Cley wrote:
They are tools. Power users of each tools will find that they are on the
"better" side.
Some peoples feel that latex, with all the commands everywhere is too
>complicated, but when you learn a bit about it it's ok. Same for
LibreOffice; there's properties dialog everywhere, multiple levels of
styles, and not-always intuitive page management, but when you learn a bit
about it it's ok.
And in both case, doing anything that's more advanced will require more
learning. Setting up the "best" template for your work can be tedious with
any tools, LO and latex included. But writing a ~100 lines latex class file
to match an (imposed) template is as tedious as setting the correct chain
of styles in LO...
Regarding the "greater control" statement, it's the same. You can have a
lot of control in both, but it's gonna be some work. But I'll concede, one
of latex advantages is that it have sensible default settings for various
usages :)
Excellent summary, and I fully agree.
In terms of ease of use, I find that with a program like LO, I can (usually)
figure something out by navigating the menus. With LaTeX, I'm performing
Google searches to find out the proper syntax to use in preamble commands. I
think my LaTeX distribution came with some 1200 document files explaining
the various packages etc. If I recall correctly, the documentation for the
Microtype package is over 200 letter size pages. The FancyHdr documentation
is equally daunting, but necessary to read if you want to customize your
headers and footers. With LO, just put the cursor in the footer and type
what you want. The wysiwyg interface does make things easier.
And, then there's all those surprises on compilation. I recently did a
document with several references to dollar figures. The program reminded me
that I had to put a "\" in front of every dollar sign "$" because LaTeX
translates dollar signs into a special code. With LO, I don't have to worry
about those things.
All that said, I do truly love LaTeX. I enjoy working with pure text files
(very little risk of file corruption) and that final output just can't be
beat.
Virgil
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