On Sunday, 15 February 2015 at 11:36:22 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
On Sun, 2015-02-15 at 04:38 +0000, Craig Dillabaugh via
Digitalmars-d-announce wrote:
[…]
Well, if you do the document with Latex on git (or some
similar version control), you get most of the same stuff.
Latex has a comment tool where you can do margin comments if
you wish, and of course you can also do comments in the 'code'
if you want - they don't show up in the document at all.
Heck, I am sure there is a package for everything in Latex if
you look hard enough.
(Xe|Lua)LaTeX or AsciiDoc
Git or Mercurial or Bazaar
Publishers have, however, seemed to have decided that
sub-editors must
work on the original source document files directly. If this is
an
integral part of the publisher workflow and the sub-editors
cannot
deal with DVCS or the markup languages, then the publishers
refuse to
use those tools.
Still as long as some half-way decent authors are prepared to
use Word
and abdicate their responsibility for the content once initially
created, the publishers win.
A MS-word document with 'track changes' on, edited by multiple
people, is the greatest eyesore known to humanity. I still
don't understand why anyone who had a choice between Latex and
MS-Word would pick MS-Word for anything longer than 25 pages...
And who has the current master version, which file is the
master,
etc., etc.
Just my personal opinion as one who recently finished a 200
page thesis in Latex, and is now working for a company where
we do all our internal documents in Word. Latex certainly has
its ugly
warts,
but it is so nice for lengthy document1.
Luxury. I typed my thesis (including the maths equations) using
a
broken portable manual typewriter. ;-)
And you tell new students these days, and they won't believe you
:o)
One other nice thing about LateX is that since you prepare
your content in a text editor, it lets you focus on your content
and
not be distracted by fiddling with formatting as you go! In
theory
you should do the same in MS-Word, but its sometimes hard to
focus with
all the pretty buttons :o)
Of course, TeX is also a programming language, so for developer
types
it does present its own distraction. Luckly TeX coding is so
obtuse
it is never a serious temptation.
