Re: English versus German

"Peter" == Peter T Daniels <grammatim@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

>> TeX was able to handle this easily before Unicode.

Peter> Uh, so what? This is 2009.

So, it means Word is lagging beind TeX by decades!



>> 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.

Peter> You get what you pay for.

Peter> Someone, obviously, is subsidizing LaTeX.

Who?


>> 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?

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

Oh! That's SO user-friendly!?

And every novice Word user should be able to recall easily that Registry
key and value to be set?



>> 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.

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

Do you know what you're talking about?

What does Word do when it "opens" a document? It does a lot of work,
including the tedious repagination of the whole document to fit the page
margins configured in the current computer, thus changing page
boundaries, location of floats, etc., thus making cross references
(e.g. page numbers in the ToC) *WRONG*!

For LaTeX, you can easily open it in an editor. That's basically
copying the file contents into memory. That's much less word than what
Word does.



Peter> DO NOT EVER try to use "Master Documents" in Word.

I first learnt and used "master documents" in WordPerfect 5.1 (back in
the late 1980s), and it worked pretty well.


Peter> They never worked correctly, they are not explicated in Help,
Peter> and they corrupt immediately.

And you're tell me that TODAY Word's similar feature is UNUSABLY buggy?
It still hasn't caught up with WP in the late 1980s? 20 years behind?



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

As you said, "opening" such a bug file will "consume lots of extra
computing power".

TeX and LaTeX can easily handle *documents* split into separate *files*.
(Read carefully, "document" and "file" are different abstractions!) And
they have been doing that FOR DECADES.



--
Lee Sau Dan 李守敦 ~{@nJX6X~}

E-mail: danlee@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee
.

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