Writing math in Word has the following disadvantages:
- referencing is a nightmare (this is probably the worst aspect). \label and \ref or \eqref? No, remember the equation number, click the References tab, Cross-Reference, select "equation" from the "Reference type" dropdown list, scroll down to the equation whose number you should remember, click "Insert". Did you add remove/an equation, thereby changing all subsequent equation numbers? Let's hope "Update all fields" works on the first try (hint: it won't).
- AMS math standards, \mathbb{R}, \mathcal{R}? No, \doubleR, \scriptR.
- \bar{x}? No, \bar SPACE SPACE left-arrow x right-arrow.
- \begin{align*}? No, good luck. (Actually I haven't even figured this one out).
- Version control? No, "Track changes". Oh, you changed a subscript or superscript? Your file is corrupted and cannot be saved, Ctrl-z until you can save and hope you remember all your changes.
- Seamless math typing if you are fast and proficient at LaTeX? No, Alt+= and hold on while I catch up. Did you go too fast? Sorry, Word has stopped responding. (This is a real problem in a 50+ page Word document full of math.)
Those are just the ones off the top of my head.
+1 for TeXmacs being superior to both Word and LaTeX. After using LaTeX for years I tried TeXmacs for a week and never looked back.
The secret is to revert back to Draft/Normal mode and abandon the performance regressions from print preview mode. Word was never designed to use that as the primary editing view.
It's also just a tiny subset of LaTeX commands and not real LaTeX. I use the bm package to make things bold and I can't use that in Word. It doesn't support \begin{} and \end{} for any environment so for stuff like matrices you need to use special Word syntax \matrix{}.
The math equations made by Word have a distinctive appearance. Partly because they’re objectively worse in some (a few) aspects, partly because people associate them with Word, the result feels amateurish. This isn’t purely an intrinsic technical quality of Word, it’s just how the cookie crumbles.
> The math equations made by Word have a distinctive appearance.
Try and use the GUST fonts (http://www.gust.org.pl/projects/e-foundry), Microsoft Word equations will look then excellently made.
The last time I used the GUST fonts, by the way, I was able to export Word documents to pdf only be printing, as using the pdf converter some glyphs would "lose pieces"; and exporting via printing I would lose the clickable links. But I did not try with the Word plugin for the latest versions of Acrobat.
In TeXmacs, switching between math and non-math mode while writing up a document is seamless and fast. Moreover, typesetting quality is comparable to TeX/LaTeX.
