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{ Category Archives } Word

Dumbing down LaTeX

Reed College offers advice on how to make LaTeX look like Word.

My reaction.

2008 07 24 Mark Eli Kalderon LaTeX Comments (0)

Word Security Risk

Despite my deep aversion to it, I still have Microsoft Word 2004 on my hard disk. Largely because administrators keep sending me Word docs, not to edit but simply to read, many of which have complex tables that TextEdit fails to render sufficiently well to be usable. (When will people learn to send PDFs? There […]

2008 03 19 Mark Eli Kalderon OS X
Text
Text Editor Comments (1)

Why Give Up Word …

… at least if you are a Mac User.

It seems that feature parity between Word on Windows and on the Mac is nothing but empty spin. See here.

While naturally curious about the “new and improved” equation editor, Mac users who write technical material remain better served by LaTeX.

Update: Part of the disappointment, here, is that […]

2008 02 10 Mark Eli Kalderon Comments (0)

Scrivener and the Joy of Text

The New York Times reviews Scrivener and other alternatives to Word. WriteRoom is mentioned favorably (though, I must confess, that while I understand the minimalist appeal of WriteRoom, I fail to see why a text editor wouldn’t serve better) as well as Ulysses and Nissus Writer. For those still smitten with wordprocessing Mellel might have […]

2008 01 07 Mark Eli Kalderon Text
Text Editor Comments (0)

Goodbye, Cruel Word

Steven Poole explains why he’s given up Word:

So that’s how it is now. I write within the pure, glowing universes of Scrivener and WriteRoom. I send articles to the Guardian as plain-text rather than .doc. I am confident that I will be able to open those articles and the chapters of my book […]

2007 09 02 Mark Eli Kalderon Comments (0)

OOXML is a Plucked Chicken

Over at An Antic Disposition, Rob Weir compares Micorsoft’s attempt to pass off OOXML as a standard to Diogenes the Cynic’s response to Plato’s definition of man.

Plato, teaching in the Akademia grove, defined Man as “a biped, without feathers.” This was answered by the original smart-ass, Diogenes of Sinope, aka Diogenes the Cynic, […]

2007 08 02 Mark Eli Kalderon OOXML Comments (0)

Why Give Up Word? Part…Oh I Give Up

Nature has announced that it cannot accept OOXML documents:

We currently cannot accept files saved in Microsoft Office 2007 formats. Equations and special characters (for example, Greek letters) cannot be edited and are incompatible with Nature’s own editing and typesetting programs.

And so has Science:

Because of changes Microsoft has made in its recent […]

2007 06 09 Mark Eli Kalderon LaTeX
Markup
OOXML Comments (0)

Zero Advance in Productivity

Hal Licino has put a Mac Plus and and AMD DualCore in a head to head speed test of common tasks using office applications. The results were dramatic:

Due to bloated code that has to incorporate hundreds of functions that average users don’t even know exist, let alone ever utilize, the software companies have […]

2007 06 02 Mark Eli Kalderon Comments (0)

Word and the North Korean Missile Crisis

Hackers broke into a State Department office in East Asia last summer with a Word document. Ted Bridis of the AP reports:

Donald R. Reid, the senior security coordinator for the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, also confirmed that a limited amount of U.S. government data was stolen by the hackers until tripwires severed all […]

2007 04 19 Mark Eli Kalderon emacs Comments (2)

It’s Not a Bug, It’s a Feature! Why Give Up Word, Part Four

Patch Tuesday (when Microsoft releases security patches) has just rolled around and not too surprisingly zero-day vulnerabilities have surfaced. This time in Word 2007. Mati Ahorni of Offensive Security posted three bugs on a security mailing list. These were malformed Word documents. Two crashed the machine and one caused a buffer overflow in wwlib.dll that […]

2007 04 14 Mark Eli Kalderon Comments (0)

Why Give Up Word? Part Three

Rob Weir over at An Antic Disposition has a good discussion of Microsoft’s Office Open XML—its new document format—and the Open Document Format developed by Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards which was based on the XML format originally implemented by OpenOffice.org office suite.

Some of the problems with storing data in proprietary binaries […]

2007 01 25 Mark Eli Kalderon ODF
OOXML
Text Comments (0)

Why Give Up Word? Part Two

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:

Although Word […]

2006 11 25 Mark Eli Kalderon LaTeX Comments (0)

Why Give Up Word? Part One

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, […]

2006 10 15 Mark Eli Kalderon Text Comments (3)
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