Anas R. wrote:
Terrible. I wouldn't even *dream* of doing a book in anything other than
LaTeX. So far my publishers have been very accommodating.
You're talking about publishers
How about windows users who want to read files -'electonic documents'?
There were a number of tools for converting dvi files to PDFs, the last
time I used (La)TeX.
Having said that, I haven't used it in years and will likely never use
it again. The pain of debugging even the simplest LaTeX macro
modifications was simply not worth the bother to a non-programmer. Any
variation from the orthodoxy of the standard layout -- that wasn't a
simple measurement change -- meant getting into coding raw TeX and that
was always a nightmare to me. The elegance of its facilities such
hyphenation is simply lost on most people. As often as not, layout that
was very logical (from the TeX engine point of view) could look _really_
ugly. And don't even get me started on Metafont.
For simple document revision control, the simplicity of the
implementations available in tools such as OpenOffice are miles beyond
some combination of LaTeX and RCS (or whatever). And there's no contest
when it comes to on-the-fly positioning of objects. I got tired of
endless recompiling of documents.
There still IMO one use for which TeX is worth the bother -- being able
to produce _really_ nice database reports -- though I imagine that if
someone was starting from scratch they might as well be producing raw
PDFs or Postscript.
These pepole arn't familiar with anything other than .doc and .html, and if you want
to talk to them you have to use there language!
Using ODF means meeting them halfway. It's an XML format which could be
parsed to and from LaTeX. It's a true open standard, has multiple
WYSIWYG implementations, and can be translated easily into doc or html
files for those who won't budge. And, unlike LaTeX, it's an endorsed
international standard, -- and IMO it's in our collective best interests
to encourage and promote the use of open standards.
For a long time, TeX was the only really open file format for document
processing. It was the only real text formatting system that cared about
things like widow and orphan control. OTOH, everything about TeX -- from
the syntax of the file formats to the too-clever spelling and
pronunciation of its name -- seemed to me elitist and deliberately
inaccessible to the public. If your goal is communications and
collaboration with non-geeks, TeX is not the answer (and probably never
was).
Meanwhile it's more than 20 years later and the rest of the world has
largely caught up.
- Evan
_______________________________________________
lpi-discuss mailing list
[email protected]
http://list.lpi.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lpi-discuss
