Re: [tlug] Poll: OpenOffice or LibreOffice?

[Stuart Luppescu <slu@example.com>]

On Sun, 2014-05-18 at 17:03 +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> The Law of the Excluded Middle doesn't apply to taste.  If you have a
> taste for beauty in mathematics, you use LaTeX.  If you don't, you
> probably don't need it, although IMO the documents of people who use
> LaTeX are more beautiful and more readable than documents produced by
> people who don't.

(When I first read the last sentence here, I interpreted it to mean
"people who use LaTeX are more beautiful", and I thought, "Yes, that is
certainly true".)

Yeah, well, I use LaTeX and I'm old but there are a lot of young people
I know (admittedly, mostly in academic settings) who use LaTeX. One
22-year-old woman turned me on to the Chrome extension GmailTex, which
enables you to include LaTeX math formulae in Gmail and GChat messages,
where they appear perfectly rendered. 

Moreover, there are certain uses for LaTeX that are hard to do
otherwise. E.g.,

1) I wrote my thesis using the university's thesis style. I didn't have
to worry about formatting at all. When I turned it in, the dissertation
secretary inspected it and declared it acceptable. The same time I was
submitting mine, another student was submitting his 500-page thesis in
biochemistry, which he wrote using MS Word. His bottom margins were 1/4"
too narrow so he had to go back and reformat and reprint all 3 copies.

2) I used to produce two, biannual reports for each of about 500 schools
in the Chicago Public Schools. Each of the pair of reports contained
about 140 pages with about 80 postscript graphs unique to each school,
some tables with school-specific information, and a lot of static text.
This rather massive text engineering job was done very easily in LaTeX
with a few macros and some simple bash scripts.

-- 
Stuart Luppescu <slu@example.com>