Hi,
  Now you have got me started.

The difficulty I have in preparing a document with a wysiwyg editor
is that you end up trying to do two things at once:
 create the source material
 format the source material.

Using latex or text file approach simplifies the process.

  *you create the source material.
  *then you compile it up as a document with latex.

=====
New users to LaTeX find this frustrating/confusing. They are so busy 
thinking about the presentation they forget the content.

============
The really nice thing about latex/text files ? You get to use emacs, with 
all the powerful macros etc. Particularly, you get the nice latex macros 
in emacs.

My wifes thesis had pages and pages of just numbers. mathematica, which 
generated the numbers, spat the numbers out in latex format. Copy and 
paste, and the tables worked - guaranteed correct.

O.k. lets avoid the holy war.
The really nice thing about latex/text files approaches is that you get to
use your favourite text editor.


Derek.
====================================
On Wed, 18 Aug 2004, Jim Cheetham wrote:

> Michael JasonSmith wrote:
> > On Wed, 2004-08-18 at 10:52, Derek Smithies wrote:
> >>For writing books, (La)TeX is the way to go.
> >>You get a book that has professional, production ready fonts.
> >>
> > If you want your document to be transformed into multiple formats then I
> > suggest Docbook XML. The "xmlto" package will transform the Docbook XML
> 
> Actually, I write for publication occasionally, and the best format for 
> me is a plain text file, with no machine-readable markup.
> 
> This might be a feature of the publishers workflow, which is to use a 
> copy/paste operation into Adobe InDesign that handles only text, and no 
> attributes. I embed instructions to the editor-as-a-human occasionally, 
> and they usually get honoured.
> 
> This isn't the technical environment, but the business one. It's cheaper 
> to employ someone to copy/paste than it is to work out the "right" way 
> to do something. I envy academia sometimes.
> 
> -jim
> 
> 
> 

-- 
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