- Speed: Anything that requires a mouse and clicking through menus will be slower than one where you can write it out in a few key strokes. This means that writing characters with accents, special symbols, and especially equations will be much faster to write in LaTeX.
- MS Word (and even worse open office) can get sluggish when editing large documents with lots of equations and figures.
- Security: stored in plain text
- MS Word stores its files in a bloated binary form. If a file gets corrupted for whatever reason you could be locked out of your file and many hours of work. Likewise if some bug in MS Word is causing it to crash when opening your file. With plain text source files, if all else fails you can always open and edit the file in a simple text editor.
- Separation of context and formatting
- The plain text style of LaTeX simply using section and subsection etc allows the writer to simply think about the logical flow of the document without worrying about superficial details such as font sizes and styles
- You know all your sections and subsections headings are in the correct font size. This is much harder to check using MS Word.
- Integratable with SVN
- Being plain text it is easier for SVN (and other revision control systems) to merge files being edited
- It also takes up less space on the server storing revisions
- It is also possible to use any diff tool to compare revisions
- You also know the diff tool will show you ALL changes in the state of the file. There is no such guarantee when using features such as track changes in MS Word.
- Control
- MS Word often tries to outsmart you. It will automatically capitalize, automatically try to select whole sentences, automatically insert bullet points, and try to infer when you’re done with a sub/superscript when writing equations. Software that tries to out-smart you will often out-dumb you. It tries too hard to infer what you want and often gets it wrong.
- A good example is the use of - vs. -- vs. ---. Microsoft assumes most users are not smart enough to infer which type of dash to use in which situation. So MS Word tries to figure it out automatically. It can be really annoying when it gets it wrong. With LaTeX you just write what you want in 1 to 3 key strokes!
- There is also the quote directions `` ''. In LaTeX it is specified manually while in word it is automatic, and can be annoying if word infers it wrong.
- Notion of state: every change in the file is visible. Nothing is hidden from you in a plain text source file.
- There is no hidden meta information
- Flexibility
- It is easy to search for $x^2$ or \footnote in LaTeX the is no easy way to do the analogous searches using CTRL-F in MS Word
- You can also search the file using regular expressions
- Macros for a more semantic representation can be written in just 1 line with a few key strokes
- For example, I often define \field{} using \mathcal{} and then \R using \field{R}
- In MS Word macros are often full blown VB scripts
- They should be disabled any way since they are a security risk
- More easily scriptable
- For instance, I have MATLAB code that exports a matrix of results in MATLAB to a LaTeX table
- It would require a full blown C++/VB program in visual studio using all sorts of crazy APIs (and therefore reading tons of documentation) to do the same thing in MS Word
- Speed-quality trade-off in formatting
- Because MS Word has to reformat the document every keystroke it has to use inferior typesetting methods to prevent the GUI from becoming glacially slow
- Since you only recompile after significant changes in LaTeX, it can afford to use more expensive type-setting algorithms (especially for equations) that might take 10 seconds to run.
- Interoperable
- Since things like bibtex are also plain text it is much easier for third parties to create applications such as Jabref. You don't get stuck using one particular reference manager. If you don't like one there are others to use instead. And if all else fails you can always edit it in notepad.
- Therefore, there is no vendor lock-in and you can't get stuck using one piece of software for backward compatibility reasons that may in the future become inferior to the alternatives.
- Misc
- Equations always come out looking crappy
- Figure captions aren't proper; MS Word will let them cross page boundaries for instance
- Footnotes are a pain, especially if you have multiple footnotes on the same page
- Equation numbering is a pain in Word
- It is possible to embed pdf figures in LaTeX which allows for vector graphics and avoids file bloat
- However, I beleive new versions of word allow for the insertion of eps figures
- Cost
- LaTeX is free while MS Office can cost a few hundred dollars
- There is open office but that is even worse
- I am not a "free-tard" so this is not my top concern
Advantages of MS Word:
- MS Word has a grammar checker. To my knowledge, none of the LaTeX editors have a grammar checker.
- Of course, the grammar checker should usually be taken with a grain of salt. However, it is good at catching typos such as interchanging it/is/if and they/then, which a spell checker will not find and are easy to glance over when proof reading.
- The equation editor is better than it used to be. Writing an equation heavy document in word used to be almost impossible. However, it is now doable, but still much slower than LaTeX.