Fine thanks. The main reason we closed the question is that it is the kind of question that tends to lead to lots of subjective opinions and discussion, which is not the goal of the site. That doesn't mean it wasn't a fair question to ask, which is why I created the chat room.
So let me start with a couple of main reasons (not that I speak for everyone, but I've been around a lot of TeX users, so what I say is probably fairly representative.)
Also, I should say that many of us have had really bad experiences with Word over the years (See some of the stories here: tex.stackexchange.com/q/2110/2693).
Crossreferencing in Word is simply speaking, quite painful. In LaTeX it's really trivial. The same goes for bibliographies and citations. Those two facts alone clinch it for many of us.
The fact that Word is a proprietary format is also really important. I can no longer open my dissertation file (which was done in Word), but decades old documents created in TeX not only open (because they are plain text) but also still compile and produce the same output as when they were first created.
I'm not talking about their math capabilities (and yes, that's a really recent improvement in Word), I'm talking about basic functionality. But I suspect some of the versions I used were created before you were born. :)
but let put the question like this, if you just want to type let's say 3 pages of math? In word I can type math faster than I can write, but in latex, this takes so much longer...
I don't understand why people use a system with so much more pain regarding math.
I think that this depends on a couple of things. One is that you are just learning LaTeX, so it's not that surprising that you can't type it very quickly. Also, with a good editor it's really easy to create macros for whole chunks of LaTeX markup. So this issue disappears really fast.
Just to give you an example, I commonly use a bracketted one column matrix in some of my work. (I'm a linguist, not a mathematician, but the markup is still math). I have a macro \fbun{} which takes a comma delimited list and puts them into an array with appropriately sized brackets. I don't think Word can do such things.
Okay, but even if I had an editor with a lot of shortcuts, and if I used macro's. Than Latex maybe is as fast Word. But still I don't have the feeling that I'm doing math, which you have when you make Math in word, because of it WYSIWYG
Well the WYSIWYG issue is obviously one of taste, I think. Since it's easy to preview quickly, most of us don't find this much of a problem. It's really a matter of getting used to it.
Right, and that capability, once you understand it, is an enormous time saver, not to mention making your source code very readable, since you're creating semantic markup.
What editors/IDEs are available for easing the process of writing TeX/LaTeX documents?
Please state some useful features like code completion, spell checking, building final DVI or PDF files, etc.
OpenType math is still in its infancy in LaTeX, since there have only been a few OpenType math fonts available. So most users use regular LaTeX markup for math rather than inputting the math characters directly. This is also a lot faster.
There are a few other advantages to LaTeX that we haven't touched on. How relevant they are will depend what kind of work you do. For pure math, they won't matter so much, but for other things, they might.
For example, many of us do statistical work and LaTeX integrates very nicely with R (the de facto standard for stats work these days).
I use the programmability of TeX to generate stimulii for experiments drawing from spreadsheet data. Although this is possible to do with MailMerge, it's much easier with LaTeX (and more complex things can be done.)
Yeah, I understand the point that in the end, you can customize latex as much as you want, while you can customize Word only as much as Microsoft want you to customize it...
As a linguist, LaTeX has a number of things that Word simply can't do. For example, in my work, trees are a common mode of representation, and I can enter trees trivially in LaTeX. See e.g. tex.stackexchange.com/q/17600/2693
@KasperPeulen Right. And as a result there are a lot of really useful extensions to LaTeX, for a huge variety of scientific fields.
Anyway, I hope this has at least given you some things to think about. Learning LaTeX at the beginning can be daunting, but in the long run, I suspect it will pay off. If you're a student writing up things for homework, then maybe it's not worth the effort, but if you are a researcher (or plan to be), then the effort is likely to be definitely worth it.
Yes, I didn't mean to imply that they weren't supported, but as the documentation states:
"This document describes the unicode-math package, which is an *experimental* implementation of a macro to Unicode glyph encoding for mathematical characters."
@AlanMunn It seems to work excellent. Do you know if it is possible to convert autocorrect file from word to an autocorrect file for autohotkey (.acl to .ahk). I'm tring to write autohotkeys myself now.
@KasperPeulen Yes, I think it unicode-math does work well, but relatively few people are using it I think. As for the autocorrect, I have no idea. I use a Mac, so I have no knowledge of AutoHotkey, sorry.
Ok, I made a lot of hotkeys now. Now I can type math symbols not only in latex as fast as in word, but also at the internet. I don't know if all browsers support this, can you see this: ∀ε>0,∃δ>0,(n>N⇒|s_n-L|<ε ∫_a^b ∑_k^n ℝℚℕℂℤ ⇔
What editors/IDEs are available for easing the process of writing TeX/LaTeX documents?
Please state some useful features like code completion, spell checking, building final DVI or PDF files, etc.
