The h Bar

8:00 AM

4. If you ask someone else to proofread it, they'll be able to make their changes on the actual document, even if they don't know TeX/LaTeX,

DanielSank

Reasons to use TeX:
1. File formal is just text, i.e. the files are human-readable without any special software.
2. You can get nice editors for TeX on Mac, Linux, Windows, i.e. you're not constrained to use Windows and Mac only.
3. You'll learn to use a program that is the absolute world standard in science.
4. Really nice features for composing documents from sub-parts.
5. Easier to version control, if you ever want that.

Dawood ibn Kareem

5.

Absolutely 5.

DanielSank

@DawoodibnKareem Yeah, if they have MS Office.

Dawood ibn Kareem

Microsoft should have built version control into Word at least 25 years ago.

In fact, all the Office products.

Everyone would use it. It would make them worth having.

DanielSank

@DawoodibnKareem First of all, they have "track changes". Second of all, building version control into a file editor an idea that several products have tried and it has always turned out to be a bad idea.

@DawoodibnKareem It absolutely would not.

Dawood ibn Kareem

8:02 AM

Track changes doesn't really count.

DanielSank

Even so, integrated version control is a devil's kiss.

I should say: MS might be able to come up with a good version control system, but even the fact of having to learn another system on top of e.g. Git would be annoying.

Just let the version control systems do their jobs and stop using proprietary file formats!

Dawood ibn Kareem

But everyone who works on a large number of documents needs version control. And because Office doesn't have it, they try to implement it themselves (ImportantDocument.v0.3.Dawoods_changes.2018.04.19.doc.backup).

DanielSank

Of course I'm being a little bit flip: in order for MS Word to work as well as it does, of course it needs a proprietary format. At least, it did when it was invented. I dunno maybe these days it could use JSON or XML internally...

Dawood ibn Kareem

If it were built into the product, people wouldn't mess it up by trying to do it themselves.

DanielSank

@DawoodibnKareem Sure they would. You can't stop people from misusing tools.

Plenty of people who use Git use it in horrible bad ways, for example.

Dawood ibn Kareem

8:06 AM

You'd have to make it easy to use properly.

DanielSank

^ That's a huge hypothetical.

Version control is a fundamentally tricky problem.

Dawood ibn Kareem

Microsoft tend to get their most usable version of any piece of software about 15 years after version 1. Then they start making it worse.

DanielSank

Git is notoriously hard to learn, and I think part of the reason for that is that humans are generally not used to thinking of data the way Git does, even though Git's data model is very good.

@DawoodibnKareem heheheh

Dawood ibn Kareem

And yes, a Word document is zipped-up XML internally. So it's definitely do-able.

That's what the x stands for in foo.docx.

DanielSank

@DawoodibnKareem ohhhhhhh

In that case, unzipping it would make it suitable for version control.

Hmmmm, interesting.

Oh by the way, there are WYSIWYG editors for TeX. Look up LyX.

Dawood ibn Kareem

8:09 AM

I'm sure Microsoft could come up with a version control system where the zipping was transparent.

@DanielSank Right. I first used TeX (actually LaTeX) in the 1980s.

I forgot that technology changes in time.

John Rennie

@DawoodibnKareem probably about the same time I first used it. 1985 I think.

DanielSank

@JohnRennie Hey, that's the year I started!

Dawood ibn Kareem

Oh, John, let's you and me have a "who's older" competition!

DanielSank

Can I play too?

John Rennie

It only became useful when the university computing dept got a printer that could print TeX output properly. Before then there were only daisywheel printers, which made using TeX a bit pointless.

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