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by sounds 4626 days ago
Arguing this is the exceptional case misses his point, I think.

He is intelligent, eloquent, and absolutely correct.

In _any_ field except "business letters and reports" there are numerous talented, creative people who use other software and understand his lament: "the major publishers have been browbeaten into believing that Word is the sine qua non of document production systems."

Some examples:

∙ Hard science research are the poster child where "Word slave labor" happens daily

∙ Math research, fortunately there's a lot the web can do but still the Word drudgery

∙ Engineering research

∙ Self-published and indie writers (Scrivener definitely has made a splash)

∙ Law

Who cares? Well, if you want to make a lot of money, these people would throw their money at you if you could ease their pain a little bit.

The publishers get a lot of bad press for other things they do (like Aaron Schwartz), but they're still wrong about MS Word being a publishing platform.

4 comments

Wordperfect still is very popular in law offices. Lawyers love the "make it fit" feature, which word doesn't have. Lawyers are always trying to put 17 ounces into a 16 ounce glass.
> Wordperfect still is very popular in law offices. Lawyers love the "make it fit" feature, which word doesn't have. Lawyers are always trying to put 17 ounces into a 16 ounce glass.

Word does not have a "Make it Fit" feature, but it does have a shrink-to-fit feature. You do have to shrink it one page at a time. You start with 13 pages and shrink it to 12, then shrink 12 to 11, etc.

However, the feature has been removed from the default Ribbon UI -- probably because only lawyers were using it. (College students tend to want to expand their documents rather than shrink them.)

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2664217

WordPerfect has clung to a niche in law offices because lawyers are inherently conservative. Even then, Word still has a majority share in law offices.

I didn't know about this feature. The documentation says it just reduces font size. WP did that but also increased kerning, reduced linespacing as well as a few other tricks.
As an aspiring mathematician, the thought of not using LaTeX for mathematics frightens me. The thought of using Word for mathematics terrifies me.
> As an aspiring mathematician, the thought of not using LaTeX for mathematics frightens me. The thought of using Word for mathematics terrifies me.

Why? You can type LaTeX into the Word equation editor -- a fact that is little-known in the math community.

The main problem with Word for mathematics is that you cannot automatically number equations! What good is it to type equations if you can't refer to "Equation 7" and have the reference update when a new equation is inserted? That makes it useless for math, physics, theoretical computer science, etc.

You can number equations. Just put a {SEQ Equation} field right of it, play with the half-broken styles/tables/tabs until it's sitting at the proper position. You'll be able to reference it with the usual cross-referencing tools.

On my particular version of Word I'll have to insert a "Caption" using the fscking-stupid-ribbon UI once and create a new counter "Equation" first, else you'll not be able to select a "Equation" in other parts of the dreaded UI.

Unfortunately, while the Eq. editor might understand LaTeX perfectly, nevertheless it will randomly thrash the font size and type whenever my colleague opens/edits/saves the document (at least the "new" font editor, the older "embedded OLE object" editor was broken in different ways).

And yes, I loathe Word and it's bastard cousins from the MS-Office-Suite with a passion and sometimes raging hate. Unfortunately there are things that money-earning demands to be made in those applications :-(

Maybe I had a unique experience, but when I was in grad school (chemical engineering) we exclusively used LaTeX for thesis work. The journals we worked with also required it, if I recall correctly.
You should count your lucky stars if you were able to submit in LaTeX format. It's obviously the best format for journals but they've all stampeded to Word.
Like I said, maybe I was just really lucky, but I never had to deal with Word for grad school. Of course, this was also 9 years ago, so maybe a lot has changed since then. Do journals in the engineering/sciences world really not accept LaTeX anymore?
Since when do mathematicians ever use word for any reason? I believe you're more likely to see published math research written in Crayola markers than in Word.