DocX is a nightmare ...

DocX is a nightmare. Work in a site where most people have Office 2003 or else Office 2004 for the Mac and we have a scenario where people can't handle documents from Office 2007 users, which is a bit bad when people collaborating on documents expect to share and revise them.

Now there are converters for the Mac and the PC, but and people working with Office 2007 can save document in the 'old' .doc format. A pain but workable you might think.

But then comes the news that Office 2007's .doc export mode isn't really .doc, well certainly as far as mathematical equations are concerned and as a consequence some journal publishers are refusing Office 2007 files.

Now given that people live and die by journal submissions and citations this is a fairly major problem. Suddenly TeX starts looking attractive, or perhaps some othe common standard such as ODF. (Mind you I'll bet some publishers can't handle that either). This also has implications for the long term storage/archiving of documents in a revisable format - having your equations as a bitmap isn't the best ....