At 16:36 +0000 3/3/14, Harding, Dan wrote:

>Anything proprietary, that requires a major learning curve, or an additional 
>software purchase/install would not work well at all.

With all respect to Rebecca, in that case I would be very cautious about LaTeX. 
Yes, it's free, and yes, it works, but if you want to deviate from the designs 
dictated by existing packages (correct term?), you are then into a very big 
learning issue, requiring deep knowledge of TeX itself. LaTeX can be made to do 
amazing things in the hands of an expert, but I've yet to see a predefined 
package produce acceptable results: there's always some wrinkle the package 
developer hasn't thought of, and which you can't fix.

As a small example, I recently copy-edited a thesis done in LaTeX. The package 
designer had never considered that an author might want to embed 
non-proportional character markup, which is very common in software 
documentation, where camel-case is a convention, i.e. 'ThisIsaThing'. Such 
words are almost always non-dictionary words. In this case, if such a word fell 
at the right-hand margin of the text page, LaTeX simply didn't bother to try to 
hyphenate it, resulting in gross margin violation and the author having to 
manually break such words *in the LaTeX source*. Of course, any editing that 
resulted in text flow destroyed this, with the manually hyphenated word now 
appearing hyphenated within a line. Yech.

-- 
Steve
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