Evan Leibovitch wrote: > 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.
With respect, this is rubbish. It is understandable rubbish coming from someone like Evan who, as he says, hasn't used LaTeX »in years«, but it is still rubbish. It turns out that the facilities for adapting LaTeX output to one's wishes (or publisher's specifications) have vastly improved. For example, there are now declarative methods for specifying page layout, sectioning, tables of contents, and many other aspects of document design that do *not* force one to code raw TeX. Also, the quality of PDF output obtainable through PDF(La)TeX is second to none -- I've talked to various people who were doing difficult things with PDF(La)TeX because the Adobe PDF tools simply were not up to the task. Also, nobody uses Metafont any longer (which in a way is a pity). The TeX font world is all Type-1 and TrueType now, with OpenType support available with some versions of TeX. Even the traditional TeX »Computer Modern« fonts are widely available in Type 1 versions. If you have TeX installed on a current Linux system you already have them and everything else I've been talking about. I'm not making this up. In fact, I'm just finishing a book on this very topic on behalf of a very prestigious publisher of computer literature. This publisher has practically begged me to do the book, so they must see a market for it. In fact, they have also contracted me to come up with a LaTeX class for the book series in question, so other people can also write their books in LaTeX. This is a long way from »publishers run away screaming when authors give them LaTeX files« -- at least *this* publisher is apparently willing to pay serious money to *enable* authors to write books in LaTeX. > 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). If your idea of revision control is based on RCS, then that may well be true. But again, there are now free revision control tools around that make RCS look like a Stone Age flint axe. Just for the record, at my day job I'm in charge of several thousand pages' worth of training materials spanning various languages, in LaTeX. We do revision control for all our manuals using GNU Arch, because we need to keep track of development vs. published versions in different languages (with much development taking place in hotel rooms or on the railway, i.e., off the Internet). You may well argue that what we do is no longer »simple document revision control« but »simplicity« doesn't cut it for us. I won't deny that OpenOffice is fine for casual use, but our requirements are complex and tools like LaTeX and Arch are making it possible for us to cope with them efficiently, in a way that OpenOffice, in its current state, couldn't. > And there's no contest when it comes to on-the-fly positioning of objects. > I got tired of endless recompiling of documents. On-the-fly positioning may be fine if you're doing flyers or business cards, but it generally sucks for book-type documents. You want things to »just work« without manual intervention. For example, we do custom branding of our training materials with customers' logos and addresses etc., where the logo shows up in ten or so different places inside the manual. If the logo is in a reasonable format (e.g. EPS) it takes me all of ten minutes to make the complete set of more than a dozen manuals available, branded for that customer. Mind you, this is measured from me receiving the »please include this logo for customer X« e-mail from Accounting to me sending out the »download your branded manuals from ...« e-mail. Updating all manuals for all customers (e.g., when the content changes) takes about twenty minutes, and during these twenty minutes I'm having coffee while the computer churns away. This works because we do *not* position stuff like logos on the fly. > Meanwhile it's more than 20 years later and the rest of the world has > largely caught up. Caught up if all you're interested in is »simple« applications. OpenOffice is a reasonably nice word processor but when it comes to doing books it just doesn't play in the same league as LaTeX (and its proprietary alternatives). Of course people will try to »typeset« books using OpenOffice, MS-Word and similar programs but the difference will always be obvious, and the amount of pain they're getting themselves into is much higher in the long run. (The sad thing is that they may not even know it, since word processors are the only tools they know, and they've been turned off systems like LaTeX because they've been told these are »too complicated« by people who have essentially no idea what they are talking about.) I'd be happy to answer any queries regarding this matter by direct e-mail since the topic has probably little to do with LPI. In the meantime, please don't diss LaTeX based on how it was when you last looked at it ten years ago. This is like extolling Linux based on a comparison to Windows 98 -- what you're saying may well be true in that frame of reference but nobody will take you seriously in 2007. Anselm (This is my personal opinion and not that of Linup Front GmbH.) -- Anselm Lingnau ... Linup Front GmbH ... Linux-, Open-Source- & Netz-Schulungen Linup Front GmbH, Postfach 100121, 64201 Darmstadt, Germany [EMAIL PROTECTED], +49(0)6151-9067-103, Fax -299, www.linupfront.de _______________________________________________ lpi-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://list.lpi.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lpi-discuss
