Thoughts on Typesetting

In 2012 IAP, I taught myself how to use LaTeX by typesetting the 8.033 — Relativity lecture notes. I also did this so that the lecturer I had that semester and the lecturer for the following semester would both have these notes at their disposal; for the record, the former is on sabbatical this academic year, while the latter did indeed use it when he taught the class this past fall. I needed to teach myself LaTeX because I was going to be taking 8.13, which I did this past fall, and that requires LaTeX use for papers (and recommends Beamer for presentations as well). That said, recently I was hanging out with some friends and a couple of them suggested that LaTeX isn't really necessary as far as producing scientific papers goes, because Microsoft Office Word 2013 has an advanced enough equation editor that it can essentially replace LaTeX, especially as it now recognizes basic LaTeX syntax. At first, given how much I had used LaTeX (and also given some of my past negative feelings toward Microsoft), I felt a little defensive. But then I realized I should give the comparison a fairer shot, so I decided to see if I could try to replicate one of my PRL-formatted LaTeX-typeset papers in LibreOffice Writer. Follow the jump to see my findings.

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Will KPresenter and Gnumeric Please Come Forward?

This is probably one of the few times that I'm wishing that I had Microsoft Office on my computer. (As it happens, as I go to the library for at least an hour every weekday anyway, I just used Microsoft Office there.) Why?
Well, for my latest chemistry problem set, I need to plot a range of data and add a trend line. Although OpenOffice.org Calc can do this, there aren't as many options. It only gives options for linear, exponential, power, and logarithmic trend lines, none of which are what I want. Although the power regression fits well, what I want is a quadratic regression, and this is something that I just can't do in OpenOffice.org, which is really a shame. I remember when testing some distribution that included Gnumeric (I don't remember which one), I needed to do a similar thing then, so I tried to do it in Gnumeric; if I remember right, Gnumeric did offer the option of a polynomial regression line (with the order of the polynomial specified by the user). Score 1 for Gnumeric, 0 for OpenOffice.org. Also, last year, I needed to make a 3D plot (x, y, f(x, y)), which is possible in Microsoft Office Excel. OpenOffice.org, unfortunately, doesn't have this capability, and at that time (I don't know if the situation has changed much now), it couldn't even render an already-created chart properly. I tried to recreate the same chart with Gnumeric, and, lo and behold, it worked perfectly! Score 2 for Gnumeric, 0 for OpenOffice.org.
Also, last year, I found myself needing to create and view many spreadsheets with lots of data (thousands of rows). Although this wasn't problematic per se in OpenOffice.org, it was certainly a lot slower than in Microsoft Office Excel. Score -1 for OpenOffice.org? Maybe.
So what does KPresenter have to do with all this? Well, it's just that in my experience, KPresenter does a whole lot better in terms of usability and ability to create high-quality presentations than either OpenOffice.org Impress or Microsoft Office Powerpoint. That's because the whole KOffice suite is geared towards desktop publishing as opposed to traditional document creation. Score 1 for KOffice, 0 for both OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office.
Oracle is being rather wishy-washy about the future of OpenOffice.org, which isn't confidence-inspiring either. I would say the only things OpenOffice.org have going for it are Writer and Math. In the near (or not-so-near, I don't know) future, I may supplant Calc and Impress with Gnumeric and KPresenter. And honestly, AbiWord is a pretty good alternative to Writer as well.

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