Non fiddling access to hundreds of Open Type fonts and UTF-8?
Trivial visual layout changes of almost every aspect of the text instead of having to write then in a layout language?
Integrated spell/grammar checking as you go, word count et al?
Non in Word per se, but BETTER algorithms for typesetting in WYSIWYG (unknown to many, InDesign and Quark have progressed A LOT over TeX's algorithms).
Interoperability for the basic edited document format (not through pdf, ps, html exports) with 99% percent of the world (excluding some parts of Academia that prefer LaTeX)?
Sorry - I didn't mean to be too controversial with my post. It's just that I've found that based on the way I think, Word is a big productivity sink for me. I have a harder time concentrating on the business of writing when I'm staring at richly laid-out text and paragraphs. For me at least, I've always found that I can write faster and with fewer mental blocks when writing plain old text in a text editor. I found that in my own experience, it was liberating just focussing on the content of what I was writing, knowing that the whole business of presentation was something that came later.
Non fiddling access to hundreds of Open Type fonts and UTF-8?
Xetex + \usepackage{fontspec}
No fiddling required!
Trivial visual layout changes of almost every aspect of the text instead of having to write then in a layout language?
Isn't this sort of the problem with WYSIWYG in general, though? That's actually one of the things that I think is cool about Framemaker - it's roughly WYSIWYG, but you can get a bird's-eye view of styles and layout.
Being able to accidentally futz up the margins on the third paragraph on the 209th page of a 401 page article and not know it without meticulously re-inspecting the document before it goes to press doesn't seem like a feature to me. Has Word tackled that yet?
Can Word give me a nice, hierarchical view of all the paragraph and character styles and margin settings that have been applied to my article? This isn't rhetoric either - I'm genuinely curious. If you tell me that Word has been able to do this since I've last used it, my opinion of Word will be much improved. If you tell me that Word has always been able to do this, I'll feel pretty silly.
Integrated spell/grammar checking as you go, word count et al?
My text editor does that for me, and I'm not distracted by presentation issues while I type my document.
Non in Word per se, but BETTER algorithms for typesetting in WYSIWYG (unknown to many, InDesign and Quark have progressed A LOT over TeX's algorithms).
How so? Text flow around images is an issue in TeX - have Quark or InDesign really improved much otherwise?
Interoperability for the basic edited document format (not through pdf, ps, html exports) with 99% percent of the world (excluding some parts of Academia that prefer LaTeX)?
I think this and ease of use are really Word's big edge over anything else.
> Xetex + \usepackage{fontspec} No fiddling required!
I'm not in an ASCII-english speaking country, and it's not like that at all. And all projects that started to rectify TeX with regards to unicode text, have fallen behind or are totally abandoned (I speak of stuff like LaTeX3e, Omega et al).
> Isn't this sort of the problem with WYSIWYG in general, though?
For some it's the problem, for others it's the allure. I like Framemaker style tools myself --but Adobe it has had it stagnate, and it's also not on the Mac.
> Can Word give me a nice, hierarchical view of all the paragraph and character styles and margin settings that have been applied to my article?
It has styles, and can present a list of them et al. Not many people use it that way, but it's quite powerful. Not as powerful as Framemaker though.
> My text editor does that for me, and I'm not distracted by presentation issues while I type my document.
No, but you are distracted of keeping a syntax NOT RELATED to the document content in your head.
> How so? Text flow around images is an issue in TeX - have Quark or InDesign really improved much otherwise?
There have been improved hyphenation/justification algorithms during the 90's that InDesign et al utilize, that provide better visual output even for simple paragraph text compared to plain ole TeX. Mainly utilizing the hz algorithm.
I'm not in an ASCII-english speaking country, and it's not like that at all. And all projects that started to rectify TeX with regards to unicode text, have fallen behind or are totally abandoned (I speak of stuff like LaTeX3e, Omega et al).
Xetex is still actively maintained, and at the very least it's utf-8 aware. Googling around, I found that non-ASCII users report that Xetex doesn't really do a very good job of handling language-specific spacing, but at the same time there are an abundance of packages and extensions to Xetex that address a lot of these issues. I'm curious though - where are you from? Would Xetex really be unworkable where you come from?
For some it's the problem, for others it's the allure. I like Framemaker style tools myself --but Adobe it has had it stagnate, and it's also not on the Mac.
Yes - I too was disappointed when they killed the Mac version.
It has styles, and can present a list of them et al. Not many people use it that way, but it's quite powerful. Not as powerful as Framemaker though.
If Word had a mode where it could enforce styles - prevent me from accidentally dragging a paragraph margin around with the flick of the mouse or something - if Word insisted that every bit of formatting in the document came from one of the named styles, that alone would be progress.
No, but you are distracted of keeping a syntax NOT RELATED to the document content in your head.
Well, I've been able to learn TeX/LaTeX syntax - so for me it's a sunken cost. And for me at least, it's a lot less distracting than the tools and accoutrements of WYSIWYG text editing. YMMV.
There have been improved hyphenation/justification algorithms during the 90's that InDesign et al utilize, that provide better visual output even for simple paragraph text compared to plain ole TeX. Mainly utilizing the hz algorithm.
Interesting - I've never heard of the hz algorithm - although Wikipedia has this to say about it:
According to Zapf,[3] Hàn Thế Thành made a detailed analysis of the Hz-program for micro-typography extensions to the TeX typesetting system and implemented them in pdfTeX. These are available as part of the LaTeX and ConTeXt typesetting packages.
So it might be as straightforward as \usepackage{microtype}? I've looked at the pdfTeX document on the microtype package and it does indeed seem to improve the text layout quite a bit, at least with the font expansion feature.
Non fiddling access to hundreds of Open Type fonts and UTF-8?
Trivial visual layout changes of almost every aspect of the text instead of having to write then in a layout language?
Integrated spell/grammar checking as you go, word count et al?
Non in Word per se, but BETTER algorithms for typesetting in WYSIWYG (unknown to many, InDesign and Quark have progressed A LOT over TeX's algorithms).
Interoperability for the basic edited document format (not through pdf, ps, html exports) with 99% percent of the world (excluding some parts of Academia that prefer LaTeX)?