Re: [tlug] Poll: OpenOffice or LibreOffice?

["Daniel A. Ramaley" <daniel.ramaley@example.com>]

On 2014-05-19 at 19:37:41 Simon Cozens wrote:
> TeX is for the humanities too!

When i was taking art history classes i would do all my papers in LaTeX. 
The professor even commented a couple times how much nicer my papers 
looked than everyone else's. One can usually tell at a casual glance 
whether something is written in Word or LaTeX. I don't know all the 
technical graphic design terminology to describe the difference 
properly, but in layman's terms, LaTeX just looks much more polished. 
The word spacing on a line is more pleasing to the eye, and even the 
letter spacing within words seems more "correct". I also find LaTeX's 
default font to be cleaner looking than Word's default font, but i'm not 
sure if that is purely a personal preference or if it is objectively 
better in some way.

LaTeX works quite well for the really simple use cases that i've used it 
for--mostly writing papers for classes with simple formatting and 
occasional embedded images. I've never learned enough of it to be really 
good at it; just enough so that i didn't have to fight with MS Word 
anymore. MS Word is just too hard to use for me, it seems to require a 
mental model that i don't quite grasp and so i find it inefficient. 
Sure, Word is easy to *learn*; the GUI is discoverable and the help 
system is decent. But it is not easy to *use*. LaTeX, like many Unix 
applications, is the opposite: hard to learn, but easy to use. Learning 
is a finite investment of time and effort, but using it continues on for 
the rest of one's life. I'd rather put in some effort learning up front 
and then have something easy to use forever, rather than having 
something easy to learn but which i struggle to use forever. The overall 
effort of things like LaTeX is less. The fact that LaTeX is better at 
the basic task of aesthetically laying text out on a page is just icing 
on the cake.

In the above i guess you can substitute word processors in general for 
my uses of "MS Word". I don't mean to be quite so hard on that piece of 
software specifically; all word processors are kind of awkward and hard 
to use for me.

__
Daniel A. Ramaley
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