[plug] OT word processing

[Christian]

On Thu, Oct 05, 2000 at 01:57:28PM +0800, Jason Nicholls wrote:
 
> I think he meant Microsoft Word (not works). It does have some of the
> facilities that latex offers such as auto table of contents generation,
> defining document styles etc... Since I never use it I can't say any more
> except that my friend, who is pro-microsoft, is now using tex (on windows)
> rather than Word for uni assignments ;)

Same deal really.  Someone's previous analogy concerning a candle and a
search light holds completely true.  Microsoft Word does, in name at
least, implement some of these things that LaTeX does but there's really
no comparison.  For example, applying a new style retroactively to a
document will not really result in document gaining the correct style.
On the other hand, providing a new document class for a LaTeX file will
completely reformat the document as appropriate.

I recently wrote a paper for a conference in LaTeX.  I just used the
standard article class but because the paper (which got accepted) was to
be published in LNCS it needed to be reformatted for this style.  In
Word that would have basically involved reformatting the entire
document. In LaTeX it was merely a matter of selecting the llncs
document class.