Re: English versus German

In article
<3598a0f9-7f6d-43ac-9e3b-12d991b6b411@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Jul 2, 5:00 pm, Nathan Sanders <nsand...@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <7a4q45pm47b2nq4qm0ga2m9fuut0l27...@xxxxxxx>,
 Ruud Harmsen <z...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:08:37 -0400: Nathan Sanders
<nsand...@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:

_One_ query to the Word newsgroup, just in the last few days, suggests
that Word2008 (the Mac version of 2007) has introduced some DTP
features that are not in 2007 (including "master pages" -- bizarre,
since Word doesn't think by pages -- and guides). So maybe you can
find such things by studying your manual.

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.  

Uh, so what? This is 2009.

The point is that the way TeX does it doesn't require Unicode, doesn't
require the Combining Diacritical Marks range, doesn't require
assigning keyboard shortcuts, or any of that other fancy stuff. It
works and has always worked directly "out of box", in a simple
straightforward manner.

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.

Have you not discovered the Insert Symbol button?

What's the keyboard shortcut for that?

Have you not
realized that you can assign a keyboard shortcut to every character in
Unicode, if you so choose?

*Every* character? That would take quite a while to assign all those
shortcuts!

And if you haven't even discovered the Combining Diacritical Marks
range of Unicode, you have very, very little business criticizing its
linguistic abilities.

Oh, I know where it is. Unfortunately, they don't all combine
properly in Word. I just tried "a" + combining macron + combining
acute and got a misaligned macron and a misaligned acute superimposed
on each other (rather than stacked and properly centered, as occurs in
TeX).

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!

Then you should learn how to use Word properly.

Praytell, how do you prevent the font from switching when the accented
character try to type doesn't exist in the font? How do you know, a
proiri, whether any particular accent+character combination is missing?

When TeX can't find the combination, it creates it from scratch, and
the result looks like it belongs with the rest of the text. When Word
can't find it, it changes the font.

TeX's behavior is far more desirable.

And you shouldn't be
using a font that doesn't have the additional character ranges for
doing linguistics.

I was using the default font! You can complain about TeX's default
font, so why can't I complain about Word's?

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.

Just like Word!

Nonsense. I just say the font-changing behavior in Word.

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.

If the same fonts were installed on both computers, the fonts were not
a problem. If the document was assigned to the same printer driver on
the different computers, there would be no formatting problem.

We had the same fonts. The "Insert symbol" function is/was broken.
If the inserted symbol was done on a PC, it showed up as a box on a
Mac.


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?

I think you need to change a Registry entry in order to open a
document in a pre-97 format. That was apparently a security measure
introduced with 2007.

No such arcane magic is necessary to open a decade-old TeX file. You
just, well, open it. And it opens. And you can read it. On any
computer, running any operating system, with any fonts, with any
printer drivers, without having spend hundreds of dollars on
proprietary file formats.

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.

And therefore consuming lots of extra computing power every time
they're opened.

?!?! Plain text files are the easiest files for a computer to open!

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.

Evidence?

See below.

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.).

DO NOT EVER try to use "Master Documents" in Word. They never worked
correctly, they are not explicated in Help, and they corrupt
immediately.

Right above is the evidence you asked about.

Instead, use RD fields, or simply make a really big file. Word can
handle it.

Oh, great. Open up a 1000-page document every time I need to make a
single isolated change!

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.

I wish you hadn't been making me defend Word so much (I'd much prefer
to be able to continue with FrameMaker), but from everything you've
said, it is considerably superior to (La)TeX.

If that's what you think, then you have the reading comprehension of a
pumpkin.

Nathan

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

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