On Tue, 1 Mar 2005, Micha Feigin wrote:
This can be done also with word using styles, although you still need to work on the typesetting at the end, and it can be a real pain since word has a tendency to mess things up (although working in layout view, IIRC how its called, make that easier).
Micha,
I've never used winWord (or DOSWord, for that matter). But, I do use OpenOffice.org Writer when I need to exchange documents with my clients.
I have a couple of colleagues who write computer-oriented books; they've been force by publishers (including O'Reilly & Associates!) to submit in winWord. They really dislike using a word processor. One asked me to teach him LyX because it was such a painful experience to try to keep formatting correct while writing. And, putting tables within tables in LaTeX is also painful; in LyX it's very easy. As much as anything, the output looks distinctly different (same text, same page layout) when printed from OO.o and LyX.
Mathtype can make things easier here but its still a pain to typeset and number equations properly.
I've been told that it still doesn't look as good, but I have no direct experience with Word.
At least math journals always point to some file (I don't think that there are more then 5 mathematicians in the world that write articles using word ;-)
Many math articles I've read don't use many words at all. I bought a fuzzy logic book and discovered it had no more than two dozen words in more than 150 pages; it was all equations. I think it's under the dust on my bookshelf.
The problem is more when you want people to be able to alter them while still see them in high quality while altering.
No problem if everyone uses LyX, then. :-)
lyx files are also better for version control since they are text files (I occasionally work directly with the lyx file when I need to do search replace on latex in math formulas where lyx's search/replace doesn't work properly). On the other hand, working directly with lyx makes it harder to control the files in ways that are good for versioning since diffs work line by line and not word by word (I've to find a good word by work diff, any suggestions?)
I'd try subversion. While I have not used it here for documents, that is definitely in the future. Because subversion is an outgrowth of CVS it will note and diff every character change.
I find that once you try and move beyond the basics word also has a rather steep learning curve and tends to fight with you quite as much, it just happens in different places where people not aware of the idea of typesetting and write by content instead of appearance usually don't run into (consistent styles, indexes, section numbering, bibliographies, mathematical formula's (including numbering), changing overall document styles easily to match publishing requirements just to name a few).
A friend of mine (who's happy with Microsoft, so he deserves what he gets with that) recently finished his fourth technical book using Word. I sent him a review draft of my book (now at the printer; should be out in March) and his comments were (to paraphrase): "why not make the leading a little larger?" "How about tweaking this or that?" I told him that I was using Springer's monograph class and did not have to worry about appearance (except for overfull lines, of course). They knew what they want and that's what they got; I just wrote without obsessing over stylistic details. Too many people get hung up on issues of fine-tuning appearance. For folks like me who are neither graphic artists nor page layout experts it's a pleasure to ignore those concepts and just write.
Toda,
Rich
-- Dr. Richard B. Shepard, President Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc. (TM) <http://www.appl-ecosys.com> Voice: 503-667-4517 Fax: 503-667-8863
