[jrockway]

I think what people don't realize is that stuff like OO.org is just for show. The free software people don't use WYSIWYG slideshow generators or word processors; they already have tools that are much easier to use.

It's the rest of the world that refuses to use any model better than Powerpoint or Word, and they get exactly what they deserve -- a tedious way to make poor-looking presentations and documents.

[loup-vaillant]

I'm not sure I follow you here. Do you mean Power point and Word are not fit for their purposes? And, what "better model" are you speaking of?

[jrockway]

LaTeX, Beamer, etc., etc.

[anatoly]

LaTeX is not much easier to use than Word; it's incredibly more difficult to use. It requires you to remember or look up a bewildering number of strange-looking commands, a special syntax, etc.

[loup-vaillant]

LaTeX is more difficult than word by a single aspect: the compilation step. The fact that you do not see what you get requires you to think a bit more abstractly. It is also less discoverable.

Once you get past that point (and I agree most people won't), I doubt you have to remember more things in LaTeX than in Word. I one case, it's special sequences of characters, while in the other, it's menus.

Also, this wasn't really about ease of use. The TeX back-end is definitely better than Word's or OOO's, and that fact ends some arguments. A well integrated WYSIWYG on top of that would be great, though.

[anatoly]

LaTeX is more difficult than word by a single aspect: the compilation step.

That's a bold statement that's backed up by no facts and makes no sense. If you were just to stop and think for a second, I bet you'd see how ridiculous it is.

LaTeX is more difficult than Word by about a dozen aspects. And here's a random list off the top of my head.

1) It's more difficult to see how what you're typing will look like.

2) It's more difficult to decide which one to download and install (there's just one Word).

3) TeX comes with its own set and philosophy of fonts that you have to learn, understand, remember and debug. Word uses the same fonts that come with the OS.

4) You need to learn what the hell "DVI files" are and what to do with them. Word prints to your printer or saves in a number of familiar formats in addition to its proprietary ones.

5) Word makes it easy to include a diagram, a drawing, a photo. TeX has different competing "drawing packages", all arcane, all hard to learn and use, all have caused many a dissertation author to curse in despair.

6) You're a journalist or a writer under contract or a translator. You need to know how many words you've written. Word can tell you immediately. TeX? Go online, look for a tool or a script, there's half a dozen, none standard, most probably obsolete or not maintained anymore.

7) Because Word is WYSIWYG, quick iteration is possible: try something, see it's not working, immediately back out and try something else. TeX's cycle is slow and breaks the flow of thought.

8) Word has hierarchical menus, context menus and tooltips, together they make it relatively easy to find some functionality if you don't remember the exact keystroke, command or menu item. Most of the times, you know where to look and quickly scan a dialog box to find what you need. In TeX, you need to remember dozens of commands, or tediously search for them in docs or online.

9) It's rare/difficult to do a local change in Word that screws up an entire page or document; it's trivial to do so in TeX.

10) When you screw something up in Word, you see what went wrong and can quickly undo it. When you screw something up in TeX, you're bombarded with arcane error messages.

11) You hardly ever need to fix up a Word installation or understand the hierarchy of its directories, include files, etc.

12) Word trivially exports to HTML, the great universal language of our times.

[loup-vaillant]

(1), (7), (9) and (10) are directly related to the compilation step I was talking about. Of course the iterations are slower, and of course a little error in the source code will break the whole document. Also, (1) is a feature, not a bug: LaTeX is designed to separate presentation from content. It is supposed to be trusted as far as "look" is concerned. Exceptions are few and far between.

(2), (4), (6) and (12) are off topic: I was assuming LaTeX was already installed, like word often is. DVI files can be viewed by evince, which makes it as easy as a pdf file (and no, the absence of a reasonable default document viewer on Windows does not count). Counting words isn't the word processor's job. HTML doesn't solve the same problem as Word and LaTeX.

I already said (8): "It is also less discoverable". Plus, LaTeX aware editors (like TeXmaker) do have those menus, making (8) false when you use them.

I don't understand (3). I just use the pretty default fonts, and that's it. Unlike Times New Roman, they're good enough. I never needed to mess with them. Did you?

(5) and (11) are fair enough.

LaTeX suffer from the fact that it is just a bunch of TeX macros. I believe even Leslie Lamport would describe it as an ugly hack. TeX need better front-ends. A set of mark-up languages, of limited purposes each, would be great. Markdown could be a good start.