[hfkwer]

The appeal of word isn't the WYSIWYG aspect. It's that... it. just. works. You want a table? There's only one way to make a table, and it works. You want to insert an image? It f*cking works. You want to format running headers a certain way? Believe it or not, it works! No weird incompatibilities between packages. No delving through the depth of 1990-era latex library code to figure out where the weird space comes from. Everything just works! And there's documentation online! Written for humans!

Trust me, writing code is not the issue with latex. I've written C++ code for embedded MCUs. I've taught python to undergrads. The pain does not even compare.

[chungy]

The disadvantage of Word is that it has absolutely terrible output and quite a lot of use cases are hard or impossible to use in it.

Don't let the name fool you. TeXmacs won't make you write (La)TeX. You'll get tables that work, images that work, hyperlinks that work, running headers that work, math that works, kerning that words, hyphenation and justification that work. (From math forward are major failure points in Word)

[eldaisfish]

>The disadvantage of Word is that it has absolutely terrible output

This is a moot point if most people are reluctant to pick up latex and those who do are greeted by often unreadable, esoteric code that produces error messages such as "badness". This is the problem with latex and its derivatives, not their output.

[chungy]

TeXmacs isn't a derivative of LaTeX. It has an unfortunate name. It is a WYSIWYG editor that produces comparable output. It does support some subset of (La)TeX backslash commands as convenience, but requires none of them.

Basically you get all the advantages of Word, all the advantages of (La)TeX, and none of the disadvantages of either.

[kaba0]

For anything more complex, world utterly fails when you inadvertently edit a column of that table, that will break page 533 beyond recognition.

[hfkwer]

Do you have anything to contribute beyond rehashing memes? I can have a go at it too: better not miss a bracket on line 2000 of your document, otherwise latex will complain about a runaway argument in a different file and you'll have to sift through the whole thing to find where the error is.

[kaba0]

But you at least get an error before you print your whole work! Like, the two is absolutely incomparable.

The sad part of Word is that even professionals mess it up constantly, because you have many ways to reach the same goal, and that every addition affects the whole document, or in some fortunate cases only the part till the next page break. But silent breakage is the worst, as is quite clear from any kind of programming background. Imo, Word just doesn’t scale due to this.