On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 11:09 PM, John Jason Jordan <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, 1 Apr 2009 22:23:39 -0700 > Jason Dagit <[email protected]> dijo: > >> > I am not smart enough to learn TeX. Besides, anyone who would use >> > something like TeX to layout a document must be freakin' nuts. :) >> >> Taking the spirit of what Rogan said and applying your complaint with >> LaTeX, you could look at an alternative to LaTeX such as docbook or >> reST (re-structured text). Something Rogan probably didn't mention is >> that he writes proposals at work fairly often and he has considerable >> experience authoring and collaborating in Word, OO.org and LaTeX. I >> recently went through the thesis writing processes in LaTeX and I >> understand intimately why someone would choose a different system. >> The next time I go to write something the size of a book I will try >> learning docbook myself. But, the bottom line is, the extra time I >> spent fighting with LaTeX is nothing compared to the time I would have >> spent fussing with Word or OO.org. >> >> > Besides, I suspect I would have the same problems printing the TeX >> > document. There is a problem with fonts and CUPS on Intrepid. >> >> That's fine. The the fonts/CUPS problems on Intrepid are orthogonal >> to the merits of the markup language you choose, or not, to use. And >> good luck with CUPS, I hope you get it working to satisfaction. But, >> I will say that mostly people generate pdf from LaTeX, and a pdf may >> just render those special characters as vector graphics or use a font >> that is part of TeX -- so you may actually have different luck, I'm >> not sure. > > Does Latex use its own PDF generator? Run it through ghostscript and > then ps2pdf? Or how?
All of the above. The utility pdflatex can go straight to pdf, but if you use the normal latex command you get dvi, then you can run dvips followed by ps2pdf if you like. I did that route for years before learning about pdflatex. > I ask because if I export PDF from OOo I get results that are not near > as good as if I print to CUPS-PDF, although CUPS-PDF is not perfect > either. That is likely to be the difference between OOo's PDF writing capabilities versus CUPS's PDF writing capabilities. Not all conversions to PDF were created equally. LaTeX is known for making stunningly beautiful PDFs. Jason _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
