LaTeX characteristics being adopted by Microsoft Word 2010

I have used LaTeX fairly extensively in my academic work for producing research papers, CVs, reports and so on. I have always felt that the final document produced by LaTeX justifies the steeper learning curve and somewhat obsolete method of document production. In a nutshell, documents produced using LaTeX look good. The page at [Dario Taraborelli: The Beauty of LaTeX] explains some of the reasons this is so.

But Microsoft Office 2010 has, finally, added some typesetting features to it’s Word application, even though they are turned off by default. Calibri and Cambria are excellent expert fonts – at par with Libertine or Hoefler, perhaps. Kerning is now supported, as are ligatures. Glyph variants can now be selected manually, even if it is still rather cumbersome. Line breaks and paragraphing is still not intelligent, though. And true small caps are not offered either. Font transparency can only be achieved using the trick of textboxes.

Nevertheless, it is a step ahead, like so many others. Text styling offered by Microsoft Word 2010 is almost at par with LaTeX. Large documents are now less prone to problems. Direct PDF output is also now a Word feature.

Unless LaTeX offers ease of use and greater features, I can see even fewer people who will want to move to LaTeX’s niche world.