole document as you add to the end of it (although you may as you add to the start of it, but that happens in Word anyway).

Lyx is a WYSIWYG editor for Latex. It shows you quick typesetting in the WYSIWYG editor, but you can compile the underlying Latex document for beautiful typesetting.

No, Lyx is not WYSIWYG, but WYSIWYM. E.g, it doesn't show you how your document will look, but it shows you how it is structured.

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