关于tex和word的一个小故事

这个帖子来自ctt，是关于word和tex优缺点的争论。作者荡开一笔，不做技术上的空谈，而是将生活中的实例，娓娓到来，如叙家常，讲述了一个被word折磨崩溃的女博士如何成功转向tex的故事。非常有趣，推荐给大家看看。原文如下：

I know that real life experience is often not considered worth much in debates like this. However, I had one very relevant experience that ended up converting a long time word users to Latex.

My partner was writing up her Phd thesis using Word. Her field is within botany. At first, everything was going fine. However, after a time, she began to get more and more problems. The formatting of her document kept getting all screwed up. All of these problems started to occur after she made some minor modifications to the formatting styles so that her thesis would fit with the style guide provided by the University.

As the thesis grew, the problems became more frequent. This created additional stress which was now making my life miserable. In the past, I'd tried to convince her that life would be easier with LaTeX. However, she had the standard prejudices against it and wanted to stay with a GUI based system that gave her a wysi(almost)wyg interface.

I decided to grab a text version of her document, which I translated into LaTeX. I thought the translation would be a real pain, but it wasn't that bad. I used Emacs and AucTex. I included the graphics package and created some macros that made it very easy for her to include her photos and images from the electron microscope. The University also has a thesis.sty file which I
installed.

I then spent a few hours creating some scripts to make life easier for her under Linux - setup a simple window manager and a few hot keys and then made a deal with her. I promised that if she tried using LaTeX (through emacs and AucTex) for two weeks and found it was no good, I would import the whole thing back into word and get it all formatted. although this would have been a major pain to do, I was reasonably confident that after a couple of weeks she would be very happy with things.

Well, I really under estimated the outcome. Within a week she was only half a stressed and the stress was all about her thesis content and not its format. Using emacs under X gave her menus for the most common commands she needed. I also exported her bibliography from endnot to bibtex and with only a few minor problems, she was very satisfied. So satisfied in fact that the first thing she asked me to do after she was finished was partition her hard drive and install linux, emacs and texlive onto her system.

There were some aspects that she didn't like at first. Probably most notably was getting use to how tables are created and formatted. However, the problem here was simply that it was different to what she had known and didn't feel right. Later she admitted that in reality, once she got use to it, the time it took her to create a well formatted table was actually less. Often, with word,
she spent less time creating the basic table, but a lot more time trying to get it to look right. Tables were another area which seemed to screw up formatting wise with word. She also found less problems with LaTeX when it came to moving tables and figures around - word often seemed to nly get the re-numbering and formatting correct part of the time.

There are some aspects of LaTeX which she doesn't like and prefers the way word does it, but on balance, she thinks LaTeX is far superior, especially for longer documents. Word can be ok if you are only writing up a few pages, but really turns into a nightmare when you are faced with something like a thesis or book. the other benefit was that she is no longer getting pain in her wrists and arms - I suspect this was probably a form of RSI and possibly due to the mouse (the right hand suffered a lot more than the left). She also has remarked on how much faster she finds writing and using key bindings for common commands rather than selecting from the menu. for example, C-c C-s to add a section heading.

Tim