| > Why don't you like Word? Here are my main reasons: - It does not allow me to make selections where I point my mouse cursor. - It breaks between versions of itself and intentionally breaks interoperability with nearly all third party software, especially when tables and formulas are involved. - Formula and math editing and typesetting is abysmal. - The quality of typesetting is abysmal. I know because I once had to convert an article with formulas written in LaTeX by hand into Word. The editor of the journal was very ashamed of the quality of the result in comparison to the original. - Images and other boxes inserted into the text almost never work in the intended way. They slip between pages, get the wrong flow around them, cannot be selected, etc. - It is practically impossible to import documents produced in other tools reliably into Word or reliably export Word documents to be processed with other tools (like e.g. LaTeX). Even pandoc cannot compile to Word files that work reliably enough. Some of the errors that occur are nearly unfixable, e.g. bizarre things strange characters in lines that cannot be erased, stretched and distorted characters. - Horrible default auto styles. - Ribbon interface and other user interface problems that make Word one of the most unintuitive pieces of software on earth (many people just don't realize this, because they have been using it for so long and so often) - relatively expensive |
Word supports LaTeX for formulas now!
That aside, Word's formula editor is really powerful but it does have a learning curve. I'd say that once learned it is rather nice though.
FWIW Unicode Math, Word's format for doing math input, is a published spec.