In the existing debate around MS Word vs LaTeX one important aspect is missing. Everybody knows that LaTeX document are looking all the same, but the open question is why should somebody prefer such a style. To answer this question we have to provide the requirements which is fulfilled by LaTeX with ease. The challenge is to create a text intensive document which is unreadable and basically a wall of text. Such a requirement sounds a bit paradox because it is seldom formulated in this explicit manner, but let us assume that this is the task for a typographer.
The typographer isn't asked to create a power point presentation which contains of pictures on every page plus the important keypoints, but the task is to create homogeneous endless document without any iimages and without any subsections. Now it is possible to discuss how to do so in detail.
The first Lorem ipsum document was created with Libreoffice writer, the document can be read easily: there is a picture, different subsections, there is enough space between the paragraphs and there are also keypoints which makes it easy to grasp the content. In one word, the libreoffice example fulfills the criteria of an accessible document.
The example in the right place was created of course with the LaTeX software. All the reader style elements like the picture and the bullet points were removed and only a long sequence of paragraph is visible. Such kind of text-only layout can be realized great with LaTeX. The document fulfills the requirements easily and its shape is for sure unreadable. In theory, text walls can be created with Libreoffice too. But the LaTeX internal algorithms are designed for this purpose much better. The spaces between the words are more dense which makes the page look as a single block.
The document on the right side looks very scientific. The only way to improve the style is by reducing the font size from 10pt down to 9pt and add some esoteric mathematical equations. In other words, creating a wall of text is the meaning of LaTeX.
No comments:
Post a Comment