@Xander It is worth noting that LaTeX is not as superior to Word in these scenarios as Word is to LaTeX in the others. So, on balance, if you had to choose one tool to use for the rest of your life then Word would be the logical winner.
@DavidFreitag Over one's lifetime, the cases where LaTeX would be the better choice are extremely niche when compared to Word. Even for most professionals in mathematics-oriented fields. Yeah, there's going to be a couple or few decades where they'd want LaTeX instead, but then things swing back again eventually.
I write a lot of technical documentation. No math needed, typographical quality doesn't need to be great. And yet Word sucks immensely compared with LaTeX.
@DavidFreitag No, it's because I can use Excel to suit my needs well and quickly enough, well before I would have learned how to use the database tool that would arguably have been better-suited for the job.
Word has very little formatting automation, just styles. In LaTeX I define a lot of macros to automate cross-referencing, formatting tables, diagrams, etc. In Word there simply is no equivalent. That's not a defect of Word so much as a defect of WYSIWYG.
then there are the defects of Word itself, like being incompatible with Word (less so nowadays than a decade ago, but incompatibilities still happen), losing references and having no way to communicate broken references, an extremely clumsy interface to creating references in the first place, no serious indexing mechanism (I'm not completely sure about that, are recent versions finally capable of sorting an index?), ...
Database vs. Spreadsheet is kind-of like Geek vs. Non-Geek here:
Ultimately, the database wins out over time once you've learned it. But if you're good enough with a spreadsheet, it's just quicker on a case-by-case basis to get the job done with the tool you already know.
Well, excel is suitable for some things but the full stack development outperforms any excel because it has 3-tier architecture, the GUI, the business logic and the database
not like outperforming excel with bash script, that would be rather php, ruby or python
@Gilles Out of curiousity, do you produce those documents as part of a team or on your own? My limited exposure to LaTeX is that people's setups seem quite personalised so good for individual efforts, less so when a large team of people need a consistent interface
@Gilles it is entirely possible to automate these things in word, just depends on whether it's worth the effort or not. As an example the organisation I work for produces x00 similar reports a week (stylistically similar) so we have a fair amount of word automation in play
@RоryMcCune On my own. That's the main problem: if I have to collaborate on a document, it has to be Word, because that's all most of my colleagues know.
One thing I want in my technical documentation is automatic cross-referencing. I want to produce a PDF where clicking on a function name brings you to the function definition.
@Gilles Right but you can include custom LaTeX and markdown pages to do the bulk of the work and let Doxygen to the heavy lifting in terms of tying everything together.
@DavidFreitag rather the opposite: I'd like to settle on a format where we use doxygen for the API documentation, but then tie it into LaTeX for the architecture documents
@Iszi Using Word is like drilling holes in your own teeth with a rusty corkscrew: once you have done it, you need to convince other people that it is the best practice ever, otherwise they will notice that you are completely crazy.
LaTeX is an atrociously hackish programming language, but at least it gets one thing right, which is to separate content from layout.
@ThomasPornin Being in the same position, I tried it for technical specs. But it doesn't scale well. I especially missed decent tables, formatting macros and seamless internal cross-references.
@AviD Not really better. One thing I appreciate in LaTeX compared to Markdown is explicit labels — no need for a global search and replace each time I change the title of a section
