Re. writing in linux/unix:
Paul Winkler writes:
> advantages for writers, over say MS Word (97 is most recent
> version I'm familiar with):
>
> 1) In LaTeX, formatting is structural, rather than on a
> case-by-case basis. [...] As far as I know (not very far) MS
> Word does this kind of thing only in a limited, predetermined,
> automatic way that's more of a pain in the ass than a real tool.
> All I've seen in there is a bunch of letter styles and some stuff
> for lists...
I'm a M$ user because that's all my department uses. I'd love to
use LaTeX for the typesetting I do, but for the moment I'm stuck with
Word 97. While I generally share the exasperation of Un*x people with
the denseness of M$ users, sometimes I do notice that Un*x folks
write off M$ products without getting to know them. Word's support
for styles (their version of structural markup) is pretty extensive.
You can define all aspects of font and paragraph appearance, as well
as what style comes after any other style, and whether elements of
some style stay with following elements, or may break across page
boundaries. Changing the definition of a style changes the
typesetting of all elements marked as that style, as well as all
styles based on that style. You can specify the language associated
with a specific style for proofing and hyphenation purposes. In
short, it goes a long way toward what you'd want. That said, the
final output is still recognisably Word and sub-standard, and then,
those crashes ...
> 2) It can handle *very* large files quite well.
Word doesn't. Sometimes I generate MailMerged documents of up to 2MB,
but that means a lot of waiting and occasional crashes. (150Mhz
Pentium, 32Mb RAM).
cheers,
--jean
