Why give up Word?
There are many reasons, but today I want to discuss the reason that actually moved me.
A Word document is a proprietary binary. Moreover, the proprietary format is subject to change over time thus allowing Word to add new features. It is possible to convert older forms of Word documents to newer forms, but the conversion is lossy and binary files are subject to corruption. Eventually, I reached the point where I was losing data. Thus, for example, I no longer have a copy of my dissertation (completed in 1995). Clearly, Word is not an archival format.
For me this was a disaster, particularly given the way that I work. I tend to publish approximately thirty percent of my written output. This is not (well, not merely) inefficiency. The remaining seventy percent gets recycled in lectures, talks, and sometimes in later research. This means that I need to have reliable access to all that I have written, and it needs to be in an editable form. Word couldn’t deliver, so I was forced to look elsewhere.
There are lots of reasons to give up Word. I will discuss some of these later. But the reason that actually moved me dictated the direction of an alternative—plain text.
The next post will discuss the virtues of plain text.
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I see there might be advantages in ditching word - the archival feature you mention, concentrating on content and funny logicians symbols included. But there seem to be a number of different? solutions - latex, markdown, textmate etc. Where does one start? I am confused and feeling technologically alienated and at only 33!
I am, as you know, a graduate student who needs to use logical symbols and the greeks. Any advice?
Hi Lee. For a complex document such as a dissertation, especially one involving formal material, the simple answer is LaTeX. Writing equations in a wordprocessor is IMHO a nightmare. I speak from bitter experience. LaTeX can be daunting to the uninitiated, but thanks to the hard work of others, it is pretty easy to set up. (I installed a TeX tree and produced my first LaTeX document in an afternoon.) And as long as you “color within the lines”, it is very easy to use. It can get difficult if you want to do something not explicitly provided for, but, for me at least, these occasions are rare (thanks to the plethora of packages available), and solutions can be found.
Are you a Mac user or a Windows user? If you are a Mac user, I would recommend using the MacTeX distribution. If you are a Windows user, then I would recommend the MiKTeX distribution. In addition to a TeX distribution (the typesetting software) you would need a LaTeX-aware editor. I have no recommendations for Windows, but on a Mac, TeXShop is a very nice GUI front-end. That’s where I started and its free (though now I use TextMate which isn’t). A useful guide to using LaTeX is A (Not So) Short Introduction to LaTeX2e.
This blog will be mostly dedicated to the technology of writing. So stay tuned for more guidance.
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[…] In my first post I described how I gave up Word. For those engaged in academic writing, or the production of certain kinds of complex documents, there’s reason to do so as well. To follow this up, I would like to bring your attention to Marko Pinteric comparison of Word and LaTeX: […]
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