Hi all, Last night, at Greater Orlando Linux User Group (GoLUG), I a gave a presentation on using TeX for simple tasks like printing shipping labels. As you can imagine, this was mostly an anti-Microsoft crowd. Interestingly, several were already TeX or LaTeX users, and several criticized MS Word for its easy facilitation of fingerpainting. Several also mentioned that with LaTeX you can concentrate on content and not worry about form.
Just the same as I do on the LyX list, I brought up the fact that if you want to, you can do styles based authoring on MS Word just as easily as on TeX or LaTeX or LyX, and in fact I've written a complete book in WordPerfect 5.1 and another in MS Word, using nothing but styles. And of course a debate ensued :-) But then one guy brought up an irrefutable point which I think might be an outstanding talking point of LyX. He said that wordprocessing documents often get so messed up, format wise, that they can't be salvaged without saving to text and reformatting everything. I've certainly seen such a MS Word doc -- I think we all have. With TeX or LaTeX or LyX, almost always coding errors immediately make the doc uncompileable, so you see it right away. The one exception is when a document class silently reverts to the default, and I showed how to prevent that here: http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/lyx/surefire_layout.htm So I think one LyX talking point to add is that with LyX, you seldom get docs that format themselves into uselessness. SteveT Steve Litt Recession Relief Package http://www.recession-relief.US
