I knew a small poetry publisher that couldn't find any printing houses willing to do small runs in anything other than Word format. There were a lot of wasted cycles at that company, and I almost took a job there to convert things to a more useful format. Long story.

XML's nice for this sort of thing, because XSL can translate it into just about any other format.

Let's be honest here. Much as it pains me to say this, the world runs on Microsoft Office; call it the lingua franca of information interchange.

Perhaps Word isn't the best tool for the job, but it's usually good enough and you can bet the farm that whatever software the other party is using can import it, largely intact.

Sure, LaTeX could be the better choice. So was BetaMax, OS/9 (vs. Apple DOS & CP/M), and arguably, OS/2 (IBM's version, that is). But so it goes...

Just spouting off,

dmm

Just call me the Anti-Gates ...

The popularity of LaTeX varies by field. In math and physics it rules, and will continue to do so. In other subjects it doesn't.

However where you want to use TeX or LaTeX is for any documentation which you want to archive. Word is simply a horrible choice for this. While it is a good bet that people today can read Word, it is a bad bet that in 15 years someone who finds a Word document will know what to do with it. However if you take a TeX document that was written 15 years ago, it isn't that hard for a person to read it in a text editor. Furthermore on the operating system of your choice it is possible to take the document and print it with the only difference from the original being caused by the limitations of your output format. (The output of TeX is specified down to the visible wavelength of light.) In fact the odds are extremely high that the program you would use 15 years from now is exactly the same as the one that you would use today. No matter what operating system you are on. (TeX is the only widely used program that I know of whose development has stopped. What people develop are macro packages to use on top of the basic program. But it has not been touched since March of 1995.)

There is no other document format which can make equivalent claims. For instance PostScript cannot readily be read as text, and the output is not even guaranteed to remain the same from one printer to another. Microsoft has problems correctly importing documents written 5 years ago. There are many minor variations on groff out there, and the toolset is not widely used outside of Unix.

It is to be hoped that tools like LyX will make more people get into TeX. But no matter what happens, there are niches which it dominates today that it shows no signs of losing its spot in for a very long time to come.

Wow! Uncle!

I never meant to criticize TeX! Never used it myself (haven't needed to), but I have a healthy respect for it and those who have.

I guess I was just pointing out that the path of least resistance (e.g., Word) can be, er, a way to get the best bang for the buck (as it were).

In other words, if there is a learning curve to using TeX (e.g., it is new and unfamiliar), and Word is good enough to get the job done, maybe there's no real payoff in switching.

dmm

Just call me the Anti-Gates ...

The idea that LaTeX belongs in the same set of superior technology that nobody uses as suggested by your examples would come as shocking news to the many publishers that wouldn't take any thing but! As long as your information exchange is nothing more than what can be done in simple typesetting terms, I suppose you could get by with Word, but as soon as you try and do anything outside of the narrow boundaries that the redmond developers conceived of, then you are seriously out of luck. Even with the advances made since TeX was invented, Word just isn't in the same class.

hsm

Apologies. The tone of your response led me to re-read my post, and on reflection I understand how it might have seemed like a flame. This was not my intent at all.

In your message to which my post was a reply, you began with a rhetorical question concerning how welcome your subsequent comment expressing surprise at the use of MS Word would be. I was expressing my own surpise at your surprise.

Dismay? Yes, perhaps. Disappointment? Well, okay. But surprise? It seemed slightly stronger than seemed appropriate on an off-topic post, ...

dmm

Just call me the Anti-Gates ...