Many of you are aware, doubtlessly to your sorrow, of my many rants about Word and its evil brethren. If you care—and you should—what your finished writing looks like, you shouldn’t be using Word. Journals and publishers who generate printing plates directly from Word are guilty of professional malfeasance as far as I’m concerned. There is just no excuse.
Dario Taraborelli has a nice post that highlights some of the differences between Word’s and LaTeX’s output. Really, a more accurate description is that the post highlights many of the typesetting errors that Word makes. They are, by and large, small things but they add up to make a Word produced document much less appealing. One of the things I learned from Rich Stevens is that while readers probably won’t notice those small mistakes, they will notice that the book or document looks less pleasing than it should.
Taraborelli’s post compares things like kerning and small caps. Take a look at the examples and see if you don’t agree that LaTeX does a better job of producing pleasing typsesetting.