I often proofread for my friends. I tell them that they must use Track Changes in Word. Is there a better tool that you recommend?
And while 'always online' is often a bad thing, it seems to be a lot more reliable than the alternatives of email chains with the attached Word document, appending -R3-edited-complete-final-done.docx to the filename, the manual merges when two people are working on the same thing, or the USB stick that gets passed around.
I think it's doable, but it's a serious project.
I'm assuming that what you're actually asking for is a pretty GUI that pretty-prints diff's output.
And that shows, at best, that if all you do is write papers with the author, date, and only thefirst line, then perhaps Word is better suited for that particular task.
But then, writing real documents is far more demanding than that.
For instance, let's say you're trying to publish your paper in a document, and your paper has more text than a single first paragraph. You find out that the style guide imposed by a journal demands that all your figures are placed at the end, in annex. In LaTeX, all you need to do is add a single line of text (include a package). How much work does Word forces you to do?
And I won't even get started on the fact that MS Word fails to support any vector graphics format.
1) The person has no knowledge of LaTeX 2) They've never seen a markup language before 3) Yet somehow they've received this file, devoid of context, instead of the PDF, and they've opened it up in a text editor. And somehow this is relevant to something they're doing.
Who is this person? What are they doing? How is their experience worse than the guy with no experience of Word, no knowledge of Word who opens up the equivalent Word document in vi?
In general, either your images are too large when compared to the text column length, or you're trying to force text around an image when it doesn't belong there.
Usually, type-setting principles tend to place figures at the top of the page or in dedicated pages, the later due to its cost-cutting advantages. Somehow, people assume that an indeterminate-size figure can be placed anywhere without it affecting the text's readability
Then he goes on to show the example of trying to find a spelling error. Ignoring that this just demonstrates his editor support isn't as strong as word's. And completely elides the cascading nightmare that is what happens when Word formatting goes wrong.
Someone else has already pointed out how much superior a text based format is if you want to work with multiple people or track the history of a document.
WYSIWYG editing has, to my mind, one advantage only: it's easier to get started. LaTeX has its disadvantages (such as being a macro language) but being a markup language isn't one of them.