On Thu, 2 Apr 2009 10:03:19 -0700 (PDT) Rich Shepard <[email protected]> dijo:
> There's more than that involved. LyX/LaTeX allows the writer to focus > strictly on content and leaves typography and page layout decisions to the > professionals who have designed the classes. That's what I feared. I suspect there does not exist pre-existing classes for the books I do. > I cannot stand to write more than a page in OO.o Writer. It's a time > consuming hassle. And the differences in the printed output are striking. > Write the same page of text in OO.o and in LateX, export both to .pdf and > look; you'll immediately see the differences. I completely agree that a word processor is not the tool for doing a book. But Scribus isn't ready yet, and I don't have the time or inclination to learn TeX. > Word processors use the line as the unit with which they work. TeX uses > the paragraph and the page. TeX also adjusts kerning on the fly rather than > the word processors' adjustment of inter-word spacing. Many (most?) readers > will not be consciously aware of the differences, but the typeset output > from TeX makes a subconscious impression of professionalism and quality. > I've had people comment on the appearance of a typeset report; that never > happened with a word processed document. I would kill for a Linux equivalent to Adobe Indesign CS (or CS2 or CS3, although CS is enough for me). It does all of that, plus it is religiously WYSIWYG. I mean what you see on the screen is exactly what will come out of the printer, and exactly what the PDF export will look like. I could have done the current book in InDesign in a quarter of the time it took me in OOo. But then I would have a book that was stuck in a proprietary format that I won't be able to open five or six years from now unless I keep buying upgrades. And then there's activation. And I could go on, but I'm getting sick just thinking of the corporate crap. > But, John's correct. It takes someone willing to learn and not just click, > drag, and wear out a mouse pointing everywhere. It's not for everyone. A Lyx-Latex-TeX session would be an interesting topic for one of our meetings if the presenter had a small project that the group could do on their own computers as the talk progressed. Hands-on demonstration is the way to sell software. I went to a session on TeX presented by the local headquarters folk. It was pretty useless to me. That is, I learned zero about TeX. _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
