The Joy of TeX

[pne]

While we were having lunch together, we were talking about the documentation we're currently churning out, and that the final document would probably have on the order of 250 pages. Someone mentioned that Word tends to have problems with such large documents.

The boss, Peter, who was having lunch with us lowly peons, agreed; he said that the maximum size you can really trust to Word is about 10 pages, since that's a quantity you can re-type if necessary.

I said that if Gerald were here, he'd probably suggest LaTeX, and Peter agreed, rather to my surprise. This spun off a little discussion of TeX and what you can do with it and what the result looks like.

Someone asked Peter when we would introduce TeX, then, and he said we could do it straight away if it were up to him; he likes TeX and thinks it's heaps better than Word. He also said that the computer he has currently is the first that doesn't have a TeX installation on it.

I was a bit surprised to see that he was such a TeX fan; I suppose I have the prejudice that all managers love Word and are oblivious to its shortcomings.

Perhaps we should have done it in TeX, then, especially since we're planning on delivering a PDF (rather than Word) version anyway :)

Comments

[nik-w.livejournal.com]

I love LaTeX, but I must admit that I always forget how do use it properly (only due to not having used it much). It definitely is better than Word, though, and like you I'm quite surprised that your manager has heard of it, let alone likes it! For making PDFs, it could barely be easier!:)

[noidd.livejournal.com]

Making pdfs from LaTeX is easy.
Making the LaTeX environment actually do what you want in the first place is hard.