Re: English versus German

In article <7a4q45pm47b2nq4qm0ga2m9fuut0l2778j@xxxxxxx>,
Ruud Harmsen <zbem@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

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.

I just tested these in Word 2008, out of the box:

No ligatures for fi, fl, ff, ffi, or ffl.

Kerning is terrible. "Table" has the wrong spacing between T and a,
and tall italics characters inside parentheses bump into the
right-hand parenthesis.

Hunting around the menus, I managed to find something called "kerning
for fonts" and turned it on. "Table" and tall italics inside
parentheses are still incorrectly kerned.

I haven't yet found how to get ligatures.

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

Possible in any system that supports Unicode.

TeX was able to handle this easily before Unicode. It still handles
it easily: \'\=a puts an acute over a macron over "a". I know how to
get an acute accent over "a" in Word, and I've modified my keyboard to
allow me to get a macron (this is not an out-of-the-box ability!), but
I don't know of a simple way to get both accents on the same character
in Word.

I just put an acute accent over an "m" in Word, and it changed the
font from Cambria to MS Reference Sans Serif, and now, everything I
type after that is in the new font!

If the accented character is not a pre-composed character in the font
(as acute-m is not in Cambria), TeX will compose the accented
character on the fly. There is no font change for either that
character or the following ones.

Language-specific hyphenation and ligatures.

Hyphenation is language-specific in Word too.

Can Word handle multiple languages within the same document? In
LaTeX, it's as easy as:

\usepackage[french,german,english]{babel}
....
\selectlanguage{german}
....
\selectlanguage{french}
....
\selectlanguage{german}
....
\selectlanguage{english}

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.

Since when is Word free?!? Last I checked, the latest version of
Office was on the order of $300 to buy it new, or about $200 to
upgrade from a previous version.

Can you send a Word file to a colleague who doesn't own the same
version of Word as you (or no version at all!), and/or is working on a
a different OS than you (Mac versus PC... god forbid he's on Linux!),
and he'll be able to open your file and it will look the same as on
your machine? As recently as last year, that wasn't true for me when
I was collaborating with a colleague. Random symbols were missing,
pagination was different, and even the fonts weren't consistent.

How about a Word file from 10 years ago? If you open it on a modern
machine running the latest version of Word, will it have the same
layout as it originally did? Will you even be able to open the file
at all?

None of these are problems with TeX, because TeX source files are all
plain text files, the most basic text file you can possibly have, free
and common to every computer system, every operating system, and every
time period.

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.

It's gotten better, but it's still buggy.

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

Why not split that into chapters?

I'm counting the entire finished product as a "document". Of course
it should consist of multiple individual files if it's large enough.
Doing this in TeX is trivial, and the resulting document is just as
stable as a 1-page document.

My experience with the "master document" functionality in Word is that
it is cumbersome (difficult to initiate, difficult to change,
difficult to work on individual pieces) and unreliable (formatting and
styles between subparts gets broken, files are prone to corruption,
etc.).

Perhaps that's changed in the past few years since I worked with it,
but this aspect of TeX has always been straightforward and stable.

Nathan

--
Nathan Sanders
Linguistics Program
Williams College
http://wso.williams.edu/~nsanders/
.

Relevant Pages

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