Re: English versus German

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:08:37 -0400: Nathan Sanders
<nsanders@xxxxxxxxxxxx>: in sci.lang:

I'm still waiitng to hear of something it can do better or easier than
Word. (Other than mathematical equations, which are of no concern to
me or to 99.9995% of users. That's one in a million.)

As I've already mentioned, ligatures, kerning, and whole-page
hyphenation algorithms.

Word (and TrueType in general) does ligatures and kerning too.

Multiple accent marks on the same character (e.g., acute over macron).

Possible in any system that supports Unicode.

Language-specific hyphenation and ligatures.

Hyphenation is language-specific in Word too. Moreover, as I said, I
never use hyphenation.

Cost and portability: (La)TeX is free and the source files are written
in plain text, so anyone can read your document without having to buy
proprietary software, without cross-platform conversion issues, and
without legacy version issues.

Word doesn't have these either.

Handling of large-documents: Word often crashes unpredictably on
large, complex documents,

After so many years of using several versions (6, 97, 2007), I can
hardly remember such events. Word 2000 was very buggy, yes, that's
true.

ut (La)TeX doesn't; a 1000-page document is
just as stable as a 1-page document.

Why not split that into chapters?

Furthermore, selectively editing arbitrary chunks of a (La)TeX
document without having to process the rest is trivial; not so in Word.

I don't understand. If by editing you mean search&replace: that can be
done selectively in Word too.
--
Ruud Harmsen, http://rudhar.com
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: English versus German
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  • Re: Same problem with Minion Pro font
    ... There is only one way to turn off the ligatures at the moment: ... I read through this thread as I was trying to fix the same issue with Minion ... Manually fix the kerning between two characters than do an Edit / Replace All ... McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd ...
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  • Re: Ligatures and Kerning Incompatibility
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