Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!nmouawad
From: nmouawad@watmath.waterloo.edu (Naji Mouawad)
Subject: Re: Comparing word processors with TeX
Message-ID: <1991Feb24.014010.28426@watmath.waterloo.edu>
Organization: University of Waterloo
References: <18200@gremlin.nrtc.northrop.com> <614@taumet.com>
Date: Sun, 24 Feb 1991 01:40:10 GMT
Lines: 87

In article <614@taumet.com> mike@taumet.UUCP (Michael S. Ball) writes:
>In article <18200@gremlin.nrtc.northrop.com> jslee@nrtc.nrtc.northrop.com (John Lee <jslee>) writes:
>>
>>Yes, I know it's not fair to word processors (like Word, WordPerfect,
>>Macwrite, etc) to attempt to compare them to TeX, but when faced with
>>the question:
>>
>>	Why should I have to tolerate the fickleness of TeX when
>>	I can use Word or WordPerfect?
>
>The best reasons to use Tex are that it
>
>a) simplifies some part of the job which you are doing
>
>b) produces higher quality output, and you care about it.
>
>We have found the first to be true, particularly for longer documents
>with significant structure.  The arguments for a markup language for long
>documents are well known, and I won't repeat them.
>
>Using our Laserjet II printer, the output produced by Tex is significantly
>higher in quality than that produced by WordPerfect with Bitstream fonts.
>I don't know why that is, but it's quite noticable.  For anything with
>equations WordPerfect isn't even close.  My friends who do desktop publishing
>on Mac's and PC's regularly Oh and Ah over our Tex output, even though we
>paid very little attention to anything but writing the document (an advantage
>of a markup language.)
>
>On the other hand, we use WordPefect for letters, short reports, and similar
>documents  which aren't worth the trouble of using Tex.
>
>A completely separate reason applies only if you consider documents to have
>a high archival value in an electronic form.  When was the last time you
>tried to recover some old wordstar files?   What? you don't still have
>wordstar around?  How about MacWrite 10 years from now?  My TeX files
>are still going to be there in ordinary ASCII, and I can edit out the
>markup if I need to.  Of course, this is only a concern for major pieces
>of documentation.
>
>-- 
>Michael S. Ball			mike@taumet.com
>TauMetric Corporation		(619)697-7607

While I do agree with Micheal concering the points that he raised
in his posting, I thought I might share a little exprerience
I had with WordPerfect and Latex:

 I had to write a long text (about 90 pages in 11 pt) with no
subdivisions whatsoever. It was a continuous stream of text divided
into paragraphs separated by blank lines.

 In case you do wonder why would anyone do something so stupid, this
piece of text is a novel.

 Furthermore, this is a French piece. I have a French version of WP
with a French keyboard (much easier to type in the French characters
than in Latex, but again Latex was not designed with French
characters in mind.) and after finishing those 90 pages, I decided
to use "wp2latex" to get a latex version of the file, since I prefer
Tex fonts over Wp fonts.

Once this tedious operation perfomed, I tried to Latex the file:

"Sorry out of main memory ..."

I thought this was because of DOS's memory limitations (I am using
emTex BTW, excellent!). I transfered my files over my MIPS UNIX account
and ran Latex on the file:

"Sorry out of main memory ..."

Either I am doing something wrong or Latex (maybe it is Tex) cannot
swallow big unformatted chunks of text... unless you change
the memory requierement, meaning that eventually you will get a bigger
file that will give you back the dreaded:

"Sorry out of main memory ..."

As a Happy Ending, I went back to my DOS machine and ran blatex,
which was able to process the file with no glitch. (Hurray for emtex !)

--Naji.
-- 
     -------------------------------------------------------------------
    | Naji Mouawad  |          nmouawad@watmath.waterloo.edu            |
    |  University   |---------------------------------------------------|
    | Of Waterloo   |   "The Stranger in us is our most familiar Self"  |
