Is there still no good large-document-writing system?

[xela]

A friend just posted about Word eating her dissertation. She was able to salvage it, but it left me wondering: Is there still no good alternative?

By which I mean: Is there not yet a system that enables normal smart people to write moderately sophisticated documents (i.e. documents with automatically generated tables of contents and indices and automatically numbered footnotes, figures and tables) without having to either (A) master arcane technology or (B) trust their work to a bunch of black-box processes they can neither consistently predict nor consistently undo?

I'm asking seriously: It's not a question I've thought about for more than five years. Last time I thought about it, Docbook and/or WYSIWYG xml editors were (and had been for a while) supposed to emerge any day now as (the basis for?) a solution. But all that seems to have come out of that is that Word and Excel files are now ostensibly xml — just not xml a human can usefully edit or whose history can be usefully tracked in a line-oriented revision control system.

So: Imagine a friend is about to write a significant scholarly work. Your friend is smart and willing to look under the hood when necessary, but it would be cruel to make them use LaTeX. What do you tell them? Can suck it up and use Word, but save early and often really still as good as it gets?

Comments

[nakor.livejournal.com]

LaTeX frankly isn't that hard. Writing programs in TeX is arcane, no question. But anyone who can use Word can use LaTeX. LyX is one fine crutch. TeXShop gets great reviews on the Mac.

You know what WordStar and XYWrite and similar were like twenty-five years ago; we all used those. Anyone who could have used those then could use LaTeX now. They may benefit from having a deeper friend around... just like someone using Word. They will certainly benefit from having a style file provided... just like someone using Word. Fortunately, all major technical universities and all major scientific journals provide LaTeX style files.

Tell them to suck it up and use LaTeX. Buy them a copy of Kopka or, slightly cheaper but rather less good, Lamport. Send them a template file.

I've trained plenty of seriously non-technical people to reliably produce working LaTeX documents. Anyone doing serious technical work should find it only a minor obstacle.

[nakor.livejournal.com]

And just to be clear, I'm not suggesting your friend produce diagrams with MetaPost, or use lualatex to embed system fonts, or do anything fancy. I'm suggesting that any scientist can install MacTeX, then use TeXShop and the (often included) style files for major journals and universities plus the following commands:

\maketitle, \title, \author, \tableofcontents, \listoffigures % once each
\section
\subsection
\includegraphics
\footnote
\begin{table}...\end{table}
\begin{figure}...\caption{} \end{figure}
\begin{tabular}...\caption{} \end{tabular}
\label and \ref
\emph and \textbf

TeXShop has menu commands to insert magic templates for most of the above, including asking how many rows and columns should be in a tabular, properly nesting each tabular into a table, getting the label and caption in the right order, etc. Modern TeX imports PNG and PDF graphics, so can easily consume diagrams from OmniGraffle or Visio. It outputs PDF for easy distribution. TeXShop uses ordinary Mac spelling correction, copy, and paste. Anyone who can use Word to do a thing can use LaTeX to do that thing.

My secret: don't tell them it's hard.

[tla]

The major obstacle comes when you've produced your LaTeX article, or book, or whatever, and the publisher or editor says 'um I need that in a Word document, no, PDF isn't good enough, I need to be able to edit it.' This is why I don't write my scholarly stuff in LaTeX anymore, for the most part, much though I'd love to.

I have a horrible sneaking suspicion that, at least in my field, this is the biggest obstacle to scholars using *any* other word processing package.

[sammason.livejournal.com]

I agree. There might well be better options than Word, in fact I think my University's standard provision includes LaTeX. But my expertise and my interst are in the content of my documents, not in the software that supports them. I use standard Microsoft products for the same reason I use PC not Mac: I go with the majority of people my work needs to interface with. It's a tippy market and Microsoft wins. So what I want is the Microsoft 'upgrades' to be actual upgrades, based on what users want.

I'm the friend yakshaver mentioned in his OP to this thread. The University I work for is forcing me to use Office 2007. Nuff said.

[nakor.livejournal.com]

If you're interested in the content, not the formatting---and even more interested in collaboration---seamless integration with the people you work interfaces with---then use Notepad or Wordpad. It doesn't have the bugs Word does, but has all the tools to support collaboration that Word does*.

If those won't work for you---if you really want Word itself---then Microsoft will sell you collaboration and backup software to prevent the thesis-eating bugs from actually eating your entire thesis. SharePoint is the best example I know of. Your university can buy it for a few tens of thousands of dollars, plus a few tens of dollars per user. And it will fix all the problems you've had with Word. Really.

*: Neither WordPad nor Notepad have Word's "Track Changes" feature. If you're beset by those who think it's useful, I'm sorry---but I don't have help to offer.

[sammason.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this. I don't need to try different software just now but I'm keeping your comment for future reference.

[ocschwar.livejournal.com]

What would be nice (hear that, Internet? Anyone?) is a LaTeX to RTF converter that would fill that need.

[tla]

I once asked on the XeTeX list about options for converting to something that could be read by Word. I was basically told to go away, it was impossible and I shouldn't want it. That was the other thing that soured me on trying to continue to use (Xe)LaTeX.

That said, when it is time to publish my critical edition, I'm going to find a publisher who will accept LaTeX - there is no *way* I'm going to do the specialized formatting required by critical editions in Word.

[nakor.livejournal.com]

That's goofy. htlatex works pretty well---it's done the conversions at http://evenmere.org/~bts/Church/ --- and Word can read HTML just fine. Going back the other way is a bit trickier, but John MacFarlane's pandoc can do a credible job.

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

Is latex2rtf no longer useful? (It was fine last time I used it, but that was over a decade ago.)

[ocschwar.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I'll run it on my thesis and see.

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

Did you try it? How did it go?

[nuclearpolymer.livejournal.com]

When I was doing my thesis along w/ my pledge sib, we ran an experiment. I used LaTeX (having never used it before) and he used Word. We decided they were both equally terrible, though in different ways, and neither was superior. (However, when using Word for large documents, it is very important to save each chapter as a separate file. Otherwise, terrible things happen when the file gets too big.) If I had to do it again, I would use Word because I am more used to its set of annoyingness.

[dmaze]

I haven't gone out of my way to search for a great GUI front-end to a better text-processing system, but one also hasn't fallen into my lap. As far as I can tell, non-professionals use (a) Microsoft Word, (b) bloated software attempting to perfectly replicate (a) but failing because it's not actually Word, or (c) even more bloated software attempting to replicate (b) and missing the point that what users actually want is (a).

Also, I tend to be of the opinion that when users think they want Word, particularly for an Epic Document Production, they're wrong. You just don't want to be able to make a single word in the middle of your document one point size larger than everything else, no matter how tempting that drop-down is in the middle of the toolbar. (And also also, when your email program has the same control, *it's* wrong...but this is getting even further off into the ranty space.)

From what I can tell professionals use professional tools. Frame Maker still seems common. Our local documentation people have an internal XML framework, and while their tooling has some support for DITA in particular it's still an XML editor. But, they get a lot of mileage out of having someone else having done the work to make the output look good.

I think that's the key difference between DocBook and LaTeX here: LaTeX documents look better with default settings, it's easier to adjust LaTeX, and having things like \large{} to fall back on makes it a little less scary. I'd only recommend DocBook if you were very specifically writing something about computer programming where constructs like <classname/> make sense, and if someone else had done the very heavy lifting of producing an aesthetically pleasing template for you.

[jered]

What he said. From my brief stint in Standards (SNIA) working on something which I believe is now on it's way to being ANSI and ISO, we started with Word until it stopped working and then switched to FrameMaker. I believe ANSI/ISO actually require FrameMaker.

We had Microsoft participants in our group who valiantly tried to keep the Word version working, but ultimately admitted defeat. My understanding is that Microsoft actually uses Word internally for standards documentation and many, many hours are lost due to Word eating them when they get too long.

Word is an excellent example of Microsoft's attitude of "make the product barely good enough for the average user".

[motodraconis.livejournal.com]

I use Word because that's what the University and all my previous workplaces have provided.

Apparently this means I am unprofessional.


Latex? Isn't that what fetish gear is made of? I'm not that sort of professional.

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

It doesn't mean you're unprofessional. The vast majority of professionals use Word — even among computer geeks. But the small number who use or at least know about other tools are disproportionately represented among my friends, which is why I posed the question here.

You can get a quick idea of that LaTeX is by scrolling down to the "Example" in the Wikipedia article.

[siderea]

Latex? Isn't that what fetish gear is made of?

Yeah, if by "fetish gear" you mean the stuff for posers. The real perverts use TeX.

\tiny{Sorry. I couldn't resist.}

[nakor.livejournal.com]

Once the constraints here are added—that the user must neither learn anything new (except those things that come with Microsoft updates that totally revamp the UI), and that it must be what others are already using—then no, there's no help. The TeXy solutions out there require about as much effort to switch to as each new version of Office.