begin quoting Christian Seberino as of Sun, Feb 25, 2007 at 10:32:44AM -0800: > > On Fri, February 23, 2007 10:12 pm, Stewart Stremler wrote: > > > Yes, LaTeX is a set of TeX macros (like Emacs was a set of TECO macros) > > that almost completely changes the input "feel"... and why I've never > > managed to get comfortable with LaTeX, it's also not too bad. > > Are you comfortable using TeX for many things people do with OpenOffice? > For example, do you like using TeX for 1 page notes you write?
For that, I generally use flat text. Most one or two page notes don't need much in the way of fonts, styles, headers, or other markup. It's short enough to work fine with plain old text. I used TeX for awhile to transcribe class notes in a class I took. It did wonderfully well transcribing most of the math, but I wasn't good enough to get decent figures out of it. Beautiful notes and equations, but I too often draw diagrams for myself, especially for complicated concepts. I needed a cheat sheet, however; so that's a(nother) downside. I've tried using LyX several times, to no avail -- I found the learning curve with raw TeX + cheat sheet to be less onerous than LyX (which is probably due to my problem with my brain context-switching to use the mouse). Caveat: I haven't used TeX in ages. So it's not useful for *everything*. > >> So what you are saying is the presentation tools of XML/XHTML > >> world...(XSL, CSS) aren't powerful enough to be as precise as you'd like > >> as Latex is? > > > > Um, no. > > Why did DocBook come into existence? I think I remember reading that a > flaw of Latex/TeX was that it didn't separate content from presentation. > I thought that was what DocBook (& XHTML + CSS) delivered. (La)TeX doesn't enforce separation, but it can be supported. It's going to depend on the author to consider those issues -- but it's primarily dedicated towards producing beautiful output, not enabling a computer to "understand" the document as well as humans. Plus, some people think that SGML is the be-all and end-all of markup. Anything not SGML derived is somehow deficient. Often, these are people who worship IBM as the creator of all things good instead of as the incarnation of all things evil and deceptive. :) -- Writing TeX isn't hard. Writing SGML is painful. Stewart Stremler -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
