On Tue, Feb 13, 2007 at 11:08:13PM -0500, Miles Fidelman wrote: > > > Oh come on. At the company we just left, we generated 2-3 proposals a > month, each at > 25 pages or so, using Word. There are lots of reasons to dislike Word, > but get real, it's usable
That depends on how you define usable. Word might handle a 25 page document. The experience of many of my friends has been that big documents (25 pages is not big) are a real pain Word. One friend of mine did his thesis (350-400 pages) in Word. Once he got past 100 or 150 pages, he was constantly fighting with it. The TOC would get messed up, it would screw up formatting and sectioning and lots of other issues. Based on his experience, he advised me to use LaTeX and *not* word. At that time, I had only recently discovered Linux (I was still using Red Hat 8.0, which had just recently been released and I was a few weeks away from being introduced to Debian). So, since I still had two Windows machines and one dual-boot, I was considering working in Word, since I didn't know what else I would use. I can only say that I am immensely happy that I went with LaTeX. Now that I am doing work at a place where Word is the only option for word processing, I realize just how much I hate working with it. Even things that should be trivial are ridiculously complicated. It asks me things that it should not need to ask me. It doesn't ask me things that it should. If I copy or cut for the second time in a document, it completely changes the layout of the screen! The dynamic menus are a royal pain since I *always* have to click on the stupid little icon at the bottom of each menu to get to see all the options. > and it works. (By the way, I run Debian on my servers, used Windows at > work because that's > what the company issued, and my personal machine is a Mac. Had an IT guy > to keep the > Windows machine working, so no stress on my part :-) > See, even with IT people to keep the Windows machine working, it is still a stress on me, since Windows violates so many principles of usability, user interfaces and how things should work, it just makes me sick. I mean, people often complain about the lack of uniformity in GUI programs targetted at Linux. Windows is just as bad, but people choose to overlook it for some reason or another. Then there is the fact that Windows does not include any of the following in a base install: * a decent shell * ssh/sftp client * a decent scripting language Those three things make it so that I will end up taking two or three times as long as I should to do some basic task. Regards, -Roberto -- Roberto C. Sanchez http://people.connexer.com/~roberto http://www.connexer.com
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