ODF more complete than LaTex

Posted Jun 11, 2007 20:25 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

First of all, you mistake TeX and LaTeX.

Not at all. I know what is TeX and what is LaTeX. Very well indeed: I've spent enough nights in my life trying to make the book look like it should... TeX is the program Knuth wrote and LaTeX is set of macros - nothing more, nothing less...

LaTeX is a high level language that encodes the semantics of the document, not the physical details.

You can pretend that it's true but the illusion only holds as far as you don't stumble upon some "gray area" - and then you need to dig in LaTeX implementation and TeXbook...

Then you have TeX the language, that is processed by TeX the program to generate the document.

You don't have TeX language, you have TeX program - TeXbook is just translation from Web to English...

As a former member of the french translation team, I can say that LaTeX is EXTREMELY well documented.

I'd say that quality of documentation for OOXML and LaTeX is more-or-less the same: both are quite precisely documented, both have some "gray areas" where the implementation rules apply and no real documentation exist. LaTeX is much simples (thnx god), but that's the only difference... of course LaTeX does not support presentations and spreadsheets at all without additional packages...

Regarding the implementations of TeX, there are many: TeX itself, PDFTeX Omega, NTS etc

How many of them are independent ? I'd say: none. Or are there some project which does not start from Kunth's codebase ? NTS is written in Java, true, but it still starts from reimplementation of the same old TeX and then add new features...