Having prepared two of my publications using word processors and the rest 
(inlcuding a PhD dissertation) with LaTeX, I much prefer LaTeX for seriosu 
publishing. As Anselm noted, pdflatex is a great program which produces 
excellent output. I have a lot of math in some of my stuff and typesetting 
math with a word processor is a nightmare IMHO. Pulling bibtex refs 
directly from mathscinet also means that a bibliography, even with over 
100 entries is easy to maintain and format. Even a small bibliography 
drove us nuts with word processors, although I gather they may have 
improved a bit in that area. A word processing program is NOT a 
typesetting program and it isn't a publishing program. 

I will grant that inexperienced users find word processing programs more 
natural than marked up languages, but the simplicity comes with a 
corresponding loss of capability.

Ian Shields Ph.D.
Linux  Technologist, ISV & Developer Relations
IBM Corp
Research Triangle Park, NC
[EMAIL PROTECTED]



[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote on 03/26/2007 02:09:20 PM:

> Anselm Lingnau wrote:
> > 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.
> > 
> Fair enough. I'll take detailed comments offline, as they're of 
> decreasing relevance here (unless someone wants to make a TeX 
> certification).  ;-)
> 
> I was a member of TUG, the TeX Users Group, back in my deeply involved 
> days, and it seemed at the time that the environment was fairly static 
> and not moving forward. Thankfully, things have picked up, and times 
> like this I'm quite happy to be be proven wrong.
> 
> My last word here: Is there a tool to translate between .tex files and 
> ODF (or Docbook XML)?
> 
> - Evan
_______________________________________________
lpi-discuss mailing list
[email protected]
http://list.lpi.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lpi-discuss

Reply via email to