Re: A (La)TeX user writes:
I would put my hand up. Largely because Word tries hard to be all things to all people - ignoring the changes in UI over the year, it just does too damn much. If you don't use all the features all the time, how can you expect to remember them? In the thirty or forty years I've used it, I have never been trained on it; it has always been assumed that I already knew how to use it...
I recall a time when engineers wrote documents and secretaries typed them up, sorted out the formatting (and on occasion spelling or grammar), but some time in the eighties I guess some management training school worked out that it made so much more sense for the people who were on the computer keyboard anyway to do things *at which most of them were not skilled* and did away with the concept of secretary.
One might argue with Fader above though: I think I would prefer to see a word processor which does away with the majority of Word's functionality - in particular, character by character formatting - and requires that styles be used throughout. When I write a book, I use LyX/Latex...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
